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Chapter 5
Shame and Resistance:
Repression, Repeating, Remembering
Resistance
In the concluding lines of Le syndrome de Vichy, Rousso suggests that the
syndrome was the result of a need to unify the French nation. It is the result
of a dichotomy that restored to health the ‘body’, the French people, at the
price of the sickness of national memory.1 The postwar reconstruction of
France required the repression of wartime divisions. The syndrome is the
consequence of the resistance and re-emergence of these internal fractures.
Rousso expresses the hope that the sickness is not hereditary or incurable.
With a few exceptions examined so far, it appears to be both. If the cause
of the syndrome is to be addressed the rift between the ‘body’, postwar
national identity, and ‘memory’, collective cultural memory, needs to be
mended. In Le hantise du passé, Rousso writes that memory is inscribed
in the register of identity whereas history examines the past in light of the
present to reveal the dif ference between the two and the changes that have
taken place. Rousso also notes that memory is characterized by continuity,
1 ‘Après 1945, la « synthèse républicaine » chère à Stanley Hof fmann a retrouvé sa
solidité, malgré tous les soubresauts et divisions de l’après-guerre. Autant les mani-
festations du souvenir ont donné l’image d’un pays incapable de retrouver le fil de
son histoire, autant la société a raf fermi progressivement ses aires de consensus. Le
syndrome n’est-il que le prix de cette évolution? Si la mémoire a été autant malade,
sans doute était-ce parce que le corps a bien résisté. À moins que le mal ne soit héré-
diatire. Et incurable’. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy, 345.
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which eneables a group or individuals to absorb and integrate ruptures.2
Although Rousso opposes the ‘body’ of the people with ‘memory’, I would
suggest that the link between these is the notion of national identity, which
carries within it both the notions of continuity (memory) and change (his-
tory). It is through this interconnecting channel that ‘body and ‘memory’
can be reintegrated. In Freud’s instructions for psychoanalytic treatment
of such syndromes he notes that the illness needs first to be recognized:
‘He must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his
illness. His illness must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must
become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which
has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his
future life have to be derived’.3 In order for treatment to begin the patient
will need to face him- or herself and the repressed memories which are
feeding the syndrome and to find tolerance for the manifestations of the
illness in order to work towards the final goal of reintegrating these in a
healthy way. Rousso’s naming of the syndrome is widely accepted as an
accurate description of trends and issues within French memory of the
war and the narratives examined so far certainly express a desire to ‘talk
about’ memories of wartime shame and are clearly trying, in some way, to
understand the continuing ef fects of this past in the present. This suggests
that the work can begin. Freud explains that the way forward consists in
controlling the compulsion to repeat and making it instead a motive for
remembering. This happens through careful management of the transfer-
ence: by redirecting the compulsion to repeat to a substitute, often to a
person, but sometimes to an object or an idea.4 In this way, the unresolved
2 Rousso, La hantise du passé, 22.
3 Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through’, 152.
4 ‘We admit it [the compulsion] into the transference as a playground in which it is
allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display
to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s
mind. […] The transference thus creates an immediate region between illness and real
life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condi-
tion has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an articifical illness
which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience,
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rifts between memory and national identity and the continuity and the
dif ference between the past and present can be approached.
Contrary to the assertion upheld by Holocaust scholarship, that the
Shoah is rarely represented in literature until the Eichmann trial of 1961,
Michael Rothberg observes that a significant number of pre-1961 postwar
narratives refer to the memory of the Holocaust in the discussion of con-
temporary political events.5 Similarly, in constrast with the popular under-
standing of Henry Rousso’s phase of ‘repression’, narratives produced during
this period, feelings and memories of wartime shame and complicity are
expressed in discussions of contemporary postwar events. Rousso felt his
historical categorization of the 1954–1971 as a period of ‘repression’ had
been picked up by both the public and some critics and contrasted with
the post-1971 period of the ‘return of the repressed’ to add further fuel to
the popular notion of a postponed historical reckoning with the memories
and guilt of the wartime past. With frustration and irony, Rousso lamented
the lack of attention paid to his critique of the overly guilt-ridden focus on
the ‘forgotten’ or ‘silenced’ crimes of collaboration and deportation with
which French cultural memory and production of the 1980s and 1990s
had become obsessed.6 Rousso identifies the first generation’s inclination
towards forgetting, silence and the placing of taboos on memories of the
but one which has been made possible by especially favourable conditions, and it
is of a provisional nature. From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the
transference we are led along familiar paths to the awakening of memories, which
appear without dif ficulty, as it were, after the resistance has been overcome’. Freud,
‘Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through’, 154–5.
5 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009), 22.
6 ‘Je n’y mettais pas simplement en lumière les oublis, les tabous ou les ignorances de
l’après-guerre et des années soixante, mais j’essayais de pointer, dès ce moment-là, le
caractère obsessionnel de cette mémoire de Vichy observé à la fin des années quatre-
vingt. Je pense que cet aspect du livre a été peu lu, sinon purement et simplement
occulté, au profit de la mise en exergue du refoulement ou des oublis antérieurs parce
que cette lecture partielle et partiale servait la cause montante du devoir de mémoire.’
Rousso, La hantise du passé, 29.
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war.7 Rather than understanding the repression of the topics of the war
and Occupation memory as absent, I would suggest, it is instead a matter
of recognizing how forgetting, silence and taboos are expressions of both
the resistance to remembering and the compulsive repetition of the past
that reveal the shame underlying the syndrome.
