Mentalities changed in the aftermath of 1968

[sharminsultana]

Now living in a safe house after the plot was foiled, Alinejad said, “Even here in America, I don’t have a normal life. I am not a criminal. My crime is just to give a voice to the voiceless protesters in Iran.France’s pro-Nazi Vichy regime still has supporters
JW

The initial post-war period was marked by various arguments that built the role of resistance. The textbooks spoke of the fact that the French were resistance fighters rather than collaborators. An argument developed that Vichy played the role of a shield while De Gaulle and the resistance played the role of the sword: in other words, there was a kind of complementarity between the two.

This was partly because there was a general questioning of the establishment, and partly because of the release of films like Sorrow and pity or books like Robert Paxton’s study on Vichy France. Along with stories of phone number library Jewish occupation survivors, they exposed the Vichy regime’s complicity in occupation crimes, showing that Vichy adopted its own measures against Jews as a willing collaborator of Nazi Germany.

A number of pivotal events then brought the question of Vichy and the crimes of the occupation back to the fore. One was the emergence of the Front National, a major political party whose leadership, certainly for most of the 1970s, included former members of the Vichy militia and the Waffen-SS. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political past includes leading a presidential campaign for a former Vichy minister. This drew attention to the continuities between the present and the past.

There has been a series of high-profile essays, or attempted essays, by collaborators. Paul Touvier was a member of the Vichy militia in Lyon who served under Klaus Barbie and managed to evade charges of crimes against humanity for several years. Georges Pompidou granted him a presidential pardon.