Robert Liris, Vichy Vertigo: une mémorielle damnation.
Les Editions Sydney Laurent, 2021. pp. 159. Many illustrations.
Reviewed by Norman Simms.
Preliminary
Remarks
Before
anything, think of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo
(1958) where fear of heights sets the scene and provides the dénouement of the
plot or W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo (in
French Vertiges, in the original
German Schwindel. Gefũhle) in which
four very different lives intersect, twist through each other, and come to a
dizzying climax. Robert Liris tries to write a history of Vichy, (a) why it was
chosen as the town to be the new French capital under Marshal Pétain during the
Nazi Occupation, (b) why it lacks a museum to recall those dark days during the
Second World War and (c) and why is filled with strange monuments recalling
ancient heroes, legends and myths: and then he decides the city streets,
architecture and famous thermal spa form the only museum possible. But walking around
the town like a Parisian flaneur and
meditating on what it might all mean makes him and the reader dizzy. This book
is brilliant but difficult and vertiginous to read: you are drawn back again
and again to read paragraphs, chapters, the whole thing. It is a new way of
writing history.
There
is a sub-tltle on the cover and frontispiece: Une Memorielle Damnation. A memorandum of damnation. Then on the title page under a photograph of
the statue of “Le Guerrier de la Paix
repose les armes”, The Warrior for Peace with his weapons at rest, a sword
in one hand, a shield in the other. Then another subtitle: “La Ville Imaginée. Damnatio Memoriae”: The
Imagined Town. Memory of a Damnation. And then two lines from a recent novel about
wartime Vichy:
[1]
Vichy est la seule
ville d’orient où l’on n’ait pas éprouve le besoin
à installer un quartier européen.
Marc
Lambron, « 1941 »
Vichy is the only
town in the Orient where it was not found necessary
to install a European quarter.
Julia Pascal explains
how Vichy in the centre of France can be considered an Eastern city:
The town is a shock, a wild skyline
of domes and minarets. Its elegant architecture is neogothic, neoclassic,
neo-Alpine, neo-everything. At first sight, Vichy is a melancholy fragmentation
of Bournemouth, Brighton, Bath Baden Baden and Brigadoon. The faded splendour
of Napoleon III’s watering hole is celebrated in esplanades named after him.
Here he built houses for his several mistresses and encouraged princes, sheikhs
and shahs to summer here with their huge retinues.[2]
What seems very
relevant to this book about Vichy as a vertiginous space is given by Georges
Didi-Huberman:
…the vertiginous
play of time in the present, in the present “surface” of a given culture. Vertigo
is first expressed in the powerful sensation—in itself obvious, but its
consequences less so—that the present was woven with multiple pasts.[3]
Vichy Vertigo
The
question that comes up again and again, swirling in and out of the visions of
the city. as Liris makes the rounds, looks at the architecture of the spa
hotels, the bourgeois residences and the few streets that seem to be a
miniaturized Paris, is: how could Vichy become the capital of France for a few
years when Pétain set up his ragtag and make-believe government? Does it have
any other history than that of the early 1940s? What was here before Napoleon
III decided to make it his personal thermal playground?
Deep
underground, from whence the healing waters emerge, there was thought to be a
subterranean creature, snake-legged and rooster-headed monster: a prehistoric,
Roman or medieval relic of fantasy and myth? Other artefacts are sometimes
found, but only a few, for the Queen of Watering Places seems out of time and
space, and no one has an interest in commemorating its past. Vichy seems to
rise in 1870, peak in 1942, and then disappears into a “syndrome”,[4] “a
mystery,” a pleasant but bland place for taking the cure. Sometimes a setting
for crime novels and tales of espionage and assassination, but bland
nonetheless. Yet there are the borborgynes,
the rumblings from deep inside the earth or the stomach. The unconsciousness of
the city, says Liris, expresses itself in the waters that ejaculate, the
geysers manifesting their curative powers from the menacing darkness below. Yet
Vichy also is a city of gardens, walks along the river, kiosks and a few fine
streets. Yet nothing about it prepared its inhabitants to find themselves the
capital of France: they were flabbergasted (eblués)—it
was miniaturized and out of all measure. Everything went into a blur,
unrecognizable, as they slipped down further and further into the abyss of
forgetting; or they found themselves floundering on a worm-eaten raft floating
above a confusion of desperate messages and incomprehensible prophecies.
And
when the heroic old marshal came, the city remained calm. There were seats of
government but without politics, a shameful collaboration with the Nazis but
without jackboots and swastikas. The baubles of office were mostly bubbles. If
the waters surged up to give places to receive the mineral cures, there were no
ideas, no ideals, no shouts of self-praise or vaunts to celebrate the memory of
national heroes, and when words fell out of their mouths, the sense drained
away, and left nothing new to gestate and grow.
L’homme des foules et l’homme asservis vont le cœur léger
au même abîme! Avec élan ! Né de l’abysse, ‘l’homme retourne à l’abime. On
ne s’échappe pas d’un ciel sans issue, sans éviter d’aveugles et mortifères
tornades.