Resistance can take the form of a refusal to forget as easily as a refusal
to remember. Both Les mandarins8 and Les séquestrés d’Altona9 are published
7 ‘Toutes les generations qui ont vécu l’Occupation à l’âge adulte aspirent à l’oubli,
voire à l’ignorance. Peut-être à cause d’un obscur sentiment de honte de n’avoir pas
toujours été presents à l’heure des choix decisifs, que l’on décèle chez des hommes
aussi dif férents que Sartre ou Pompidou. Elles ont été les plus enclines aux silences,
qui se manifestent aussi bien par l’apaisement provisioire des polémiques, que par
les tabous dont sont empreints les films ou l’historiographie, tabous apparemment
acceptés par la majorité: du moins, rares sont les indices qui permettent d’af firmer
le contraire’. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy, 343.
8 My reading of Les mandarins reveals how questions of guilt and postwar identity
raised by the novel and in criticism inform the novel’s relationship to shame and
resistance. I also engage with Beauvoir’s assertion that the Kierkegaardian movement
of repetition can be seen in the evolution of Henri and Robert’s ethical positions:
Genevieve Shepherd, Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction: A Psychoanalytic Reading (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2003); Gail Weiss, ‘Politics is a Living Thing’, in The Contradictions of
Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Les mandarins’, ed. Sally J.
Scholz and Shannon M. Musset (Albany: State of New York Press, 2005); Carol
Ascher, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981);
Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990); Elizabeth Fallaize, ed., Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Terry Keefe, Simone de Beauvoir: A Study
of her Writings (London: Harrap, 1983); Terry Keefe, Simone de Beauvoir (London:
Macmillan, 1998); Sonia Kruks, ‘Living on Rails’, in The Contradications of Freedom,
ed. Scholz and Musset.
9 Les séquestrés d’Altona was first performed on 23 September 1959 at the Théâtre de
la Renaissance. The play was an immediate success with audiences and ran until 4
June 1960. The action takes place in the home of a wealthy German family, who had
been supporters of Nazism and whose wartime af filiations have continued to haunt
their postwar lives. Frantz, the eldest son, who fought for Germany, returned after the
defeat and has sequestered himself in his room for the last thirteen years refusing to
see anyone apart from his sister Leni. Sartre explained that the play was an allegory
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during the period of so-called ‘repression’ yet in both texts explicit references
to the impossibility of forgetting wartime shame can be observed. Beauvoir’s
first person narrator, the psychoanalyst, Anne Dubreuilh, explains how
her work with deportees and those whose loved ones did not return from
the camps make her acutely aware of the impact of the irremediable social
breakdown caused by the unbearable memories of acts of inhumanity car-
ried out during the war. She struggles between her professional role and
her personal convictions as she ref lects on the lack of progress with a child
whose father has died in an extermination camp: ‘Peut-être la résistance
de l’enfant traduisait-elle celle que je sentais en moi: cet inconnu qui était
mort deux ans plus tôt à Dachau, ça me faisait horreur de le chasser du
coeur de son fils’.10
Anne’s own resistance to forgetting the events of the war lead her to
believe that she is at odds with the psychoanalytic model that she prac-
tices which, she claims, seeks to help people forget their past.11 Like the
amnesties of the 1950s, Anne suggests that therapy tries to sweep away
the past. This leaves the lingering problem of wartime complicity and its
critiquing the state endorsement of the use of torture by French troops in Algeria.
Government censorship and public sensitivity about Algeria at the time prevented
him from making this the explicit theme of the play. The question of torture also had
an inverted resonance with the torture of French resisters during the Occupation.
The play can thus be considered to refer to both situations. There is significant criti-
cism of the existential problems of guilt and responsibility posed by Frantz’s act
of wartime torture and its relation to Sartre’s opposition to torture in Algeria, my
analysis of shame and resistance is informed by the following criticisms: Catherine
Savage Brosman, ‘Sartre, The Algerian War, and Les séquestrés d’Altona’, Papers in
Romance, 3 (1981), 81–9; Oreste Pucciani, ‘“Les séquestrés d’Altona” of Jean-Paul
Sartre’, The Tulane Drama Review 5 (1961), 19–33; Oreste F. Pucciani, ‘An Interview
with Jean-Paul Sartre’, Tulane Drama Review 5 (1961); Walter Redfern, Sartre: Huis
clos and Les séquestrés d’Altona (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995); Michel Contat
and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); Philip Dine, ‘The
Inescapable Allusion: The Occupation and the Resistance in French Fiction and Film
of the Algerian War’, The Liberation of France: Image and Event, ed. H.R. Kedward
and Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 269–82.
10 Simone de Beauvoir, Les mandarins (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 57.
11 As we know, neither Beauvoir nor Sartre was a fan of psychoanalysis.
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connection to shame unaddressed. In Les séquestrés d’Altona, although
Frantz’s recollection of the Nazi soldiers’ murder of the rabbi is lucid in
every detail,12 he claims to have forgotten the acts of torture he ordered
as a Nazi soldier on the Russian Front: ‘J’ai tout oublié. Jusqu’à leurs cris.
