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.

“How Lucky Were the Blond Kabyles”

Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself, the way it was documented in police archives, and the anarchive. When read for its representations of race and racism, the anarchive produces a transhistorical discourse that is as instructive in its moments of ambivalence as it is in its most pointed critiques. The chapter begins with a discussion of the difficulties of talking about race in a French context, and then goes on to excavate discourses of race and racism as they have been produced, implicitly or explicitly, in over 50 years’ worth of cultural productions, ranging from documentary and feature film to historical and graphic novels. In each section, cultural productions are read against their specific micro-historical context, conditions of publication or production, and other epiphenomena. At stake in reading race in the anarchive is a process of “race-ing” October 17, that is, of understanding the repression as not simply an inevitable skirmish in a war for independence, but as the fallout of a colonial ideology invested, tacitly but profoundly, in a racialized worldview.

Epilogue

The epilogue reflects on the ways in which the October 17 massacre continues to be rendered invisible in public discourse, while also acknowledging key evolutions in the representation of knowledge about the event. Deliberately open-ended, this final chapter of the book also considers the fate of the anarchive, particularly with respect to the now-declassified police archives, to changing attitudes about national memory, and to the demands of the digital world.

The Seine’s Exceptional Bodies

Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic Parisian river as a mass burial site remains one of the most gruesome aspects of the massacre. While not all of the dead on October 17 fell victim to the river, it is nonetheless true that the Seine has come to occupy significant symbolic territory in the realm of representation, to a degree that perhaps surpasses the representation of analogous “killing fields” or “technologies” of destruction in other episodes of state violence. The anarchive is replete with images of the Seine and of the experience of what Sidi Mohammed Barakat calls “exceptional bodies,” all of which participate in an implicit project of re-signifying the river. In exploring representations of the Seine in novels, documentary and fiction film, and visual art, this chapter makes visible a poetic and political discourse about the nature of the violence on October 17. It also explores how culture has dealt with the weighty implications of a state hiding evidence of its crimes in a site so geographically, affectively, and symbolically central. Alongside cultural productions, this chapter engages archival material from the files of the Parisian police and the history of the Seine.

Archive Stories

Chapter 2 brings together several strands of analysis which, together, produce an argument about both official archives and the representation of archives or archival material in works of fiction. Beginning with a narrative about the Parisian police archives on October 17, this chapter charts the archives’ slow road to declassification and the various obstacles that have led to the persistent belief that the machinations of the French state make it impossible to ever fully know their contents. The second section operates in two modes: ethnographically, detailing the author’s own experience of consulting the freshly declassified police archives, and hermeneutically, that is, in the manner of literary critic, offering typological assessments and interpretations of the archival material itself. The final sections of this chapter connect the archive to the anarchive, demonstrating that the latter stages its own archive stories—narratives about the provenance of the archive, its history, and its effect on its user—by foregrounding the subjective experience of characters (researchers, detective, scholars, reporters) who work in, against, or in the absence of archives.

Excavating the Anarchive

Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and thematises the contents of the anarchive—the cultural productions that have represented, directly or obliquely, the stories of October 17. While anarchive is presented in 3 “waves”--the original scene (1961-1963); the return to the scene (1983-1999); and the post-Papon anarchive (1999-)—the chapter nonetheless seeks to tease out the limits of periodization, calling attention to continuities over time. Chapter 1 also looks at trends and problems within the anarchive, investigating, in particular: the “turn,” in the 3rd wave, to visual representation and performance; debates about demands for historical accuracy and truth in fiction; and the anarchive’s relationship to scholarship on cultural production and memory. This analysis is also infused with a concern for epi-phenomenal and meta-textual matters, how issues of circulation, translation, marketing, authorial status, genre, and medium bear upon interpretation.

Non-lieux de mémoire

This chapter explores the intersection of spatial practices, the representation of urban space, and the way both of these interact with the visibility of October 17 and its inscriptions (or lack thereof) on the city. Beginning in the contemporary moment with a discussion of current polices and politics of the representation of October 17 in the Parisian memorialscape, the chapter then returns to October 1961 to explore the spatial politics of the demonstration and its representation, teasing out a cartographic impulse that connects up with both earlier colonial technologies of mapping and representation, and that emerges, later, as a trope in the anarchive (notably in documentary film). Finally, chapter 3 explores the ways the anarchive has represented October 17 and the space of Paris through revisionist cartography, pop- or counter-cultural subversive tactics such as graffiti, and rogue spatial practices.

Introduction

The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massacre, situating it within the context of the Algerian War for Independence and the French imperial project more generally. It is invested in tracing the evolution of the massacre’s representation in political, popular, and scholarly discourse, and in exploring the ways in which the massacre has been rendered both visible and invisible. Comparisons with Vichy (briefly) and with another episode of state violence (the 1962 police murder of protesters at the Charonne subway station) help to contextualize October 17’s ambivalent status in the French national narrative. Arguing that October 17 should be read as a signal event whose putative invisibility has been both metaphorical and a result of historical conjuncture, the introduction also lays out the book’s critical commitments, surveys the landscape of existing scholarship, and establishes the concept of the anarchive.