Description

What does a nation choose to remember—and what does it try to forget?

In The Years of Silence, historian Julien Peltier delivers a powerful, unsettling exploration of France under the Vichy regime and the long shadow it cast over collective memory. Moving beyond familiar narratives of occupation and resistance, this book confronts the decades of denial, selective remembrance, and moral ambiguity that followed the war.

Drawing on political history, cultural analysis, and memory studies, Peltier examines how collaboration was minimized, how silence became policy, and how myths of unity replaced uncomfortable truths. From postwar justice and amnesty to the slow emergence of public reckoning, The Years of Silence reveals how memory itself became a battlefield.

Written with clarity, rigor, and narrative force, this book speaks not only to historians but to anyone interested in how nations rewrite their past—and how truth eventually demands to be heard.

Essential reading for fans of European history, World War II studies, and the politics of memory.