Forgotten Crimes?: Representing Jewish Experience of the Second World War in French Crime Fiction

This article explores the relationship between French crime fiction and memories of the Second World War. It focuses on the late 1950s and early 1960s and representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in the work of Léo Malet and Hubert Monteilhet. For whilst these early post-war years are commonly supposed to have been given over to the repression of troubling wartime memories, selected French crime fiction offers an intriguing set of counter-narratives with which to challenge such notions of French historical amnesia. By examining Léo Malet's Du rébecca rue des Rosiers (1957) and Des kilomètres de linceuls (1955) and Hubert Monteilhet's Le Retour des cendres (1961), this article will show how representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in these fictions activate complex patterns of disclosure, displacement and disavowal of French wartime guilt and complicity. In so doing, these popular novels provide rich material for speculating on broader configurations of French wartime memories at a time of apparent forgetting.