Denis Peschanski

On November 13, 2015, the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, carried out by three Islamist commandos and claimed by ISIS, were the deadliest in France since the end of World War II. In the months that followed, the November 13 Program was launched by the CNRS and Inserm to study the construction of individual and collective memory around an event that profoundly marked French society. Today, the testimonies of 27 volunteers—among some 1,000 people—who participated in the study form a mosaic of experiences that shows how trauma extends beyond the immediate circle to permeate the national collective memory.

In February 1944, in a courtyard at Fresnes Prison, the Germans staged a spectacle to stigmatize a group of communist resistance fighters—all foreigners and mostly Jewish—who had been arrested a few weeks earlier. The propaganda aimed to discredit these fighters, portraying them as terrorists and criminals, even though they had managed to carry out numerous attacks against the occupiers in Paris. The red poster, plastered in thousands of copies across the country, would immortalize them in legend. They were subsequently executed at Mont-Valérien, near Paris. Missak Manouchian, the Armenian who led these fighters, now embodies this group in the collective memory as he is enshrined in the Panthéon, on behalf of all his comrades, 80 years after their execution.

French current affair show