This paper utilises Pierre Nora's term lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to situate two Parisian geographical sites – the former internment camp at Drancy and the memorial at the site of the former Vel d'Hiv – within the wider realm of memory studies. By using these sites as case studies to explore the relationship between 'memory' and 'memorials', this paper demonstrates how a 'distorted' version of history can become a collective memory, which grows to shape the identity of a nation.
With reference to developments in memory discourse by Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, this paper will argue that a focus on the notion of 'how' rather than 'what' we remember brings to the fore the fluid dichotomy between remembering and forgetting, in turn exposing the memory processes involved in commemoration and facilitating comparison between the ways individuals and collective groups remember. Drawing on Berel Lang's theories of representation and James Young's research into Holocaust memorials and their meanings, this paper explores the subjectivity inherent in the memory documentation process to demonstrate how, being subject to both the individual or collective group tasked with their creation as well as the societal and political situation at the time, monuments and memorials can only ever portray a selective 'version' of past events.
This paper therefore endeavours to analyse the extent to which these two Parisian sites of memory contribute to Holocaust commemoration today. Benefitting from in-depth research into the silence that shrouded French responsibility in the Holocaust – drawing on Henry Rousso's Le Syndrome de Vichy – this paper argues that the physical memorials in the capital suffer from the scars of the past. Although the construction of memorials would initially be viewed as a means to cement history into the landscape in order to always remember, exploration of the agents and motives behind their erection calls into question their commemorative role. Aware that the history of the Jewish victims was not willingly endorsed by the French State and, rather than working through the past, the country adopted what Assmann terms, 'a policy of forgetting', their very construction bears testament to the deliberate desire of the collective to overwrite the past: this paper argues how the power of the French 'master' narrative to exclude the 'individual' traumatic memories of the Jewish people is reflected in the controversial and belated inauguration of these two sites of memory.
By calling on both Nora and Young's research into a memorial's ability to displace memories it ought to embody, this paper explores the overarching absence of active commemoration for the Holocaust today. Rather than encouraging individual remembrance, this paper argues that post-war French society deposited its devoir de mémoire into concrete, consequently removing the need to confront the truths of the past. In so doing, the dominance of the French Gaullist myth of resistance had the power to not only dictate the collective historical narrative, but to direct the culture of remembrance in France today.