The man for the multitude and the
man subject to them walked with the same light heart into the same abyss! With
a leap! Born of the abyss, the man returns to the abyss. It is impossible to
escape from the endless sky without riding the blind and deadly whirlwinds.
As
he wanders around a silent spectator (like Charles Baudelaire or Walter
Benjamin, a flaneur) through the streets of Vichy, Robert Liris
notes the monuments—to whom and to what he is not sure: they mark places where
nothing happened and represent great men who never lived there. Then he compares
these statues, with their inexplicable plaques and their confusing symbols,
with monuments found in other little cities, and he becomes only more confused.
In Vichy, the public displays are of defeat, longing for an elusive peace that
never comes, a nostalgia for a past that never was. Liris tries to match up these
images with the words of patriotic songs and anthems—and to the opera house
which seems to epitomize Vichy, the grandiose but superficial music in the
score and the meaninglessness of the plots.
Les spectres sont invisibles à l’historien, car ils sont par nature dématérialises,
mais le psychohistorian par synesthésie entend, plus qu’il ne voit les traces, singulièrement
en pratiquant et écoutant le ‘bruit majeure » d’une pratique poétique. Ainsi l’histoire s’écrit et s’écrie !
The ghosts are invisible to the
historian, for they are by nature dematerialized, but the psychohistorian
through synaesthesia hears the traces more than he sees them, singularly by
experiencing and listening to a “great noise” of a poetic practice. In this way
history both writes itself and cries out.
Just
as the psychoanalyst learns to listen with “the third ear,”[5] so
as to hear what is repressed, disguised and displaced in the voice of patient
on the couch, so the psychohistorian, sensitized to the dynamic history of emotions
sounds, gestures, rhythms and the patterns and designs in visible spaces, thus
to feel what others can barely recognize, if at all, in their experience.
Out
of the black abyss or maelstrom, from which the muffled roars and vibrating
passions emerge, not only to make Vichy a museum of itself and its recent
history an operetta put together from meaningless clichés. Unlike other little
places that became proudly, for just a momentary blink of the eye, a centre of
world affairs, Vichy averted its sight and pretended that nothing had changed.
The outsiders sought to make something of this little blemish on the pages of
history, but nothing came of nothing,. Outsiders come to Vichy to find
something but there is nothing to find except a quiet, sleepy spa town,
dreaming away its passage through eternity. Everything seems out of date,
rubbed clean of any unpleasant dust. Of Petain, there is neither a reliquary of
his bones nor a procession of his presence for a few short years: some of his
devotees tried to organize a memorial in 1973 and it came to nothing, a vague
memory of dissipated emotions.
All
is vitiated in Vichy-nation, capital of a non-existent country. As in Alan
Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad
(1961), unnamed aristocrats move in dizzying circles through time and space,
passing one another and seeing themselves with different degrees of
incomprehension. The palatial rooms, the gardens of classical statuary, the muffled
music and the dance of indeterminate history, all coming to nothing, so too in
Vichy. But the psychohistorian feels more deeply, emotions winding in and out
of their synaesthesia web of repressed memories. Like Glozel, too, the mystery
is knotted into mysterious speculations: why so many things from different
times and places buried in one insignificant place? Why such resistance to
anyone who tries to make sense of or discern patterns in the discovery? Why
such an appeal and fascination to come back and walk the dizzying streets? Back
to the prehistoric which portends a time without history.
Vichy, ville au si modeste musée municipal, autant et
plus que d’autres cités, semble être frappé d’une anomalie historique.
Vichy, town with such a modest
museum, so far and yet more than other cities, seems to be frozen in an
historical anomaly.
This
condition Liris calls “uchronique”,
Vichy the city outside of measured events or the one being outside of any time
at all (as utopia is a land without
space, a nowhere). The queen of watering
holes has its monuments to “un jeun dieu
immobile, ni vainqueur, ni vaincu…’la der des ders’” (a young motionless
god, neither victor nor vanquished…’the last of the last.’). Familiar gestures,
postures and poses, but unrecognizable points of reference, and thus uncanny (inquiétant, étrange,
what Freud calls Unheimlich), so
close and yet so far from ordinary experience.
De la Défense passive de toute la France une ville
thermal, capitale pendant deux and d’un Etat française fantôme, sut éviter une
sorte de servitude volontaire et en apparence soumise à l’occupant.
In passive defence of all of
France, capital for two years and of a phantom French State, this thermal town knew
how to avoid voluntary servitude and yet in appearance to seem to submit to the
occupier.
With
its exotic architecture, its old-fashioned wall-paper, its seemingly grandiose
operas, “Vichy est une Arcadie thermal
inventée” (Vichy is an invented thermal Arcadia,” bathed in listlessness,
yet always implicated in the curses of history, resisting the ambition to be a
real capital, refusing monuments that mean anything, with no nostalgia, it
advertises itself as “Vichy DestiNatiions”
(an impossible destination for all nations): an appeal to the humanist ideals of the European Union and glossed by
Liris as “les fragiles lumineux de
l’esperence fraternelle”, a microscopic,
luminous protective external skeleton covering beetle wings
City Under Subtle Scrutiny and
Psychoanalysis
Robert
Liris’ Vichy Vertigo does not
explicitly deal with the broader question of France during World War II, with a
France that included its overseas territories and its dealing with the
criminals who were tried and found guilty and those who faced no meaningful
retribution. His book meditates on and evaluates the experience of the city,
how it came to take the strangely passive and disconnected view it did during
and after the war, and what it means today more than a half century later, to
live and work in the city and its suburbs (like Bellrive, where Robert resides).
