An ever-present past : Didier Daeninckx and the Manouchian resistance group

摘要

In February 1944, Missak Manouchian and twenty-one of his fellow Resistance fighters were executed by the Nazis. Over sixty years later, a prize-winning French author, Didier Daeninckx, is regularly depicting key members of this band of warriors in his novels, short stories, children’s books and other writings, thereby finding himself at the forefront of a veritable wave of imaginative representations and commemorations of these martyrs for the cause of freedom. After exploring this individual obsession of Daeninckx’s and its relationship to the broader retrospective trend, this article ultimately contends that not only the author’s subject matter, but also many of his narrative strategies suggest that France has still not really managed to come to terms with the legacy of the Occupation.