- 2. History and the "Duty to Memory" in Postwar France: The Pitfalls of an Ethics of Remembrance
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2001 by Routledge. German Occupation and the brutal final years of the Vichy regime. Roussolabels the next phase, covering the period between 1954 and 1971, the period of "Repress ions," when the majority o f the French ound comfort in the Gaullistinspired myth of Resistance, which held that only a small group of traitors and opportunists supported Vichy and the Germans while the over whelming majority supported de Gaulle and his Free French as well as the domestic Resistance. Ironically, this line of (wishful) thinking was given intellectual ballast by none other than Jean Paul Sartre, no supporter ofde Gaul le or Gaullism, in his classic essay, "What is a collaborator?" 7 In 1971, according to Rousso, the" mirror broke," and the comforting illusion that France was a nation o f resisters was shattered first by the 1971 releaseof Marcel Ophuls's classic film, The Sorrow and the Pity, which painfully underscored the reality of collaborationism and even pro Nazi sentiment in virtually all walks of French life. Louis Malle' s portrait of a young French collaborator in Lacombe Lucien (1974) also challenged the Resistance myth and went even further by suggesting, in the opinion of many, 8 that in reality not much separated resistance from collaboration.
