South Central Review

Restoring "the Tatters of a Mutilated Reality":
Response to Susan Suleiman

Ralph Schoolcraft
Texas A&M University

As Susan Suleiman reminds us, France's current controversies concerning the Occupation years are not due to a neglect of memory and history—on the contrary, it is more a thorny question of sorting through a proliferation of competing accounts describing those tragic years. The "Aubrac affair" is an eloquent example given the complex historiographical, ethical, and ideological questions it has provoked. In her comments on this episode, Suleiman offers a hypothesis that strikes me as an unconsidered key to unraveling significant aspects of these confusing and painful debates: that the parties involved may have greatly underestimated the role of unconscious (and semiconscious) narrative desire in the reconstruction and interpretation of the historical events of 1943.

In addition to the litany of examples identified by Suleiman from the Libération roundtable, the rhetorical choices in a number of the Aubracs' written accounts reflect this impulse as well. In his introduction to a brief history of the war effort, Raymond Aubrac refers to the Resistance as "a unique chapter in the history of France." The metaphor thus works off of an episodic narrative division. He goes on to describe this particular chapter of history as one which "opens with a crushing defeat, closes with full participation in a triumphant victory, and passes through incredible shifts of fortune between the two."¹ This mirrors the heroic narrative structure Suleiman describes as its outline follows the same mixture of individual and collective heroism, the same Manichean opposition of patriots who eventually vanquish the villains. Lucie Aubrac makes an even more explicit reference to literary devices in her famous memoir, Ils partiront dans l'ivresse (Outwitting the Gestapo). "Because of my deep involvement in the underground war, keeping a diary was out of the question," she writes. "That, however, is the form I want my narrative to take. It covers nine months—from May 1943 to February 1944 . . ."² In so doing, she obeys the fiction writer's strategy of making use of a genre that reproduces the impression of historical immediacy, of factual chronology in lived time. For instance, André Malraux, who did not witness the events in question but long let it be understood that he might have, employed this technique for his fictional account of the [End Page 82] Shanghai uprising in La Condition humaine (Man's Fate, 1933). In the case of the Aubracs, novice writers who are not necessarily fully conscious of the influence form exerts on content, one wonders to what extent they unknowingly followed familiar narrative structures to mold, sift through, and even "arrange" the raw material with which memory had provided them.

This phenomenon of narrative desire is, of course, not to be understood in a purely negative light. On the contrary, it can provide legitimate coherence. For example, to turn to one of the historical experts invited to the Aubrac roundtable, one can even characterize Henry Rousso's descriptive paradigm in The Vichy Syndrome as sketching out a four-act narrative play in its well-known sequence of incomplete mourning, repression, the return of the repressed, and obsession.³ This takes nothing away from the judiciousness of the stages and pattern it identifies—Rousso's analysis constitutes to my mind the most significant interpretation of social memory's evolution in contemporary France over the past five decades—but perhaps this clear structure has helped improve the work's intelligibility to scholars from a variety of different fields.

Another virtue of Suleiman's hypothesis is that it can potentially account as well for ways in which some of France's most respected (intellectually and deontologically) historians were led into fairly aggressive lines of questioning during the Libération roundtable. While this still consists in essence of the same operation, there is perhaps a slight shift since on this side of the equation the activity is (at least initially) that of a reader. We are closer to something like what Wolfgang Iser has termed in reader response theory "filling in the textual blanks," i.e., those gaps in a text which require an interpretive act on the part of the reader, an act which supplies meaning and thus allows the reader to move forward with the narrative.⁴ The apparent contradictions in the Aubracs' accounts—the putative "holes in their story"—are the bait that led the historians to assume in some instances a counternarrative of dissimulation. To couch it in the terms provided by Suleiman, the historiographical dilemma thus comes down to the following: Do the problems lie with irreconciliable inconsistencies in the Aubracs' accounts, or are the historians basing their expectations on a presumed standard of verisimilitude and are seeing gaps where in fact there are none?

