After punishing thousands of people who collaborated with the German-backed Vichy regime in World War II, the French in the 1950s and 1960s sought to forget about the Vichy past. Although many people guilty of heinous crimes remained at large, the trials of Vichyite collaborators were routinely halted under pressure from powerful state officials with compromising pasts of their own. Prior to the 1990s, no French president had officially acknowledged the role played by the French state in the commission of crimes against humanity during the war. Rather, to foster a badly needed sense of national unity, most French parties, especially the Gaullists, cultivated the myth that nearly everyone had belonged to the French Resistance.

As time passed and the Fifth Republic acquired stability, France became more willing to reexamine critically the Vichy legacy. Path-breaking research beginning in the 1970s exploded the myth of near universal participation in the Resistance and proved beyond doubt the willingness of Vichy leaders to collaborate with Nazi Germany. The French soon began revisiting the Vichy years in a growing flow of books, documentaries, and films, most of which confirmed the new research. In 1995 President Jacques Chirac publicly acknowledged the role of the French people and government in abetting crimes under German occupation. Two years later French Catholic bishops apologized for the church’s failure to resist the deportation and murder of Jews more vigorously, and the leaders of the French police union apologized for police participation in the roundup of Jews.