French memory and the wages of guilt
| Author | Richard J. Golsan |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885111417782 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review article
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
10(4) 490–500
! The Author(s) 2011
French memory and
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the wages of guilt
DOI: 10.1177/1474885111417782
ept.sagepub.com
Richard J. Golsan
Texas A&M University
Pascal Bruckner (2010) The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
On 11 October 2008, the French newspaper Le Monde published a petition entitled
‘Liberte´ pour l’histoire’, signed by some twenty of France’s leading historians,
including most notably Pierre Nora, editor of the ambitious, multi-volume Lieux
de me´moire project, among numerous other accomplishments. Consisting of a
statement of principle not only of the twenty-odd signers, but also of a larger
group of historians originally organized in 2005 by Rene´ Re´mond, the 2008 peti-
tion in Le Monde protested at ‘the intervention of political power in historical
research and the teaching of history’. Specifically, it criticized two recent develop-
ments in French law. The first of these developments was the 1992 reform of the
penal code which introduced two new categories of crimes, ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes
against humanity’, other than those committed by the Nazis and their collabora-
tors as defined in the context of the Nuremberg trials. The second development,
made possible by the first, was the passage since 2000 by the French legislature of
several new, so-called ‘memorial laws’.
Designed to satisfy the demands of a range of groups and ethnicities, the first
‘memorial laws’ passed in the new century identified and labelled as ‘crimes against
humanity’ specific abominable episodes and practices in France’s – and Europe’s –
past. In 2001, the National Assembly passed a law legally recognizing as a ‘geno-
cide’ and a ‘crime against humanity’ the mass killing of Armenians by the Turks in
1915. A second law, referred to as the ‘Taubira law’, was passed the same year. This
law recognized as a ‘crime against humanity’ slave trading practised by Western
countries since the 16th century. The final law passed in 2005 took a different
course. Rather than condemn or criminalize past practices and actions, its intent
was to honour ‘repatriated French’ and to underscore ‘the positive role of the
French presence overseas’. Generating an immediate firestorm of controversy as
an official apology for French colonialism, this last law, known as the ‘Mekachera
Law’, was annulled a year later in 2006.
Corresponding author:
Richard J. Golsan, Department of European and Classical Languages, Texas A & M University, College Station,
Texas 77843-4215, USA
Email: rjgolsan@tamu.edu
Review article
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According to the 2008 petition, all three of these laws found their initial inspira-
tion in the widely discussed and much debated Gayssot law, France’s first memorial
law. Passed in 1990, the Gayssot law was intended to combat the dangerous spread
of what the French call ne´gationnisme, or the denial of the Holocaust, by making it a
crime and punishing its proponents under the law. But as opposed to the later
memorial laws dealing with the Armenian genocide and the victims of slavery,
those whose interests the Gayssot law sought to protect were ‘survivors and
orphans’, very much alive in the present, who were being tormented by ‘authors
of abominations’, also living today. Nevertheless, as Nora had stated earlier in a
2005 interview (Le Figaro, 22 December 2005), whatever its benefits, the inspiration
of the Gayssot law itself was still dangerously ‘totalitarian’ in that it sought to leg-
islate the ‘correct’ or ‘official’ interpretation of the past. The fatal consequences of
the precedent it set could be seen in subsequent memorial laws which also sought to
legislate – and criminalize – the past in retroactively labelling certain actions and
practices ‘genocides’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. Once the Pandora’s Box of this
form of legislation was open, any dark moment from the recent or distant past could
be stigmatized and criminalized in similar fashion. Why not the St Bartholomew
Massacre, for example, or the suppression of the Vende´e insurrection, or the anni-
hilation of the Cathars? The possibilities were endless. For the signers of the ‘Liberte´
pour l’Histoire’ petition, the articulation and passage of further memorial laws
needed to be stopped immediately, not only because the retroactive application of
crimes against humanity laws was intellectually and morally illegitimate, but because
the passage and implementation of these laws compromised the freedom and integ-
rity of the historian in his or her research and teaching. Moreover, the very practice
of criminalizing the past in this fashion was unhealthy in any society, and especially
in a democracy. As Paul Ricoeur had warned, ‘a society cannot remain angry with
itself indefinitely.’
In response to criticisms made by the ‘Liberte´ pour l’histoire’ group as well as
others, the French National Assembly appointed a commission to reflect on the
benefits as well as the disadvantages and problems created by the passage of memo-
rial laws. In a lengthy report summarizing its deliberations entitled the Accoyer
Report (named after the group’s chair, Bernard Accoyer), the commission recom-
mended that, given the difficulties and problems it created, the practice of legislat-
ing memorial laws be suspended. To date, no further memorial laws have been
proposed in France, and the ‘Liberte´ pour l’histoire’ group has turned its focus to
Russia and Eastern Europe, where the passage of similar memorial laws continues,
apparently unabated.
If the French debate over its memorial laws has died down in the wake of the
Accoyer Report’s recommendations, the controversy itself – and the very perception
of a need for memorial laws in the first place – underscores a number of important
features of contemporary France’s problematic relationship with its past that are
worth stressing here. First, what to all appearances began in the 1970s and 1980s as a
national preoccupation, and even ‘obsession’, with the so-called Dark Years of the
German Occupation during the Second World War and French collaborationism
492
European Journal of Political Theory 10(4)
and complicity in the Holocaust under Vichy – an obsession that Henry Rousso has
aptly labelled the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ – has expanded over the last few decades to
embrace other troubling and traumatic moments from the nation’s, and Europe’s,
recent past. Foremost among these troubling memories is that of decolonization,
and more specifically in the French context, the still-divisive memory of la guerre
sans nom, the Algerian War. Where the Algerian War is concerned, as recently as the
fall of 2010 French public was shocked by...
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