Violence and War in Culture and the Media

3    Patrick Pécherot, eugenics andthe Occupation of France

Angela Kimyongür

Introduction

The late 1960s and early 1970s in France marked the beginning of a period of sustained re-examination of the ‘années noires’, the dark years of the German occupation of France during the Second World War. The Liberation of Paris in August 1944 from four years of foreign occupation was not the straightforward occasion for joy and celebration that might have been expected. Rather, the Liberation was a time when continuing divisions in French society which had, to a certain extent, been camouflaged during the Occupation, were exposed anew and risked plunging the country into civil war. The post-war emergence of a reassuring myth of a France unified in its ...