Je suis vide’.13 The father points out that Frantz has been able to repress
the memory of this torture by isolating himself from the world: ‘– Le
Père: « Tu es possédé depuis quatorze ans par une souf france que tu as
fait naître et que tu ne ressens pas ». –Frantz: « Mais qui vous demande
de parler de moi? Oui. C’est encore plus dur: je suis son cheval, elle me
chevauche »’.14 Frantz’s recognition that the psychological scars of war
control and determine his behaviour suggests that he recognizes that the
repression reveals an inability to truly forget his wartime past. The impos-
sibility of forgetting is reinforced also in L’empreinte de l’ange where, as a
result of the complicity she feels as result of her German heritage, Saf fie
decides to shut of f from the world of contemporary politics.15 Through
12 Frantz’s recollections of the war occur in fragmented f lashbacks. In one memory, after
discovering that there is a concentration camp on his father’s estate, Frantz confesses
to his father that he has found an escaped inmate, a Polish rabbi, in the grounds,
who he has hidden in his bedroom. Initially, the father of fers to help Frantz to aid
the rabbi’s escape. However, on learning that their chauf feur, an ardent supporter
of Nazism, has seen Frantz helping the rabbi, the father calls Gœbbels who arranges
for the SS to collect the rabbi and for Frantz to be reprimanded by being sent to the
Russian front. The SS find the rabbi in Frantz’s bedroom and hold him down and
force him to watch as they slit the rabbi’s throat.
13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976),
186.
14 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 186.
15 Nancy Huston’s L’empreinte de l’ange follows the Parisian lives of Saf fie, a young
German immigrant, Raphaël, an aristocratic French f lutist, and Andràs, a Hungarian
craftsman of musical instruments, over six years from 1957 to 1963. Saf fie arrives in
Paris as a war-traumatized teenager. She is employed as a housekeeper by Raphaël, a
famous f lutist, who is drawn to her cool emotional detachment and asks her to marry
him. After the marriage, Saf fie becomes pregnant and although she tries to abort,
she gives birth to a son, Emil. Soon after, she begins a passionate five-year af fair with
Andràs, when she takes Raphaël’s f lute to Andras’s workshop to be repaired one day.
The narrative explores the ef fects of the changing political tides of the Fourth and
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this embargo on the present, she attempts to forget the past. However, the
resistance to remembering wartime shame finds expression in both Saf fie’s
and Andras’ memories of the organic re-emergence of dead bodies. At the
German defeat, Saf fie remembers how the family garden could not hold all
the bodies of the animals people brought to her veterinary father to have
put down: ‘La terre bougeait et ça remontatit, les pattes resortaient’.16 This
reminds Andràs of Vassili Grosman’s description of the mass graves dug
by the Jews in the Ukraine:
Et puis, les mêmes mots, le sol qui bouge, les cadavres qui enf lent, remuent et se
remettent à saigner, faisant craquer sous leur pression la surface de la terre … La terre
argileuse de Bereditchev ne pouvait absorbait tout ce liquide, le sang des juifs s’était
mis à couler sur le sol, on barbotait dans des mares de sang.17
These descriptions of mass killing, burial and the resurfacing of bodies
mirror the unexpected resurfacing of wartime memories. This suggests that
the shame and complicity that the memories simultaneously communicate
and suppress cannot be truly ‘forgotten’. Quite the opposite, repression
articulates an inability to forget. In Les mandarins, on a cycling holiday
in 1945, Anne, Robert and Henri find themselves in the Vercors and are
invited to join the local people at a memorial meal for the war dead. This
causes Henri to ref lect on the function of commemoration:
Un an: c’est court, c’est long. Les camarades morts étaient bien oubliés […] c’est
malsain de s’entêter dans le passé; pourtant, on n’est pas très fier de soi. C’est pour
ça qu’ils ont inventé ce compromis: commémorer; hier du sang aujourd’hui du vin
rouge discrètement salé de larmes; il y a beaucoup de gens que ça tranquillise.18
Fifth Republics on the personal lives of the characters. Saf fie, Andràs and Raphaël
witness the re-election of de Gaulle, the escalation of the war in Algeria, the rise of the
Parisian FLN, the 17 October massacre and the Evian Accords. My analysis draws on
Max Silverman’s observations on the connection between the war in Algeria and the
Occupation and the patterns of repetition in the novel. Max Silverman, ‘Palimpsestic
Memory in Nancy Huston’s L’empreinte de l’Ange’ (unpublished, 2010).
16 Nancy Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 142.
17 Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange, 142.
18 Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 230.
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Commemoration allows wartime sorrow, pain and remorse to be collec-
tively remembered within a contained and controlled framework. This
allows it to be divorced it from af fect in the present. Henri points out that
alcohol and drugs provide a similar release for emotional outpourings and
in soothing and distancing pain and memory.19 Despite his criticism of this
staged ‘therapy’ of remorseful commemoration, Henri will later exploit
the desire for contained collective emotional outpouring in his play, Les
survivants, for which he wins huge critical acclaim. After the first perfor-
mance, however, he is gripped with guilt as he realizes that to satisfy the
public’s desire for the compulsive expression of pain he has aestheticized
the emotional and ethical devastation of the Occupation.20 In Les séques-
trés, although Frantz represses memory of his acts of torture, he is obsessed
with the thought of future judgment of the events of the war. Frantz has
spent his thirteen years of isolation tape-recording versions of a testimony,
which he imagines will be played at a trial in the thirtieth century, in which
he presents an apology for the actions of the ‘black-sheep’ twentieth cen-
tury. He avoids the question of his own personal responsibility for torture
by dissolving this into a generalized remorse about the evils of the whole
century. Walter Redfern observes: ‘Frantz’s counter-attack on his century
is an attempt to generalize guilt in order to lighten his own share for, as
Napoleon recognized, “les crimes collectives n’engagent personne.”’21 In
19 Vincent, a young friend of Nadine’s, desperate to forget the people he killed when
fighting in the Resistance, finds his solace in drinking and violently avenging crimes
of alleged collaboration. Sézénac, another associate of Nadine, who has also failed to
deal with the emotional fallout of war and the ethical choices he made, has become
a drug addict to combat the pain of remembering. Initially presented as a Resistance
hero, Sézénac turns out to have of fered to help dozens of Jews escape to the Southern
Zone and instead handed them over to the border authorities. Both Sézénac and
Vincent represent the extremes of war scarred youth exhibiting the inwardly turned
destructiveness of wartime trauma. Their present day actions are determined entirely
by their inability to come to terms with their guilt and shame.
