The French are perfectionists – mainly about themselves. They carry self-criticism to extremes but anyone who attempts to criticise them will suffer from their refusal to accept that they can be perceived as imperfect. I have spent many years living in Paris and can tell you that on TV the most popular programmes are those that depict the Resistance in their heroic fight against the Nazis. However, anything as shameful as French collaboration with the Nazis or French involvement with antisemitism is unpopular.
France endured much in World War Two and indeed there were many heroes. Yes, de Gaulle was also a hero. But he is the mask that fits over the face of an earlier history, of those who refused to understand and listen to warnings so that when it came to war, France was unprepared. As was Britain, thanks to Chamberlain's pacifist policies and his failure to understand Hitler's intentions.
When Germany invaded Eastern France and battles began, Francois St Exupery, a hero of French legend, then flying with fighter squadrons against German air attacks, wrote: "We were throwing a glass of water on a forest fire." France had no chance. De Gaulle fled. The failure to arm was not only that of France. Britain also failed to arm under Chamberlain. Only that strip of water, the English Channel helped buy time.
One February, I stayed in a friend's Normandy farmhouse and walked daily among tiny hamlets scattered throughout the nearby farmland. In that dismal winter countryside, each hamlet had its tragic war memorial where long lists of World War One casualties told the story of a France that had lost its young manhood in the trenches of that Great War. When World War Two threatened, there had to be an avoidance of repetition. The French, with Germans already rolling their tanks towards Paris, bought time by compromise. There would not be war on French soil. French manhood would not die fighting the invaders.
The Vichy regime was a typically French compromise. To avoid war, the destruction of historic Paris, the loss of young manhood, a compromise had to be made. The Vichy Regime preserved for the moment the illusion that there was a France still in control of its own destiny. That suited the German occupiers perfectly.
This denial suits the French perfectionist mentality
Atrocities could be perpetrated under the guise of being lawful enactments by the French government. Officials in French uniforms knocked on doors of Jewish houses. French officials did Nazi dirty work of loading Jews into trains, and German perfectionism, an even more potent weapon than that of French perfectionism, preserved the Nazi self image of a purifying and perfecting force.
Now that history, and the concept of historic guilt, is being revised by French writer Eric Zemmour whose latest book - one of the country's biggest sellers - is a novel that whitewashes the Vichy regime's evil. In a climate where anti-semitism is rife again and openly so at bourgeois dinner parties, that historic dirty work is presented as not being so dirty, nor so French. And it suits French perfectionist mentality. It is a strain that runs through French society, that denial of anything that besmirches the notion of French civilisation. Exquisite clothes, food and architecture, gracious manners, mistresses hidden under the correct choreography of la famille, that is part of French civilisation, and it is indeed beautiful. But as Carl Jung described in his works on the human psyche, the more one pretends that all is perfect, the more the dark forces of the psyche accumulate below ground and the more likely they are to burst forth in violent expression of hideous barbarity.
A French bestseller that rewrites the Vichy regime is not only a distortion of history but a warning of historical repetition. The Thirties brought just such a violent expression of repressed dark forces of the Collective Unconscious, and conditions are building to be just right for a repetition. While liberal organs such as Le Monde find his views unacceptable, Zemour's denials of French antisemitic crimes and their enthusiastic response by the French public may be the warning of danger around the corner.