L'archélolgie française et le Régime de Vichy (1940–1944)

Abstract

For four years (1940–1944) after its defeat by the Third Reich, France was ruled by an anti-republican government whose active collaboration with the Nazis made a major contribution to the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Through the ‘National Revolution’, the Vichy regime developed an ideology opposed to democracy and republican roots and sought to re-invent its national origins as a justification for Pétainism. Thus, the Gallic past and archaeology in general played an important role in this new ideology by assimilating the defeat of the Gauls by Caesar to that of the French by the Nazis and by then comparing the successful incorporation of Gaul into the Roman Empire with that of France into a ‘new Europe’ dominated by Nazi Germany. At the same time, the Vichy regime provided French archaeology with its first legal and administrative structure, which allowed the development of the discipline. This legislative and administrative framework was preserved intact not only until the liberation but right up to the present day. It is the permanence of this structure which creates the problem of the relationship between current French archaeology and the Vichy regime.