428
PARTISAN REVIEW
established itself in
I
94
5 as a means of legitimizing the
nouveau regime
by a systematic and organized transformation of recent historic events.
On the one side, there was Gaullist France, which since June
I8, I940
had been the sole incarnation of France-all of France-legislatively
and politically voiding all that had transpired there. On the other side,
there was the Communist Party, which was the party of the executed,
resisting the advance of Nazism from the very first moments-so the
line went-as if the Party were not merely resisting in the wake of
Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, as if the German-Soviet Pact of
August
I939
had not contributed to France's defeat. This is a complex
double myth whose two halves were wedded to one another, to buttress
the legitimacy of the New Republic.
To take another, particularly sensitive example: would the great
European powers have accepted the creation of the State of Israel in
I948
had they not realized (though late) the extent of the tragedy of the
Shoah? There is no taboo against advancing the notion, painful and
shocking as it may be, that the collective management of the memory of
the Shoah in Israel-the national minute of silence, the pilgrimages to
Yad Vashem-functioned to legitimate morally Israel's existence. The
survival of the Jewish people in a national form became, after Hitler's
will to eliminate it, a moral imperative serving to justify a special polit–
ical project.
The group known as the Harkis is another victim of political man–
agement of memory: victims of a veritable historical trap whose very
existence was denied by two national memories. Gaullist France of the
Fifth Republic repressed its consciousness of the entire colonial project,
in particular the "Dirty War" which should have never been fought, in
order that France would be free to exercise her sovereignty in the inter–
national order as the sole entity worthy of her own glory-and of de
Gaulle's. The FLN, for its part, established the legitimacy of the new
independent Algeria by comparing the war waged from
I954
to
I962
with the resistance of the French people to Nazi oppression-and
indeed with that of all peoples struggling for their independence in the
face of imperial powers. The Harkis, living witnesses to the colonial war
in French eyes and traitors to the Algerians, were condemned by the
construction of two national memories. Some were massacred in Alge–
ria without any intervention from the French Army still there, while the
survivors, shipped to the other side of the Mediterranean often in con–
travention of orders, were received in France with hostility-a legacy
whose social and moral consequences some of their children and grand–
children still endure.
