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

National Identity’. ¹⁰ The film Hôtel Terminus by Marcel Ophüls was filmed in 1987 at the same time as Klaus Barbie was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. The eventual trial was filmed. Known as ‘Le Boucher de Lyon’, Klaus Barbie had been sent there in 1942 to become head of the local Gestapo. He personally tortured prisoners and is blamed for the deaths of 4,000 people. He is known also for the arrest and torture of Jean Moulin, one of the highest-ranking members of the French Resistance. Louis Malle's Au revoir les Enfants, with its tragic end marked by the death camps, was made in the same year and proved to be a worldwide success.

The ongoing process of revelation and progressive disclosure, which voiced itself largely through film and literature, intensified during the 1990s with the fiftieth anniversary of the years of Occupation and various appeals for specific events to be commemorated. Likewise, another key development was that which Rousso terms ‘la mémoire juive’, a specifically Jewish cultural identity. Demands were made that the crimes committed against Jews resident in France during the war be recognised and commemorated appropriately. Organisations such as the ‘Association des déportés de France’ or ‘Les Fils et Filles des déportés juifs de France’ played an important role in the establishment and development of new memorial sites. One of the most intense of these sites related to the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary in 1992 of the mass arrests of Vél d'hiv, with some groups calling for a public apology from the French president for crimes committed in the name of the French state. As a result of these debates and occasional public protests, the mid 1990s was a period rich in memorial activity, with presidential political speeches delivered and the institution of a national day of commemoration and the accelerated creation of memorial sites. Unlike his predecessors who had absolved France from responsibility, claiming that