The Entangled Stories of October 17, Vichy, the Jews, and the Holocaust

In a significant number of works about October 17, roles for Jews, the Vichy regime, and the Holocaust are articulated or imagined, pointing up networks of association that may be historical, apocryphal, real, or romanced. Chapter 6 takes up the question of whether Vichy and October 17 can or should be compared. Beginning a discussion of scholarship that has engaged this question, and with reflections on how Henry Rousso’s “Vichy syndrome” can be mapped onto the October 17 context, this chapter identifies a comparative discourse present in materials collected in the polices archives. After a survey of archival contents and a longer analysis of one particular case, the chapter turns its attention to the anarchive, not to unravel, but rather to observe the cultural entanglements of October 17, Vichy, Jews, and the Holocaust. In analysing works of theatre, film, novels, and young adult literature, chapter 6 speculates about why representations of a massacre of Algerians remain yoked to images and tropes of WWII, while also investigating how such representations function within their discrete literary worlds, and how we might speculate about the payoffs and pitfalls of such entanglements.