20 It is interesting to recall Elizabeth Falaize’s note that Les survivants was one of the
titles Beauvoir considered using for Les mandarins. Elizabeth Falaize, The Novels of
Simone de Beauvoir (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 92.
21 Walter Redfern, Huis clos and Les séquestrés d’Altona (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995),
59.
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L’empreinte de l’ange, it transpires that when Saf fie’s French teacher, M.
Ferrat, seduced her in the summer of 1952, he forced her to listen to his
harrowing account of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and German culpa-
bility for the Holocaust. Since then Saf fie has been crippled by feelings of
unbearable complicity. The narrator suggests that M. Ferrat’s motivation
for instilling such intense shame in his German pupil is a determination to
implicitly assert French innocence in relation to these wartime atrocities.22
In his discussion of the period of repression between the years 1954–1971,
Rousso notes that the passing of the law of imprescriptibility, the com-
memoration of Jean Moulin and the first amnesty of war crimes in Algeria
all took place within a two week period in December 1964. He suggests
that these acts signalled less a full repression of the past and were more a
case of ‘selective remembering’ which aimed at restoring national unity to
a previously war-torn and, following the Épuration, a presently war-weary
country: ‘Il s’agit donc moins de refouler le passé dans sa totalité, que
d’opérer une selection propre à ressouder l’unité nationale’.23 Similarly, in
the narratives, the ‘gap’ in memory created by repression poses the problem
of the fracturing of both individual and collective identities. Anne reacts
against her psychoanalytic professional duty to encourage repression in a
child who does not want to forget in order to help her patient reintegrate.
Frantz’s repression or ‘selective remembering’ allows him to present himself
as a victim. Yet, in order to maintain this rarification of memory, he has to
sequester himself to preserve his version of events and vision of the world.
Saf fie’s memories of the reappearance of dead bodies of animals through
the surface of the garden, Andràs’s mirrored memory of the Jewish dead,
and M. Ferrat’s attribution of guilt to her German heritage, all commu-
nicate a selective remembering which seeks to whitewash acts of French
complicity with Nazism. Freud observes that repression is observable in
22 ‘Julien Ferrat savait qu’on ne parlait jamais de ces choses-là dans l’entourage de Saffie,
ni à l’école ni à la maison, mais il était cinéphile à Lyon après la guerre, il avait assisté
aux atroces actualités répétitives ainsi qu’aux nouvelles du procès de Nuremberg:
preuves de la culpabilité allemande que l’on montrait à satiété aux Français pour les
rassurer quant à leur propre innocence’. Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange, 76.
23 Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy, 112.
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the acting-out of traumatic memory, which does not constitute ‘remem-
bering’ but rather a compulsive repetition of acts or words that simultane-
ously communicate and conceal past trauma.24 Thus, although repression
can be described as forgetting, ‘selective remembering’ or repeating, what
it actually points to is the crystallized preservation of one moment of the
past rather than its disappearance. I would thus concur with Dominic
LaCapra, who applies a psychoanalytic approach in analyzing the social
and cultural implications of Holocaust trauma and who insists that the
Freudian concepts of repression, acting-out and working-through engage
the processes of remembering and forgetting in complementary interaction
rather than forcing their opposition.25
Repeating
Part of the trauma that lives on in French narratives of war and Occupation
concerns shame and its problematic legacy. In my study of narratives about
wartime shame, a trend emerged in the experiences of shame recounted.
The encounter with shame appeared to circumscribe an ethical rupture. I
use this term to describe the irredeemable breakdown of ethical values that
occurs in the encounter with shame as a result of experiencing, witnessing
or perpetrating an act of inhumanity. Shame, as noted earlier, in Sartre’s
ontological definition concerns the objectification of the self by the other.
However, in the section on being-for-others where Sartre introduces the
concept of shame, which constitutes ‘my’ recognition of the existence of
24 ‘The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but
acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without,
of course, knowing that he is repeating it’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating
and Working-Through’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1967–1974), xii, 150.
