Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France

This is the story of how the Nazi genocide of the Jews became an almost daily source of controversy in French politics. Joan Wolf argues that from the Six-Day War throughout the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98, the Holocaust developed from a Jewish trauma into a metaphor for oppression and a symbol of victimization on a wide scale. Using scholarship from a range of disciplines, the book argues that the roots of Holocaust politics reside in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and the tensions inherent in the revolutionary notion of universalism. Ultimately, the book suggests, the Holocaust became a screen for debates about what it means to be Frenxh.