'Vichy, la mémoire empoisonnée' by Michaël Prazan

© Talweg

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