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The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France. By Henry Rousso. Translated by Ralph Schoolcraft. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. xxii, 96 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8122-8645-9.
The Haunting Past is a brief but richly textured treatment of the role of the historian in dealing with information about contemporary political and legal matters. Originally published as La hantise du passe: Entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1998), the book consists of three interviews conducted by Petit, an independent Parisian journalist, with Henry Rousso, director of the Institut d'histoire du temps present, author of The Vichy Syndrome (1987), and coauthor with Eric Conan of Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (1994).
Rousso's book is one of several recent publications that focus on shifting perceptions of past events and how they are commemorated. (What really happened? It depends on who is remembering.) Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory (Columbia University Press, 1996-98) and Daniel Sherman's The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (University of Chicago Press, 1999) come to mind, along with Avner Ben-Amos's Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789-1996 (Oxford University Press, 2000). While Rousso also discusses the issues of memory, commemoration, and historical writing, he is mainly concerned with the role of the historian as participant in legal controversies such as the trials of those accused of collaboration during the occupation of France during World War II. Rousso defends in a convincing manner his premise that historians should serve "truth" rather than any particular cause, even one in which they might wholeheartedly believe.
As France began reluctantly to examine...