25 Dominic LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 205.
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others and ‘my’ perception of ‘their’ power to objectify ‘me’ and thereby
limit ‘my’ freedom, he writes:
Ma chute originelle c’est l’existence de l’autre; et la honte est – comme la fierté – l’ap-
préhension de moi-même comme nature, encore que cette nature même m’échappe
et soit inconnaissable comme telle. Ce n’est pas, à proprement parler, que je me sente
perdre ma liberté pour devenir une chose, mais elle est là-bas, hors de ma liberté vécue,
comme un attribut donné de cet être que je suis pour l’autre.26
For Sartre then shame is not simply about becoming an object or a thing
through a loss of freedom but, importantly, also underpins the recognition
that freedom is not an attribute simply of the self or the other but a bond
that ties subjectivities to each other. Shame occurs when the recognition
of this shared human bond is denied. It is this bond that is dissolved in
the moment of ethical rupture. Narrative subjects experience a breakdown
in their previously established code of ethics, their concept of humanity,
their self-understanding and their relationship to others. Shame and the
denial of freedom are experienced as a lack of agency or impotence. As a
result, the narrative subject is drawn into a relationship of complicity with
the perpetrator.27 It has been noted above that in psychoanalysis, repression,
acting-out and working-through are all ways of mediating the traumatic
encounter. Thus the forgetting and remembering of past trauma is repeated
in the present in discourses which bear no apparent relation to the past.
Similarly, the ethical rupture of wartime shame is also repeated and can be
26 Sartre, L’être et le néant, 321.
27 Rothberg points out the dif ficulty of negotiating the question of trauma when it
af fects not only victims but also perpetrators: ‘The dead are not traumatized, they
are dead; trauma implies some “other” mode of living on. On the other hand, being
traumatized does not necessarily imply victim status. As LaCapra has frequently
pointed out, perpetrators of extreme violence can suf fer from trauma – but this
makes them no less guilty of their crimes and does not entail claims to victimization
or even demands on our sympathy’. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 90. I have
italicized this term to emphasize the fact that narrative subjects, who experience
shame but who are also perpetrators, attribute their actions to being the victim of a
previous perpetrator. In these cases, the perpetrator functions as a pre-determining
force governing the present perpetrator’s acts. We will examine how this works in
the proceeding analysis.
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identified in contemporary ethical dilemmas in the narratives. This return
or repeating of the past in the present (and also the repeating of the pre-
occupations of the present in discourses ostensibly about past events) is
excellently summarized by Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory:
‘This project takes dissimilarity for granted, since no two events are ever
alike, and then focuses its energy on what it means to invoke connections
nonetheless’.28 In a similar way, this study invokes connections between the
wartime shame experience of ethical rupture and the ethical conundrums
posed by contemporary events in the narratives. Repetition of the ethi-
cal rupture in the present can lead to an inversion of the wartime shame
encounter. This results in the character perpetuating the cycle of shame
by becoming directly responsible for perpetrating an act of inhumanity.
In Les séquestrés d’Altona, Frantz’s ethical rupture in witnessing the
murder of the rabbi leads him to act out or repeat the moment of shame
and complicity in his decision to torture:
Le rabbin saignait et je découvrais, au cœur de mon impuissance, je ne sais quel
assentiment. […] Quatre bons Allemands m’écraseront contre le sol et mes hommes
à moi saigneront les prisoniers à blanc. Non! Je ne retomberai jamais dans l’abjecte
impuissance.29
The impotence that Frantz experienced in being forced to witness the
murder of the rabbi leads to his direct culpability in ordering torture in
Russia and his desire to assert power by subjugating others: ‘par un canif
et un briquet, je déciderai du règne humain’.30 By re-enacting the shame of
the ethical rupture, Frantz moves from his previous position of shame as a
complicit witness of an inhuman act to become the perpetrator of an act of
shame and inhumanity. His inability to come to terms with these memories
dictates the terms of his self-sequestration. Frantz’s shame is closely bound
to his sense of nationality and to that of his father, who staunchly refuses
to admit to his own wartime complicity:
28 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 18.
29 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 181.
30 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 181.
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Père: – «Nous sommes allemands, donc nous sommes coupables; nous sommes
coupables, parce que nous sommes allemands. Chaque jour à chaque page. Quelle
obsession! [A Frantz] Quatre-vingts millions de criminels: quelle connerie! Au pire,
il y en a eu trois douzaines. Qu’on les pende, et qu’on nous réhabilite: ce sera la fin
d’un cauchemar ».31
The father’s proposed solution ref lects and resonates with the desire to
purify and rehabilitate the French nation through the rough justice and
trials of the Épuration. However, the shame of complicity indicts the entire
national community and cannot be ‘cured’ or neutralized either through
punishment of individuals or forgetting, as observed in previous chapters.
Frantz persistently attempts to distance himself from responsibility for his
ethical failure. He blames those who made him complicit in the murder of
the rabbi for awakening in him a thirst for power and dominance: ‘Après
cet … incident, le pouvoir est devenu ma vocation’.32 Frantz understands
that there is a causal link between the encounter with the rabbi and his use
of torture in Russia. However, he cannot accept responsibility for his own
acts as he still considers himself a victim of the encounter with the rabbi. He
blames the ethical rupture he experienced for his decision to order torture.
In making testimonial tape recordings that will be heard at a tribunal in
the thirtieth century, Frantz imagines that, by this time, there will be no
people; instead crabs will be the arbiters of justice. Frantz appears to prefer
the idea that he will be judged by sub-human crustaceans to the thought
that he could be judged by future human generations: ‘des hommes ne
jugeront pas mon temps. Que seront-ils, après tout? Les fils de nos fils.
