Rousso has set out to provide not just another narrative of les années noires—the years of defeat, occupation, of the phantom ‘French State’ and the civil war—but a study of the way the Vichy episode has been perceived and perverted by the French ever since. The result is a brilliant and intemperate book that is also a tract for the times.

Succeeds as a practical demonstration, for a particularly vivid case, of how to study a people grappling with a past. It is remarkable how few similar works there are… One understands a historian’s hesitation before the poorly documented and ill-defined wider popular memory as a subject. Rousso shows us, however, how dramatic and revealing this genre can be.

This is an original and thought-provoking work, a ‘must’ for anyone interested in the political and cultural psychology of post-war France.