Americans, still haunted by their Civil War of a century and a half ago, should not be surprised that the French bear an even fresher wound from the defeat of 1940 and their conflicting responses to German occupation. Richard J. Golsan’s books have been wise guides to the unending replay of these pains in French politics and culture, and The Vichy Past in France Today carries his work forward into the twenty-first century with his customary thoughtful care.

- Robert O. Paxton, Columbia University,

Richard J. Golsan analyzes the ways Vichy France is repeatedly reconfigured, suffusing contemporary French culture. As a damning metaphor and a polemical tool, it is increasingly distant from the past as conceived by historians of the period. In The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory, Golsan lucidly explains why so many of those who now remember the Vichy past in France appear doomed to repeat that memory as farce.

- Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

Richard J. Golsan, one of the best North American connoisseurs of French culture and politics, has written a new, brilliant, and thought-provoking book. Breaking a kind of a consensus, he argues that France is still coping with the legacy of the Dark Years. From 1990 to 2000, public debates have largely focused on French accountability in the Holocaust, the need to provide accurate historical narratives, and moral issues to be learned from the Vichy past. On the contrary, in the last decade, controversies seem to go backwards and carry on multiple forms of revisionist and distorted interpretations of the past. These are consequences of a lingering feeling of decline, of the extreme right's growing impact, and of deeper political divisions. Whether one follows or not his rather pessimistic views, Golsan reopens the discussion on the French ‘hot topic’ par excellence.

- Henry Rousso, Institute for Contemporary History, French National Center for Scientific Research,