Est-ce qu’on permet aux marmots de condamner leurs grands-pères?’33
Ironically, however, Frantz initially blames his father for his fate, ‘je suis
tortionnaire parce que vous êtes dénonciateur’.34 According to his sister,
31 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 62.
32 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 181.
33 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 154.
34 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 179. The father denounces Frantz’s attempt to rescue
the rabbi when he realizes that Frantz and the rabbi had been seen by a Nazi sympa-
thizer, who would have probably denounced Frantz. By extension, this would also
have besmirched the reputation of the father with the Nazis jeopardizing the busi-
ness opportunities and powers they had granted him.
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Leni, Frantz claims: ‘Les innocents avaient vingt ans, c’étaient les soldats;
les coupables en avaient cinquante, c’étaient leurs pères’.35 On an allegorical
level, there is an implicit connection in Sartre’s play between the repeti-
tion of wartime shame in Frantz’s use of torture on the Russian front and
its resonance with the contemporary torture being carried out by French
troops in Algeria suggesting this is linked to the shame and complicity
experienced by France as a result of the defeat and Nazi Occupation.36 In
Les mandarins, the younger generation also struggles with wartime shame
and complicity. Nadine has been traumatized by the French authorities’
deportation of Diégo, her Jewish lover. The ethical rupture caused by this
experience renders her hopeless. She has lost her faith in the shared bonds
of humanity that connect people and has subsequently pursued numer-
ous loveless, sexual relationships. Her resistance to forgetting causes her
to repeatedly avow her incomprehension at the possibility of forgiveness:
‘Moi, je n’admets pas qu’on l’oublie […]. Et je ne comprends pas qu’on
pardonne’.37 Nadine’s more sustained relationship with Lambert, a pho-
tographer working for Henri’s independent left-wing newspaper, is initially
possible because of their shared bond of wartime shame and complicity.
Lambert’s father denounced his son’s Jewish lover, Rosa, who was subse-
quently deported and exterminated. In an argument, Nadine and Lambert
shame each other for betraying their dead lovers:
35 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 64.
36 Rothberg observes how the use of torture in Algeria echoed the acts of inhumanity
committed by the Germans during the Occupation. ‘The practice of torture also
evoked memories of the German occupation of France, both among members of
the leftist resistance and even among some state of ficials. For example, in submitting
his resignation in 1957, the secretary general of the police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen,
a former deportee, wrote that he recognized in Algeria “profound traces … of the
torture that fourteen years ago I personally suf fered in the basements of the Gestapo
in Nancy.”’ Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 193.
37 Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 346.
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– Toi! Toi qui as trahi Diégo avec toute l’armée américaine.
– Tais-toi.
– Tu l’as trahi.
Des larmes du fureur coulaient sur les joues de Nadine. « Je l’ai peut-être trahi
mort. Mais toi tu as permis à ton père de dénoncer Rosa quand elle était vivante. »38
Equally, other characters belonging to the younger generation, Josette,
Vincent and Sézénac, are also hounded and possessed by their inability
to come to terms with the ethical ruptures brought about by the circum-
stances of war. Jan McWeeny suggests that Vincent and Sézénac have less
opportunity to break the cycles of repetition of the past because they
place emphasis on action rather than ref lection.39 Their behaviour patterns
align with the concept of ‘acting out’, discussed in Chapter 3.40 After the
truth emerges that rather than being a resistance hero, Sézénac was a Nazi
informant, Vincent tracks him down and kills him. When Vincent enlists
Henri’s help in getting rid of the body, Henri, although sympathetic to the
obvious trauma conveyed by Vincent’s acts of violence, tries to address and
challenge Vincent’s self-appointed role as an Épuration vigilante by sug-
gesting that he enjoys killing:
Tu te trompes, dit Vincent vivement; je n’aime pas tuer; je ne suis pas un sadique, je
déteste le sang. Il y en avait des types dans le maquis pour qui descendre des miliciens
c’était une partie de plaisir: ils les découpaient en rondelles, avec leurs mitraillettes;
moi j’avais horreur de ça. Je suis un type normal, tu le sais bien.41
Vincent’s observation nuances the postwar ethical divide that separates
‘good resisters’ from ‘bad collaborators’ revealing shame and complicity also
form part of the wartime experiences of resisters and that deep ambiguities
38 Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 356.
39 Jan McWeeny, ‘Love, Theory, and Politics’, The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical
Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Les mandarins’, ed. Sally J. Scholz and Shannon M.
Mussett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 163.
40 See pages 109–111.
41 Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 565.
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marked all motivations during the war and Occupation.42 The repetition
of the ethical rupture is born out in Vincent’s murder of Sézénac. Vincent
bleakly explains to Henri that there is no point in changing his ways as
he believes a third world war is coming that will annihilate the planet.