In her assessment of the apparent inconsistencies in the Aubracs' accounts, Suleiman is wary of the prosecutor's pose and refuses to assume sinister motives on their part. Her perspective here can be seen as a companion piece to her first major study. Authoritarian Fictions showed [End Page 83] no small measure of courage and intellectual honesty in its careful demonstration of the formal features shared by ideological novels from the Left and the Right—a gesture potentially misunderstood by those who would hastily conclude that this fosters political relativism.⁵ Twenty years later, we encounter the same candid integrity, but in this instance she encourages a fairly supple approach to a historical imbroglio. In a sense, the intellectual reflex is inverted. When devising in Authoritarian Fictions a method for the study of the search for truth in fictional modes, she opted for the meticulous technical descriptions afforded by narratology. Here, however, in seeking to examine the role of narrative desire within a historical (i.e. factual) discourse, she explores a more intuitive, open interpretive stance.

This approach is anchored in a humane and, I believe, realistic notion of how memory functions. In stepping back for a moment, we can easily conceive of the daunting task facing the Aubracs. For many incidents from the Occupation years, meetings, names, and chronology have taken on an importance today that they did not initially possess (and thus memory at the time had no reason not to relax its grip upon them). Processes of memory were also no doubt disrupted by the fact that the Aubracs often endured makeshift situations or were deprived for other reasons of the stable grounding that provides memory with a fixed backdrop.

While these concerns are acknowledged as a matter of course, Suleiman's emphasis is not so much on the obstacles in 1943 as it is on the workings of the Aubracs' memory over the last half-century. None of the parties—Gérard Chauvy, the historians, or the Aubracs—seems to factor into their judgments the notion of memory as a dynamic process. Even though all three know the contrary to be true, they frequently lock in on lines of reasoning that only make sense if one assumes (consciously or unconsciously) that memory is static.

This is hardly surprising in the case of Chauvy since his aims are hostile. It is disconcerting, however, in the instance of a figure like Daniel Cordier, given that he has written an excellent article on the workings of memory from the perspective of an historical actor/witness.⁶ As an analysis of his own effort to compile historically-accurate memoirs, Cordier enumerates the many tricks memory played on him. First, he was confronted with the fact that his memory of such events would have to become what we can call assisted memory. His own recollections were too sparse in concrete reference points and too achronological in their organization for them to stand on their own. He also realized that even the most prominent of witnesses enjoys only a partial view of historical events. To fill in the extensive gaps and rectify a multitude of [End Page 84] mistaken recollections, he was obliged to consult archives, read other sources, and extrapolate logically.⁷ But he also discovered that he could not trust those rare occasions on which he did experience a sort of Proustian recall (where a block of time seemed to come flooding back in its entirety). Upon verification, he had to admit that, in spite of their vivid detail, these images owed as much to invention as they did to the retrieval of lost time; they were nothing but "les lambeaux d'une réalité mutilée" ("the tatters of a mutilated reality").⁸ His mind had not preserved memories like fossils forever embedded in their original form, inanimately awaiting excavation; on the contrary, the very act of revisiting these sites had sufficed to scatter these "artifacts" into more recent layers of living memory and imagination, thereby transforming them. Finally, more disorienting still for Cordier was encountering "phastasmagoric" intrusions into some of his clearest, most conscious memories.⁹

Returning to the Aubracs, then, it is little wonder that their memories are rife with contradictory elements. Assisted memory is like a mental mosaic in which disparate pieces—factual and imagined—can blend seemlessly into one another. In fact, for historical reconstructions like these, so many years after the fact, assisted memory is in essence the only kind of memory. How much of the Aubracs' knowledge of those years has been completed by sources that they can no longer even recall having read? How much of their recollection has been deformed through the countless times they have renewed their narration of those events? To what extent have their reconstitutions been guided by the questions and suppositions of others, or altered in response to competing and contradictory narratives? Though history has no telos, the narratives constructed from memory do. Our attempts to reconstruct the past are necessarily oriented toward a particular goal and, as Suleiman reminds us, logical deduction, wish fulfillment, or preexisting narrative structures can all intervene to redirect the course of a "memory['s]" reestablishment. The historians' desire for a perfect witness—one whose memory neither varies over time nor contradicts itself—is certainly understandable but it remains, of course, perfectly unattainable.

