Cinematic Portraits of Evil: Christian de Chalonge’s Docteur Peti ...

unmistakable visual parallel between de Gaulle and Pétain) and Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle, 1974) in its portrayal of collaboration. The French translation of Robert Paxton's Vichy France in 1972 also demanded a reassessment of national history. In their diverse ways, these films all played an important role in ushering in a new period in France's troubled relationship with its wartime past.

By 1980, which marked the beginning of the Mitterrand presidency, the repression and re-evaluation of the Occupation ‘noires’ had seemingly turned into a national obsession. ⁸ Every month, a new revelation about the period of Occupation would emerge from beneath the crumbling façades of the Gaullist myth and would in turn dominate the news agenda in France. In 1985 Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, which had taken eleven years to create, was finally released. The first six years comprised the acquisition and recording of Holocaust testimony in fourteen different countries; the next five years were spent editing the film from 350 hours of footage into the ten-hour result, a profound and harrowing exhibition of intense personal agony, the meticulous logistics of genocide and the intricate details and truths of the extermination process through the terrorising display of horrific sites and testimonies. As Guy Austin states, the film stood as ‘an agonised description of the indescribable’. ⁹

It was the trials of Klaus Barbie (1987), Paul Touvier (1994) and Maurice Papon (1997), and the attempted extradition of Aloïs Brunner from Syria to face trial for crimes against humanity in France (1999), that served to give the Occupation a continued high media profile into the next decade and thereby centralised French complicity in the Holocaust within mainstream political debate. The Papon trial aroused notable debate and dominated the media, revealing the true extent to which the Vichy period remains ‘a site for contesting discourses on French