In L’empreinte de l’ange, Saf fie, Andràs and Raphaël are all unfortunate
heirs to the shame and complicity of war. When Andràs learns of Saf fie’s
father’s involvement in creating the gas used in the camps, he is deeply
disturbed: ‘Chaque fois il pense avoir fait le tour et puis non, il y aura tou-
jours quelqu’un pour venir lui raconter encore un autre drame, un autre
horreur, c’est littéralement inépuisable’.43 The next time they make love he
slaps her face repeatedly. By this action, Andràs figuratively punishes both
the oppressors and those who were complicit with them, himself included:
martyrisant en elle son père sourd et apoplectique, le peuple allemand sourd et apo-
plectique, les SS et les Croix f lèches, la voisine catholique de Buda qu’un jour il a vue
cracher sur sa mere, et surtout, surtout, sa propre lâcheté et sa propre impuissance 44
Andràs expresses shame about his impotence in witnessing the oppression
of Jews and the memory of the racial persecution of his mother, an act for
which he feels complicit in having witnessed it. Saf fie acknowledges her
own complicity by passively accepting Andràs’ punishment. It transpires
that Saf fie’s passive acquiescence to Andràs’s slaps, her unprotesting sexual
subjugation to her husband Raphaël, and to her former French teacher’s
advances emanates from her own ethical rupture: the shame and impo-
tence she experienced as an eight year old when she and her mother were
raped at the fall of Germany by the Russian ‘liberators’. Saf fie’s desperate
attempt to abort her son, after her marriage to Raphaël, appears to convey
her fear that wartime shame and complicity are repeated through the gen-
erations. This act echoes the death of her mother who hanged herself on
42 ‘C’est des salades ces histoires que les tueurs c’est des obsedés sexuels et tout le fourbi;
je ne dis pas que dans la bande il n’y ait pas un ou deux cinglés; mais les plus déchaînés,
c’est de bons pères de famille qui baisent tout leur content et sans histoire’. Beauvoir,
Les mandarins, 565.
43 Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange, 181.
44 Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange, 183.
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discovering she was pregnant by the Russian soldiers. Andràs observes the
repetition of France’s wartime shame in the country’s warmongering since
the Occupation:
C’est pas fini la guerre! Crie Andràs. Entre 1940 at 1944 la France se laisse enculer
par l’Allemagne, elle a honte alors en 1946 elle commence la guerre à l’Indochine.
En 1954 elle la perd, les Viets, l’enculent, elle a honte alors trois mois après elle com-
mence la guerre à l’Algérie.45
He suggests that France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria following
the Second World War demonstrate a political desire to subordinate and
oppress other nations, which is an inverted repetition of the shame expe-
rienced by the French nation as a consequence of their sense of impotence
as a result of the defeat, invasion and Occupation by the Nazis.
Remembering
However, the ethical rupture can produce a dif ferent outcome. By remem-
bering, that is by mobilizing the shame of wartime impotence when con-
fronted with contemporary ethical crises, the subject can begin to identify
and work through the compulsive repetitions of the syndrome. The stimu-
lation of these memories highlights both the similarities and dif ferences
between past and present and the possibility of breaking the cycle of past
shame by exercising freedom and responsibility for one’s actions in the
present. In a similar vein, speaking of Marc Bloch’s contribution to histori-
cal understanding, Rousso argues that Bloch’s original insight was to show
that analysis of the present enables understanding of the past:
Cette conception du métier ressortit, à mon sens, à une pensée libératrice, car elle
refuse l’idée selon laquelle les hommes ou les sociétés seraient conditionnés, determi-
nés par leur passé sans qu’ils puissent y échapper. En s’interrogeant sur l’Histoire, les
45 Huston, L’empreinte de l’ange, 112.
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hommes tentent au contraire de confronter leur propre expérience avec l’expérience
de ceux qui les ont précédés, en un échange qui reste libre, ouvert et indéterminé.46
The recognition of the dif ference of the present by remembering the past
(rather than compulsively repeating it) opens up an encounter with free-
dom. This type of active remembering is described by Søren Kierkegaard
as ‘repetition’: ‘The dialectic of repetition is easy, because that which is
repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated; but precisely this,
that it has been, makes repetition something new’. It is quite the opposite
of the compulsive backwards-looking repetition of repressed memory
described by Freud.47 Another way of thinking about this way of remem-
bering, which creates a hiatus for ref lection on the dif ferences between
the present and the past, is described by the crystalized potentiality of the
Benjaminian ‘monad’.48 It is also observable in the movement that Badiou
terms an ‘ethic of truths’:
Ce n’est qu’en déclarant vouloir ce que le conservatisme décrète impossible, et en
af firmant les vérités contre le désir de néant, qu’on s’arrache au nihilisme. La possibi-
lité de l’impossible, que toute rencontre amoureuse, toute re-fondation scientifique,
46 Rousso, La hantise du passé, 54.
47 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Repetition’ in Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans.
M.G. Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19.
48 ‘Thinking involves not only the f low of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where
thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that
configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist
approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this struc-
ture he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put dif ferently,
a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of
it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history – blast-
ing a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of
this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled*;
in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing
fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed’.
*The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to
cancel. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 254.
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toute invention artistique et toute séquence de la politique d’émancipation mettent
sous nos yeux, est l’unique principe – contre l’éthique du bien-vivre dont le contenu
réel est de décider la mort – d’une éthique des vérités.49
In Les séquestrés d’Altona, when Frantz and the father are reunited after
thirteen years of separation, through their discussions of the past, they
are finally able to recognize their complicity in events. However, they are
unable to recgonize the possibility for change and freedom in the present:
Frantz: – Deux criminels: l’un condamne l’autre au nom de principes qu’ils ont
tous deux violés: comment appelez-vous cette farce?
Le Père: – (tranquille et neutre) La Justice.50
In exchange for forgiveness, the father claims responsibility for creating a
monster in his son by arguing that he had groomed Frantz for the impotence
that led to his decision to torture because he had been an over-controlling
father.