Many of Chauvy's conclusions concerning the Aubracs are malicious and unwarranted. And the Libération experts—Cordier in particular—are probably ill-inspired at times in their presumption of deception on the part of the Aubracs.¹⁰ That said, the Chauvy book does document blatant contradictions that are troubling—or, rather, for this reader, it is the Aubracs' refusal to grant that these examples constitute contradictions that becomes troubling.¹¹ Moreover, given that many of the Aubracs' [End Page 85] statements are taken from legal testimony and other documents that were explicitly presented as historically exact (wartime depositions, classroom educational visits, autobiographical texts), one feels justified in holding them to a high truth standard. Thus, while one can only admire the sacrifices, resourcefulness, and commitment of these Resistance heroes, I do not believe either that all of these discrepancies can be accounted for by the vagaries of memory. Let us be clear. I concur completely with the historical experts that the most damaging insinuations of Chauvy's book attacking the Aubracs have no grounds. In addition to the abundant materials previously available that point to René Hardy as having revealed the Caluire meeting, Chauvy's Aubrac Lyon 1943 provides additional evidence that substantially invalidates Klaus Barbie's attempts to smear the Aubracs. Most notably, the testimony of Barbie's assistant Harry Stengritt contradicts the former Gestapo chief on a number of crucial points and reenforces the thesis that Hardy's capture was the sole cause.¹² But I would like to return to Suleiman's hypothesis with a critical eye. In what ways could the Aubracs have passed from accidental distortion to semiconscious or even deliberate fabulation? And what are the consequences of such disfiguring?

An important theme in Suleiman's discussion is that of the public aggrandizement and debasement of heroes. Though the cycle has been observed since antiquity, Suleiman notes that our sociopolitical context determines its contemporary contours. Our postmodern sensibility pushes us "to unmask, to demystify—in a word, to dethrone what was previously extolled."¹³ I would go further and suggest that aspects of postwar France were (and still are) ripe for a particularly strong reversal with respect to the moral high ground claimed by the French resistance.

Lucie Aubrac's charisma is almost palpable in her inspiring vision of the "spirit of Resistance."¹⁴ It is the belief, born of admirable struggles at a time when good and evil seemed to exist quite concretely, that this "spirit" is something much larger than the specific circumstances in which she discovered it.¹⁵ Aubrac describes herself today as well as an "activist"¹⁶ and one is left with the impression that her pedagogical mission seeks to convey this abstract spirit as much as it does historical fact. The Resistance comes to represent not just an end to the war but a force potentially capable of creating a better, more civil society. We see this same notion embraced by a number of her comrades-in-arms. Serge Ravanel writes in his memoirs, "La Résistance pensait possible d'unifier la société autour des idées d'avenir qu'il exprimait. Elle avait développé un esprit de la Résistance, qui était porteur d'une éthique dans la vie sociale" (The Resistance thought it possible to unite society around the [End Page 86] ideas for a future that it had articulated. It had developed a spirit of Resistance that could bring its own ethics into the social sphere).¹⁷ Ravanel's wartime experience thus revealed to him an opportunity for continued social progress that was consonant with his own communist beliefs. Moreover, despite their ideological differences, de Gaulle and his right-leaning followers endorsed a similar vision of the Resistance flame. In Romain Gary's Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven, 1956), for instance, the Resistance is transformed into a quasi-metaphysical concept and serves as an explicit model for the novel's hero Morel in a maverick humanist campaign to protect endangered species against wanton destruction.

Thus, the gradual aggrandizement of Resistance figures was not simply a process that took place at the instigation of the media. In many instances, the historical actors worked tirelessly to promote this legacy because they sincerely believed that it would produce lasting social benefits. With the Gaullists, this typically took the form of celebrating the monolithic figure of the lonely General; he had used the language of legends and in time became one himself. With Resistance movements like Libération-Sud, on the other hand, their Leftist sensibilities and usually more modest origins led to the heroization of common citizens—e.g., Lucie Aubrac, the pregnant high school history teacher. It was her apparent "ordinariness" that made her story all the more remarkable and moving.

