To put an end to Vichy

Will Vichy always haunt the French conscience? What relationship will France then maintain with such old wounds? Will people still know that Vichy was born from the most cruel and total defeat in all of French history, that it cannot be imagined detached from the brutal demands of the occupier and the daily inquisition of the Parisian "collaborators"? These questions—and a few others—are at the origin of this book, which I intended to be almost a testament. Forty years of work, the written testimonies of thousands of readers, have given me the right, and perhaps the duty, to write it. I wanted to emphasize points that have been too often neglected, and whose understanding would allow for a less Manichean judgment, which is not to say a lenient one. For regarding Vichy, I hold to the validity of what Germaine de Staël, recalling the Terror, wrote in 1810: “To allow oneself bad means for an end one believes to be good is a maxim of conduct singularly vicious in its principle…” I know all the better what can be held against Vichy—the compromises, the complicity, the initiatives—because I keep, along with photos of my children, the photograph of Régine Adjelson, an eight-year-old Jewish girl, deported to Auschwitz in the convoy of August 17, 1942… Putting an end to Vichy… Will we ever be done with it? But understanding the evolution of feelings, dispelling confusions, protecting ourselves from the telescoping of dates and events (1940 is not 1941, which is not 1942…), doing the work of explanation to repair the “forgetting of memory” - such is the ambition of this book.