H-France Review by Douglas Porch, Naval Postgraduate School

Abstract

The Great War centenary has prodded a hornet’s nest of controversy, not least in France where le suicide d’Europe will be fêted in tandem with the seventieth anniversary of D-Day and the Liberation of France. This confusion mémorielle is in fact a reprise of 1964 when de Gaulle short-circuited the fiftieth anniversary of an event of conflicted memory and pain with the panthéonisation of Jean Moulin as the centerpiece of a narrative of liberation from the dead hand of a Great War generation symbolized by Philippe Pétain and national rebirth under Free France.