If the forms of heroization vary, inevitably those of the backlash do, too. First, as the most visible authority figure of his time, de Gaulle found himself vilified in the late 1960s with an intensity equal to that with which he had once been celebrated.¹⁸ For the Aubracs, it would come later, through the indirect settling of old scores. In both cases, though, the figures' ideological approaches—the paternalist de Gaulle and the faceless idealists of the Left—grate on today's postmodern nerves. Manichean views are dismissed as naïve by those who profess to have gone "beyond good and evil" to a new ethical vision. Just as importantly, in a French society fighting at the dawn of a new century to maintain an enviable standard of living (both material and cultural), the fact that the Resistance generation—on the Right and the Left—failed to deliver this "better" world has spurred skepticism or resentment in those quarters hostile to the great political ideologies of the twentieth century.

In the end, however, this diametrical narrative reflex is in some respects a more understandable human response than we might recognize. Amongst the general public, it is akin to rubber-necking at the [End Page 87] scene of a traffic accident: people are not wishing for anyone to suffer, but in a rather innocent yet perverse way they do want to see if something happened, to see if there is an event unfolding. It is a slightly different, slightly morbid form of narrative desire. Similarly, the corresponding scandal narrative obeys a rough time-table. As France became saturated with tales of the glory years of the Resistance, the space for dithyrambic narrative dwindled. In other words, once the heroic accounts (or the public's appetite for them) were exhausted, the demolition inevitably began.

The historical actor's complicity in the process of aggrandizement is also complex and merits further discussion. What are we to make of the mutually exclusive narratives offered by Lucie Aubrac to recount how she helped spring prisoners in Lyon?¹⁹ Even if we adopt an attitude of prudent suspicion, we are not obliged to jump to the opposite extreme (i.e., that her efforts never took place or that some reprehensible tactic was employed). In granting room for the interference of narrative desire, we can indeed arrive at less dramatic conclusions. If what mattered for Lucie Aubrac at the time she told her story was the spirit in which the act was undertaken, and if in fact her actions did lead to rescuing her comrades, one can allow that a little embroidering in the narration could seem inconsequential or even inadvertent at the time. The very shift toward abstraction (i.e., this timeless spirit) demotes historical detail to a secondary, even anecdotal, level.²⁰ In this reading, her primary desire was to be faithful to a particular vision and use a great story to motivate her audience to pursue those values in their own lives. In other words, it was a version of her personal history that was true to her needs and beliefs at the time of the retelling. It was, for her, historically accurate insofar as it did not betray the spirit of those actions, a criteria which to her was more important than the positivist details. Yet one of the stakes in offering historical testimony is that we can never predict what questions the future will ask of those events. If Lucie Aubrac finds herself in a bind today as a historical witness, doubtless it is because she has become caught between two historiographical moments. Epic accounts such as the one she published in September 1945 in La Marseillaise²¹ were legion in the postwar years. One has only to look at the many volumes of Colonel Rémy's collection Mémoires d'un agent secret de la France Libre (Memoirs of a Secret Agent for the Free French Forces, 1945-. . .) to confirm this. Institutional historiography took time after the war to reestablish its preeminence within the public eye and, of course, its practices have grown enormously in rigor and method over the last thirty-five years. Thus, the embellishment of past actions did not necessarily mean then what it can mean today. [End Page 88]

