A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory
Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.
Career Timeline
- 1974–1979Student, École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud
- 1977Passed the agrégation in history
- 1981–현재Researcher, French National Centre for Scientific Research
- 1988–1990Teacher, Institut d’études politiques de Paris
- 1994–2005Director, Institut d’histoire du temps présent
- 2001–2010Professor, Paris Nanterre University
- 2019–현재President, prefiguration mission for the National Museum on the History of Terror