The Memory of the Medieval, the Vichy Regime, and Albert Camus's La peste

Cultural memory studies address the way the "past" is created within a sociocultural context, including the notion of "mémoire collective" or shared memory within groups. Literary memory is an important part of this collective memory and can be an agent of cultural change. This article examines the way in which the Vichy government used, curated, and reshaped the collective memory of the medieval as a political tool of collaborationist restraint, and how Albert Camus's novel La peste deliberately used the same mnemonic vocabulary of the medieval as an act of literary resistance.