Vichy Syndrome
비시 증후군
Vichy Syndrome is a concept in the study of historical memory describing postwar France's oscillation among guilt, denial, shame, forgetting, and the reconstruction of memory concerning the Vichy regime's collaboration and the responsibility of the French state. Henry Rousso systematized the concept in his 1987 book, using it to analyze the conflict between the myth of a united Resistance and contested recognition of Vichy's responsibility.
In depth
Rousso's concept encompasses the movement from post-Liberation reconciliation and a Resistance-centred narrative, through decades of silence and evasion and the return of Vichy officials to public life, to the spread of research and testimony after the 1970s, war-crimes trials in the 1990s, and official recognition of state responsibility. It is therefore not simply a psychological condition shared uniformly by French people, but a political and scholarly struggle over how collaboration and resistance are narrated and how far the continuity of the French state is acknowledged. Jacques Chirac's 1995 speech acknowledging state responsibility for the Vel' d'Hiv roundup is often discussed as a turning point.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) (Henry Rousso's concept, its meaning, and shifts in postwar French state memory)
- books.google.com (Harvard University Press bibliographic record for Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944)
- foreignaffairs.com (summary of Rousso's account of shifting public opinion, myth-making, evasion, and moments of recognition)