'Tetanus of the Imagination'?: The Presence of Vichy France in the Algerian War of Decolonization, 1954-1962

In recent years, scholars in the fields of French Studies and Memory Studies, as well as historians, have all paid increasing attention to the connections between the experiences of Vichy France and the Algerian war of decolonisation. This paper aims to contribute to this burgeoning field in making two contentions. First, that in large part this scholarship has been limited to intellectuals and cultural production, and requires broadening out to compare how other actors imagined this past in the present: combatants, politicians, religious and political activists, “ordinary people”, and foreign observers. Second, I argue that more work needs to be done in discerning the modes and forms in which this absent past was made present in what has come to be thought of as the quintessential event of European decolonisation. To this end, the paper examines the value of approaches such as “multidirectional memory” and “knots of memory”, Albert Camus's call for an imaginative approach to history through what he termed “the eyes of the body”, Walter Benjamin's concept of a constellation, Primo Levi's notion of the crystallisation of (traumatic) memory, and Simone de Beauvoir's charge – addressed to the French public during the Algerian war with reference to the experience of Nazism – of a “tetanus of the imagination.” The paper presents a comparative analysis of the motifs that characterised manifestations of imagination of France's Vichy past during the Algerian conflict: trauma, of course, but also haunting, debt, disorientation, tragedy, freedom, the cohabitation of presence and absence in imagination, reconfigured perceptions of temporality, fidelity, the relationship between justice and violence, and the meaning of the concept of a generation in post-war France.