Why would the meaning of those embellishments have changed? Or, rather, why would the consequences of embellishing have changed? I would argue that, in addition to historiographical advances and the shift in historical stages identified by Rousso, texts such as Gérard Chauvy's Aubrac Lyon 1943 or Thierry Wolton's attack on Jean Moulin²² have changed the rules of the game. Not as egregiously offensive or patently false as negationist texts, investigative journalism can nevertheless borrow similar strategies.²³ We are faced with, as Pierre Vidal-Nacquet among others has shown, a type of discourse that weds narrative plot and historical chronology in deceptive ways.²⁴ To illustrate the potential malleability of these forms, for instance, it is worth recalling that Chauvy's 1997 book is not his first work on the subject; three others preceded it. With its title implying scandalous revelations, Histoire secrète de l'Occupation provides a damning demonstration of René Hardy's guilt in bringing the Gestapo to Jean Moulin.²⁵ Most readers (who do not have access to the documents or witnesses) will be strongly persuaded by this account in which the entire narrative movement prepares his conclusion. (Moreover, the testimony of Raymond and Lucie Aubrac is used here with complete confidence as part of the arsenal of proof assembled by Chauvy).²⁶ To learn then that Chauvy, a mere six years later, provides in Aubrac Lyon 1943 his own counternarrative condemning a different figure, is an unsettling prospect. It is a grim reminder that virtually anyone could be subjected to such calumny and thus moves us closer to issues germane to negationism.

Indeed, Aubrac Lyon 1943 is a more pernicious work than Histoire secrète de l'Occupation. Though the major claims turn out to be little more than innuendo, Chauvy's work mimics many gestures of the scholarly historian. There is an ostentatious display of facsimiles of newly-published documents and an historical reconstitution than does not shy away from minutiae. Little in the introduction betrays an ideological bias and he cites (rather insidiously) unimpeachable authorities such as Rousso, Dominique Veillon, and Jean-Pierre Azéma, as if to suggest that they endorsed his methods and project.²⁷ But by far the most effective strategy available to Chauvy is to exploit problematic features of the Aubracs' own statements. Each time Chauvy is able to document an apparent (or real) contradiction, the rest of his project seems to creep a little bit closer to plausibility.

To pose the problem another way: What are we to do when both Chauvy and Lucie Aubrac define their books as historical correctives to misleading legends? "Une 'légende' s'est construite, développée sous une forme épique, sans soulever nulle contestation en dépit des évidentes [End Page 89] invraisemblances du récit," writes Chauvy. "Il est temps que l'Histoire . . . obtiennent une véritable «mise-au-point»" ("A 'legend' has been built of epic proportions without provoking any objections despite the obvious incongruities of the tale. It is time that History obtain a proper clarification").²⁸ Lucie Aubrac asserts that this mission was one of her reasons for writing Outwitting the Gestapo: "Having known the men of those early days of struggle [in the Resistance] . . . many of whom today can no longer answer the roll call, I don't want Barbie and his friends to insult them, or us, or to trivialize with their slander the glorious and tragic history of the Resistance."²⁹ What are the tools that will allow us to distinguish between the two accounts?

The only serious recourse is indeed to turn to the finest contemporary experts in the field, something which the Aubracs themselves recognized at the outset. This is where it gets more awkward for the elderly couple. From an historiographical point-of-view, the Aubracs' moral high ground is not sufficient to dispel the contradictions; it cannot override methodological procedure. For the most part, the historians did not embark on these lines of questioning of their own initiative; they did so because numerous possible contradictions were brought to their attention. Negationists may be a false scarecrow in that the professional and public consensus remains for all intents and purposes entirely united against their positions. But texts which adopt less censured tactics—works like Chauvy's or the satirical polemics of the 1950's "Hussard" circle (Antoine Blondin, Roger Nimier, Jacques Laurent, Kléber Haedens, Michel Déon, et al.)—can pry open the door to cast greater doubt if given room to maneuver. This is the principal obstacle to adopting a looser, more intuitive interpretive stance. As mentioned above, I fully recognize the considerable limits to human memory. An approach that acknowledges this is commensurate with the need for a respectful and realistic approach to the treasures that historical witnesses can offer us. But journalists such as Chauvy exploit every half-truth and fabulation. We cannot simply accept the Aubracs' half-truths and condemn Chauvy's on the grounds that the former are more palatable to us ideologically. The witnesses must be shown respect, particularly where their private sufferings are concerned, but we must show an even greater respect for historical accuracy because it, in a certain sense, concerns all of us.

