Aspetti della storiografia su Vichy

In the last decades French public memory has been shattered by the trials of collaborationist civil servants or nazi officers who took part in the deportation of Jews. These trials took place when historiography had already done some decades of considerable research work both on the Pétain regime and the general attitude of the French people, after the war had ended, towards the Vichy regime. The considerable media coverage of these trials has allowed historical research to reach a larger audience with respect to the smaller group of people into this area of study. They stressed the difference of the Pétain laws by comparison to the murderous turning point of nazi anti-semitism. But with respect to the rich European tradition of anti-Semitism, which, also in its German variant, used to ask for norms discriminating against Jews, France was not a case apart. Since the anti-Semite imaginary reveals its wide geographical scope, the use of the same arguments and of the same analytical categories in the different countries, an excessive stress on national specificity would miss the strong internationalism which used to inspire it.

Francesco Germinario, Aspetti della storiografia su Vichy in "TEORIA POLITICA" 3/2005, pp , DOI: