The historical literature about the memory of the Occupation in France is immense. Since Rousso’s pioneering study, the accepted narrative was that for twenty-five years after 1945, the French lived a consoling Gaullist myth that France had been a nation of resisters.1 This myth not only underplayed the role of collaboration, but its focus on the heroes of the resistance marginalized the experiences of the Holocaust victims: Jews who tried to tell their story were ignored. This heroic narrative, so the argument goes, shattered at the end of the 1960s in the wake of the upheavals of May 1968 and the Six Day War. Increasingly the Holocaust, and Vichy’s role in it, has come to dominate French collective memory.

This interpretation has been much contested in recent years, especially, as Azouvi has dubbed it, the “myth of silence” regarding the Holocaust.2 Nord’s new book is a distinguished contribution...

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