It is worth noting that, to the extent that the history of this period continues to fascinate, the contradictions in the Aubracs' stories would probably have been enumerated sooner or later. The Libération roundtable, however trying it was for all participants, provided an opportunity [End Page 90] to clarify the record during the Aubracs' lifetime. The professional historians acquitted themselves of this difficult and delicate task. They unequivocably cleared the Aubracs' names on the gravest issues, but were forced to recognize that not all matters had been adequately clarified. The "hairsplitting" on the part of the historians was dictated by the pressure to maintain their professional standards in order to protect the truth from the tactics of negationists and scandal-mongering journalists. For this reason, I find the rather virulent attacks after the roundtable not only puzzling but patently unjustifiable.³⁰ As Veillon would comment after the proceedings, such painstaking and, at times, painful verification of facts is necessary for the process to maintain its credibility.³¹ The persistent application of their professional procedures is the very proof of their probity; it is how they earned their authority in the first place and it is what separates them from writers like Chauvy. As Rousso's remarks suggest, to turn a blind eye to the Aubracs' contradictions under the pretense that some legends are "necessary" and thus require protecting is to run the risk that they will in fact eventually be completely discredited.³²

Ralph Schoolcraft is Assistant Professor of French at Texas A&M University. He recently authored Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and translated Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). He is working on two book manuscripts, Methods of the Mask (on pseudonymous authorship) and Literary Gaullism: Representations of the French Resistance.

Endnotes

1. Raymond Aubrac, The French Resistance (Paris: Pocket Archives, 1997), 7.

2. Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, trans. Konrad Bieber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 7.

3. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

4. See Wolfgang Iser, "How Acts of Constitution are Stimulated," in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 180-231; and Iser, "Interaction Between Text and Reader," in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, eds. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

5. Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

6. Daniel Cordier, "Histoire et «Mémoires»," in Mémoire et Histoire: la Résistance, eds. Jean-Marie Guillon and Pierre Laborie (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1995), 299-312.

7. Cordier, "Histoire et «Mémoires»," 305.

8. Cordier, "Histoire et «Mémoires»," 308.

9. A landmark event in Cordier's past, for example, was a speech enjoining the citizens of Pau to join him in refusing Pétain's armistice. Cordier distinctly remembered haranguing an impromptu audience from the stairs inside city hall. Recently, however, he discovered that he had invented the stage upon which the event was supposed to have taken place. In effect, he had plastered a sort of visual cliché—the marble staircase of a generic French city hall—onto what was otherwise a factual occurrence (Cordier, "Histoire et «Mémoires»," 309). [End Page 91]

10. At one juncture in the Libération roundtable, frustrated by Raymond Aubrac's answers, Cordier states, "Il me semble que derrière cette dérive, il y a quelque chose d'inavouable. J'en suis triste et c'est pour cela que je reviens à la charge; que dissimules-tu?" ("It seems to me that behind this slippage lies something to which you cannot own up. This saddens me and it is for this reason that I keep pressing: What are you hiding?"); "Le rapport du commissaire Porte," Special Supplement to Libération, 9 July 1997, p. xviii.

11. Claiming that the historians had not verified their sources properly, for instance, Raymond Aubrac will insist that they had confronted him with contradictions that did not in fact exist (Aubrac, "Ce que cette table ronde m'a appris," Libération, 10 July 1997, p. 30).

12. See Gérard Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 132; 143-44; 178. Furthermore, the debate over how Jean Moulin came to be captured could ultimately be moot. If the law does not hold individuals accountable for information yielded under torture—and I include the threat of torture as a form of torture—then it is difficult to see where history should judge them as "guilty." Moreover, our assumption of a guilty party partakes in narrative desire as well; it is not impossible that the Gestapo uncovered the Caluire meeting by other means (documents seized from mailboxes, conversations overheard, individuals being followed, etc.).

13. Susan Suleiman, "History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire: The 'Aubrac Affair' and National Memory of the French Resistance," South Central Review 21 no. 1 (2004): 63.

