Playing the Press by Henry Rousso

After the right was returned to power in the March 1986 elections, the idea that collaboration and fascism were somehow born on the left, an idea that had first taken shape while the left was in control of the government, ceased to be mere insulting  rhetoric and became a “historical concept” approved by various authorities. Encouraged by this shift in opinion, by this new revisionism, Charles Pasqwua, a rightest minister of the interior, calmly charged that certain friends of the Socialists had “prostrated themselves before the occupying power.” This charge was launched on 20 May 1986 during the debate over whether to replace proportional representation with winning-take- all balloting.

Again we see all the elements of the syndrome: retroactive blurring of the boundaries, calculated provocation, uncontrolled reaction, and ultimately diversion.

It would be easy to minimize the impact of these polemical attacks. But we have seen that they had a specific function, an intrinsic role in the French political debate, and one that was rooted in tradition. A clear sign of the perpetuation of this tradition is that politician born during or after the war, and thus not personally implicated in the events, resorted to the same kinds of attacks. This enduring turmoil has had profound consequences on memories of the war.

Generally these attacks follow a standard pattern, involving what Evelyne Largueche calls “allusive insult.” In most of the instances described above four parties were involved: the insulter, who launches the attack; the insultee, or object of the attack; the insulted, mentioned in the attack (Vichy, collaboration, non-Resistance); and, finally, the witness to the insult. All the classical devices of rhetoric are employed, from metonymy  (“X . . .is Vichy) to allusion (“And Mitterrand? And Hersant?) and amalgamation (Guiscard and the collaboration, Rocard’s policy and Laval’s). 

Accusations charging a specific person with a specific crime are rare. Exceptions include the  Herant, Marchais, and the Papon cases, all of which of which came to the courts either because libel was alleged or because potentially solid charges existed. More often a double or triple language was used so as to avoid libel: it was alleged, for example, that the “friends’ of the Socialists “prostrated themselves before the occupying power,” or that X or Y ‘worked with Vichy” without further elaboration (when of course thousands of people, including authentic resistants, fit that description), or that X or Y belongs to the “collaborationist breed,” without actually stating that X or Y personally collaborated.

In attacks of this kind, what counts is the general effect on public opinion and not direct damage to the ostensible adversary, and for this witnesses are required – the media first of all and through them “public opinion.” It is the media and the public who, on their own, draw the conclusion that so- and- so is a collaborator and therefore a traitor or criminal. A typical example of this was the debate on regulation of the press, when it was the Socialists who first raised the question of Mitterrand’s past, not after the war, as the opposition urged, but during the war, thus (unwittingly) leaving it to the media and the public to ask what was being covered up.

In other words, the fraudulent “truths” of polemical attack are framed not only by those directly involved but also by spectators who, in spite of themselves, maintain a climate of suspicion. This systematic practice of appealing to the public is a crucial factor in the history of the syndrome. In many respects, the appeal seems to have been out of step with the actual state of opinion; as we shall see later, the public appears to have been less preoccupied with these quarrels than many people, especially politicians, believed at the time. What turmoil did do, however, was to force people to ask questions about the past.

The use of veiled language and the fact that politicians of every stripe used similar kinds of invective tended to confuse the image of the past. The political truth of the moment periodically supplanted the truth of history. Words like “collaborator” lost all real meaning. Worse still, they suggested that everyone involved had something to hide or to be ashamed of, since insult is by definition a mechanism of defense. Thus the polemics often had unintended consequences, and often it was those who initiated them, on both the right and left, who suffered the worse damage.

It is rather surprising how little is added to our understanding of the past by this kind of political rhetoric. The attacks, far from routing the enemy, served only as periodic reminders that no party and no individual, no matter how reputable, emerged from the Occupation unscathed. In  a sense, this banal judgment signifies the ultimate failure of the resistance heritage; forty years later, the heroism and lucidity of a few cannot make up for the real or alleged faults of others.