‘Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right

“They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.”26

seeing that a defeat would run the risk of destroying, for an indefinite period, everything which lends value to human life in our eyes, it is obvious that we must struggle by every means which seems to us to have some chance of proving effective.

Ces bucoliques avis, pourtant, ne sont pas exclusivement choses d’aujourd’hui. Toute une littérature de renoncement, bien avant la guerre, nous les avait rendus déjà familiers. Elle stigmatisait l’« américanisme ». Elle dénonçait les dangers de la machine et du progrès. Elle vantait, par contraste, la paisible douceur de nos campagnes, la gentilles

“We must keep from falling into inertia, believing that the liberation will be carried out by others. Each of us must know that one day it will be his duty to take part in it, and hold himself in readiness . . . We must think of the precious things we allowed to be lost because we did not know how to appreciate them, things that we have to regain a

On peut difficilement se débarrasser en quelques semaines de trente à quarante années de foi intime dans le monde. Ancrés dans notre vision du droit, nous croyions à l’existence d’une conscience morale allemande, européenne, universelle, et nous étions convaincus qu’il y avait un certain degré d’inhumanité qui s’éliminait une fois pour toutes devan

The lesson of the Holocaust was that in the face of overwhelming concentration of power, acts of self-sacrifice and spiritual demonstration had little or no effect on the murderers. Classic moral traditions—martyrdom in Judaism, satyagraha in Hinduism, the cross and turning the other cheek in Christianity—were shattered in the Holocaust. Nor did th