14. Quoted in Suleiman, "History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire," 59.

15. "J'explique à ces jeunes que l'esprit de Résistance dépasse le cadre de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, qu'il a existé bien avant, qu'il existe actuellement et que, futurs citoyens, ils en deviennent dépositaires. A eux, dans leur vie, de préserver les valeurs qui de tous temps ont engagé dans des combats volontaires des hommes et des femmes pour la défense ou la reconquête de la liberté et de la dignité de tout être humain" ("I explain to these young people that the spirit of Resistance exceeds the context of the Second World War, that it existed before, that it still exists today, and that, as future citizens, they will inherit it. It will be up to them, in their lifetime, to preserve the values which have always led men and women to commit themselves to defending or reconquering the liberty and dignity of all human beings"); Lucie Aubrac, "Des éloges aux soupçons," Libération, 10 July 1997, p. 31.

16. Quoted in Suleiman, "History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire," 70.

17. Serge Ravanel with Jean-Claude Raspiengeas, L'Esprit de la Résistance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995) 8.

18. De Gaulle was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. Rightwingers still disgruntled over his role in granting Algeria its independence had maintained a lively hatred of the former General, while in May 1968 the Left's rejection of his authoritarian approach to governance culminated in the student riots that led eventually to his retirement from political life.

19. Chauvy's critique is effective on this count. With respect to the first rescue of captured Resistance members (May 24, 1953), Lucie Aubrac occasionally included her husband among those liberated when in fact he had already been released. She also gives different versions of how she pressured French judicial authorities to free him and of who participated in the actual maneuver at the Antiquaille Hospital in Lyon. For the second rescue mission, which included the dramatic commando raid on the Gestapo [End Page 92] trucks transporting prisoners to and from jail, she has accumulated a variety of accounts here as well. The representatives of the Gestapo with whom she claims to have met change over time, as do the identities she assumed (under one scheme she posed as an aristocrat—Mlle de Barbentane—while elsewhere she affirms that it was as a commoner, one Lucie Montet). Another key point concerns her confusion over whether Klaus Barbie had identified Aubrac as "Aubrac" (an important officer in the Resistance) or was still accepting the pseudonyms of "Vallet" or "Ermelin" (figures who were of no known consequence). Finally, the Libération-Sud figures present in the armed raid change, as do the maneuvers made to assure the prisoners' safety once they are freed.

20. In a very different rhetorical register, of course, de Gaulle demonstrates a similar predilection for a gradual emptying out of the historical specificity of the French resistance in favor of the celebration of an idealized French spirit of Resistance; see Rousso, "La Seconde Guerre Mondiale dans la mémoire des droites," in Histoire des Droites en France, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 574.

21. Reproduced in Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943, Appendix 1.

22. Thierry Wolton, Le Grand Recrutement (Paris: Grasset, 1993).

23. The term "negationism" is preferred to "revisionism" in order to clarify the act of holocaust denial. Since historiography consists today largely of revising past history, and since negationists attempt, however poorly, to drape their discourse in the trappings of historiography, the latter term inadvertently served the negationists' goals. "Negationism" also establishes more clearly that this act is unacceptable in historiographical terms not because it proposes a weak hypothesis but because it flat out negates events for which there exists an overwhelming consensus within the academic community.

24. Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

25. Ironically, it so happens that one of Hardy's wartime pseudonyms was Chauvy! (Chauvy, Histoire secrète de l'Occupation, [Paris: Payot, 1991], 189).

26. Chauvy, Histoire secrète de l'Occupation, 175.

27. Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943, 8-10.

28. Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943, 10.

29. L. Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, 232.

30. This applies particularly to the case of Rousso, singled out by Raymond Aubrac (Aubrac, "Ce que cette table ronde m'a appris," Libération, 10 July 1997, p. 30). Rousso maintains an extremely circumspect manner, stating that the information available is not sufficient to resolve some of the areas of contention.

31. Dominique Veillon, "«Trouble-mémoire»," Libération, 11 July 1997, p. 30.

32. Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 77-78.