A continuing preoccupation with the Occupation
In addition to a number of commemorative and traditional events and a steady stream of new publications, references and allusions to the period of the Occupation appear to have increased over the last few years. One basic reason, sometimes supported by evidence, is that after seventy years there is a danger that those years and their traumatic events will gradually be forgotten or remembered incorrectly. It may also be, however, that they are being recalled to help assuage a collective sense of guilt, or in some cases used more consciously for political and socio-political purposes with the result that they feed deep-rooted and sometimes unrealised prejudices with direct consequences for contemporary society. After rapidly rehearsing the ways in which the Occupation has hitherto been assessed, the article focuses precisely on some of this apparent modern development.1
Le cas Bernard Faÿ : du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale
Bernard Fay n'est plus guere connu aujourd'hui que pour son role dans la repression de la franc-maconnerie sous le regime de Vichy. Son action a la tete de la Bibliotheque nationale de 1940 a 1944 lui valut les travaux forces a la Liberation.
Intrigue par le destin de cet intellectuel passe de Proust a Petain et de l'avant-garde a la collaboration, Antoine Compagnon, dont Bernard Fay fut un lointain predecesseur a l'universite Columbia de New York, puis a Paris, au College de France, renouvelle en profondeur une enquete entamee par les historiens. Car l'homme demeurait tres mysterieux.
Quels demons ont pu pousser cet americaniste eclaire, ouvert au monde moderne, familier de Gide, Cocteau, Crevel et Picasso, intime de Gertrude Stein, aux engagements les plus funestes aupres des autorites d'occupation et de leurs complices francais, aux compromissions les plus basses avec la police et la SS ? Comment cet homme de haute culture, infirme et esthete, inverti et religieux, a-t-il pu consentir a l'ignominie de la delation? Et pourquoi ne s'est-il jamais repenti ? 
Tragique epoque, tenebreux caractere, troublant portrait.
Andre Malraux : Politics and the Temptation of Myth
Part I Radical ideas and radical change: an age of uncertainty Malraux, Trotsky and Marxist inheritance the temptation of the right. Part II The mythical dimension: an ahistorical vision and an atemporal plane reason and the mythical sensibility myth inflated.