Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (review)

As historian Henry Rousso has asserted, "the past—or a certain reading of the past— can mistakenly be seen . . . as a refuge, at a time when the present is not understood and the future not foreseen."¹ Joan Wolf's work chronicles this "reading of the past," or more specifically, the meaning and use of France's Vichy past by Jews and non-Jews after World War II. Wolf traces the paths of public narrative about the Holocaust in France, landmarked by a series of provocative national events, beginning with the 1967 Six-Day War ("the seminal event in the development of public discourse on the Holocaust" in post-Vichy France [p. 17]) and spanning the Darquier controversy; the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue; the Israeli bombing in Lebanon; the Barbie, Touvier, and Papon cases; the attack on the Carpentras cemetery; and the recent political maneuvering by the nation's leaders surrounding the public recognition of Vichy's role in the persecution of the Jews.

Wolf explores the debates on the "meaning of Holocaust" that arose from each of these explosive events. Beyond that, she traces the impact of these debates on French Jewish identity. The struggle to define French Jews' relationship to the nation has a long, complex history; debates surrounding the Holocaust since the end of the war, as Wolf ably demonstrates, reveal that this struggle is far from over: "[T]he postwar story of the Holocaust in France is rooted in the national history of Jews since the Revolution, and in particular, in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation" (p. 6). Wolf finds that Holocaust-related debates in France were just that: related to but not necessarily singularly focused on the Holocaust. They did not constitute a critical confrontation with that past. Unlike Rousso, Wolf suggests that public debates on the Holocaust focused predominantly on Vichy collaboration and French guilt rather than directly on the Holocaust and France. Discourse on the Holocaust in France has revealed a deep concern not solely with the murder of the Jews, but rather with "contemporary social transformations, especially the emergence of radically new forms of ethnic and national identity in France" (p. 6).

To follow the evocative twists and turns that public consciousness of the Holocaust in France has taken, the author makes extensive use of mainstream newspapers, magazines, television, radio programs, and intellectual debates. As Wolf herself notes, public opinion is a "rather transient phenomenon" and therefore a challenge to measure and evaluate (p. 3). Despite the elusive nature of public opinion, Wolf's analysis can be viewed as an elucidation of one aspect of French public narrative on the Holocaust. The author focuses on national discourse, as well as on debates within the Jewish community (dialogue put forth predominantly by the Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France, consistories, and Fonds Social Juif Unifié, as well as by Jewish scholars and in other forums). This rather narrow scope, although formidably delineated, may not provide the most nuanced picture of French public narrative, however. As a reminder of this, Sarah Farmer's study of how national debate informed and shaped local politics in the creation of monumental space in Oradour-sur-Glane demonstrates that local histories, at once contentious and illuminating, provide another window onto public discourse.² Likewise, Wolf's analysis centers solely on France—again, an understandable geographical limit to her study. Yet some of Wolf's explorations of public events, such as her investigation of the impact of the Six-Day War, might have been enhanced by a comparative analysis of the absorption of the event into the public narrative throughout Europe and elsewhere. Similar reactions and challenges to Jewish identity in other national contexts undoubtedly occurred at this time, and an incorporation of these international debates might have been useful to this chapter...