Je t’avais donné tous les mérites et mon âpre goût du pouvoir, cela n’a pas servi. Quel
dommage! Pour agir tu prenais les plus gros risques et, tu vois, elle transformait en
gestes tous tes actes. Ton tourment a fini par te pousser au crime et jusque dans le
crime elle t’annule: elle s’engraisse de ta défaite.
Although he wants to accept full responsibility for Frantz’s act: ‘Dis à
ton tribunal de Crabes que je suis le seul coupable – et de tout’, it is quite
clear that the father is himself deprived of agency.51 The father’s business
is the largest of its kind in Germany. He wanted to hand this down to his
son. However, the business is now a self-managing infrastructure, thus the
father is now only a figurehead with no real power.52 Neither in Frantz’s
admission of guilt nor the father’s attempt to claim responsibilty for the
49 Alain Badiou, L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (Caen: Nous, 2003), 59.
50 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 178.
51 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 176.
52 ‘Je voulais que tu mènes l’Entreprise après moi. C’est elle qui mène. Elle choisit ses
hommes. Moi, elle m’a éliminé: je possède mais je ne commande plus’. Sartre, Les
séquestrés d’Altona, 188.
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past is there any hope of truly breaking with the repetition of the past by
authentically remembering. The father is entangled in a web of impotence
that leads him to blame his business and changing times for his feeling of
failure. Frantz feels remorse but this allows him to wallow in self-pity and
self-loathing and to paint the war as an era of evil and ethical dissolution
which predetermined all acts as evil:
Le Mal, Messieurs les Magistrats, Le Mal, c’était l’unique matériau. On le travaillait
dans nos raf fineries. Le Bien, c’était le produit fini. Résultat: le Bien tournait Mal.
Et n’allez pas croire que le Mal tournait bien. 53
For Frantz and his father, the solution to their shame and complicity is
suicide. Redfern points out that although Sartre insisted that: ‘the audi-
ence should be persuaded that change is possible […] little change seems
available to the protagonists of Les séquestrés d’Altona’.54 It is true that the
ending is bleak. However, after Frantz and the father have left for their
suicide drive, Leni plays the tape recording of Frantz’s final testimony to
the Court of Crabs. His words contain a revolutionary ethical encounter:
le siècle eût été bon si l’homme n’eût été guetté par son ennemi cruel, immémorial,
par l’espèce carnassière qui avait juré sa perte, par la bête sans poil et maligne, par
l’homme. Un et un font un, voilà notre mystère. La bête se cachait, nous surprenions
son regard, tout à coup, dans les yeux intimes de nos prochains; alors nous frappions:
légitime défense préventive. J’ai surpris la bête et j’ai frappé, un homme est tombé,
dans ses yeux mourants j’ai vu la bête, toujours vivante, moi. Un et un font un: quel
malentendu!55
Frantz has not been able to take responsibility for his own ethical rupture.
Yet the audience to whom the recording speaks has this possibility. Like
Frantz, they cannot undo their shame and sense of complicity about the
events of the Occupation but they can make a dif ferent ethical stand in
the present by refusing to condone the brutality of the French campaign in
53 Sartre, Les séquestrés d’Altona, 102.
54 Redfern, Sartre: Huis clos and Les séquestrés d’Altona, 72.
55 Redfern, Sartre: Huis clos and Les séquestrés d’Altona, 193.
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Algeria. ‘In “la bête humaine” are two unblinkable realities: the beast and
humankind, the human beast’, Redfern succinctly explains.56 In the eyes
of the beast, Frantz seizes on both the alienation of the human condition
and the indivisibility of humanity both of which are experienced in the
ethical rupture of shame. Rather than repeating the shame of the past, the
words ‘un et un font un’ suggest that beyond the irrevocable breakdown of
the wartime ethical rupture there will be further ethical encounters. These
will give subjects the opportunity to ‘remember’ that each occasion of fers
the possibility of taking responsibility for their actions in the present and
recognizing their freedom from the shame of the past.
Writing of Les mandarins in La force des choses, Beauvoir attests that
Henri and Robert both experience a Kierkegaardian repetition through
the course of the narrative:
Un des principaux themes qui se dégage de mon récit, c’est celui de la répétition, au
sens que Kierkegaard donne à ce mot: pour posséder vraiment un bien, il faut l’avoir
perdu et retrouvé. Au terme du roman, Henri et Dubreuilh […] retournent à leur
point de départ […] Désormais au lieu de se bercer d’un optimisme facile ils assument
les dif ficultés, les échecs, le scandale, qu’implique toute enterprise. A l’enthousiasme
des adhésions se substitute pour eux l’austérité des préférences.57
In similarity to the way that Frantz retrospectively evaluates and finally
recognizes his wartime acts as crimes, in Les mandarins, Henri and Robert
slowly realize that their wartime experiences have put paid to the possibil-
ity of a transcendent moral code:
Henri and Dubreuilh have become aware that political commitment cannot consist
of applying blueprints but involves engaging politics on a case-by-case basis and with
more modest goals; and they are aware that it requires that we approach issues not
from some point outside reality but from the inside.58
56 Redfern, Sartre: Huis clos and Les séquestrés d’Altona, 78.
57 Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 289–90.
58 Karen Vintges, ‘The Return of Commitment’, in The Contradictions of Freedom:
Philosophical Essays on Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The mandarins’, ed. Sally J. Scholz and
Shannon M. Mussett (Albany: State University of New York Press 2005), 111.
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