"Vichy, la mémoire empoisonnée" by Michaël Prazan

© Talweg

Vichy, its collaborationist system and its crimes have long been pushed into the dustbin of collective memory. Until the historic speech of Jacques Chirac in 1995, political power has long paid for words to keep at bay the "parenthesis" of the regime embodied by Marshal Pétain. Civil society has fought a long battle – lasting more than half a century and dividing France – against silence, denial, and falsification.