His book deals with legends, myths and monuments, a dizzying array of older
artefacts without any real connection to what happened during the few years
when this spa became an operatic (per)version of France. Sensitive to the
sounds of the words and to the images conjured up, Liris, psychohistorian that
he is, treats the words with a subtle scalpel and ekes out connections no one
else could ever see; and he slices apart the layers of the dreamy appearance of
the city from its earliest archaeological sites to the sleepy town that it is
today, and he puts those slivers under a microscope.
What
Liris leaves out, as it seems most historians of France during the war either
leave out or obsessively focuses on without a context, because his book is not
concerned with the hypocrisy, duplicity and treasonous aspects of Pétain, Laval
and their cronies, is anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Bertran M. G Gerdon argues with the notion of
the “Vichy Syndrome” and cites Patrice Higgonet’s review of the issue:
Vichy’s Jewish victims, in life a
negligible quantity for Pierre Laval and Phillipe Pétain, have suddenly [in the
1990s] become, in death, an unanswerable reproach for the conscience of a great
nation.[6]
Somehow
inside this comment lies an echo of Maurice Le Pen’s disgusting comment that
the Holocaust is a mere detail in history. Until 1942, it may have been argued
that the Nazi aims in the invasions east and west were to gain strategic and
economic lands, but from the time when the Soviet armies pushed back the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, it became the singular aim of the war to keep fighting
long enough to complete the Vernichtung
of the Jews, the Final Solution. This
was formalized at the Wannsee Conference (January 1942) outside of Berlin and
in many documents passed from the Fũhrer to
the leaders of the Nationalm Socialist Party and the Army.
But
another view of Vichy sees that many of the citizens engaged in activities to
help Jewish children and their families escape to Switzerland, and to bring in
milk and medications to keep those same families alive as the Vichy regime
collapsed and the Germans took over. One must remember, too, that many French
men and women in the south risked their
lives in hiding and protecting Jews from the Gestapo and SS—and from
collaborating French police.[7]
Julian
Pascal’s short essay in The Guardian outlines
these nasty facts of the Vichy pseudo-government looking at the autobiographies
and novels by famous writers who passed through this strange town of “mud baths
and colonic irrigation…a cure centre for rheumatism and liver complaints”:
Pétain called for family values,
forbade women to wear shorts or short skirts, abhorred divorce and demanded
that women be mothers, Yet he married a divorcee, was a faithless husband and
had no children.
Arthur Koestler’s
autobiographical Scum of the Earth
reveals how foreigners were rounded up and imprisoned in camps before the Nazi
jackboot arrived on French soil.
[American historian Robert Paxton
on Vichy, 1940] Never had so many Frenchmen
been ready to accept discipline and authority´…. Those judged responsible were
the Jew, the communist, the socialist and the freemason. For France to be
regenerated after the freedom of the Third Republic, ‘the guilty had to be stripped of their
possessions and civil rights. This regime of vengeance…”
Obersturmfũhrer Helmut Knochen,
head of the security police in France…said: “We found no difficulties with the
Vichy government in implementing Jewish policy”
And
so on and so forth ad naueum. Yet
this is not want Robert Liris’s book is about. However, on almost every page
there is found between the lines, under the tones of a pleasant passage through streets of the town and
ambiguously hinted at in the interweaving of time and space: What kind of
people let all this happen in their hotels, parks and cure-stations? Why don’t
they memorialize their history? What does it mean for a psychohistorian to live
in the midst of this dizzy avoidance of the truth?
In
other words, this is a new kind of way to write history, drawing on the rich
insights of psychohistory, and the meditations by a man who only seems to be
strolling around his own hometown.
[1] Marc
Lambron, 1941 (Paris: Grasset, 1997).
[2] Julia Pascal, “Vichy’s Shame” The Guardian (11 May 2002) online at https://theguardian.com/world/2002/ may/11/france.weekend7
[3] Georges
Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,”
trans. Vivian Sky Rehberg Oxford Art
Journal 25:1 (2002) 63.
[4] Bertram
M.Gordon, “The ‘Vichy Syndrome’ Problem in
History,” French Historical
Studies 19:2 (1995) 495-518; and Rosemarie Scullion, “Unforgettable:
History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome” Studies
in 20th Century Literature
23 (1999) 1-26.
[5] Theodor
Reik, Listening with the Third Ear
(1948).
[6] Gordon, “Vichy
Syndrome” 504-505; citing Patrice Higgonet,”A Stain on France’s History.” New York Times Book Review (15 August
1993) 13.
[7]See my review essay: Review
Essay: “A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d’hiv
1942” Shofar 30:12 (2012)
123-137.
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