From <i>Meurtres pour mémoire</i> to <i>Missak</i>: Literature and historiography in dialogue

November 1943. Following a series of highly visible attacks in Paris, committed by the Communist, 'immigrant' Resistance group of Missak Manouchian, 2 the Brigades spéciales (special Brigades) of the French police finally pounce on the perpetrators, and arrest follows arrest. At the end of a very brief trial a few months later, twenty-three members of the combat unit, including Manouchian himself, are condemned to death. The twenty-two men are immediately shot at Mont Valérien, on 21 February 1944 (the one woman, Olga Bancic, is executed separately, beheaded in Stuttgart on 10 May). More or less simultaneously, the photos of ten of these freedom fighters are displayed on the infamous Affiches rouges (red posters), which are plastered over the walls of French towns and cities, and which denounce 'l'Armée du crime' (the Army of crime), most obviously composed of people with names of foreign, if not Jewish, origin. Shortly afterwards, the Liberation of France, for which these combatants willingly gave their lives, commenced. That is by no means the end of their story, however. Throughout the postwar period, the group regularly comes back into the headlines, forming, as Margaret Atack has noted, 'an important focal point for remembrance and controversy' (2013: 175). 3 For example, in 1955, in honour of the group, and to mark the inauguration of a rue du Groupe Manouchian in Paris, Louis Aragon writes the poem which will first appear in L'Humanité on 5 March 1955, entitled 'Groupe Manouchain', and then in his collection, Le Roman inachevé, as 'Strophes pour se souvenir' (1956: 225-26). Having been put to music, these 'strophes' reappear in

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Conflicting histories and histories of conflict

Gleeson

2022

Journal of Romance Studies

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This article focuses on French author Didier Daeninckx’s 1986 crime novel Le Bourreau et son double [‘The Hangman and His Double’]. Daeninckx’s novel challenged official narratives that minimized the use of torture during the Algerian War and highlighted the brutalization of conscripted soldiers, the conflict’s hidden victims. Firstly, this article investigates Daeninckx’s use of what Max Silverman (2013) terms palimpsestic memory to highlight the interconnections between France’s process of decolonization throughout the 1960s, and 1980s France, which saw a rise in urban poverty and racism and a severe decline in left-leaning politics. Secondly, palimpsestic memory is closely associated with intertextuality and this article examines Daeninckx’s allusions to Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) [W, or the Memory of Childhood (1988)], which shares a similar structure and the themes of haunting and repressed memories with Le Bourreau et son double. Finally, the article emphasizes the value of popular culture, such as crime fiction, in the remembrance of hidden conflicts.

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From Meurtres pour mémoire to Missak: Literature and historiography in dialogue

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Creating Places to Inhabit: “In-between” Self-Expression in France

Creating Places to Inhabit: “In-between” Self-Expression in France

An Ever-Present Past: Didier Daeninckx and the Manouchian Resistance Group

Conflicting histories and histories of conflict

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