Because most historians think of their job as consisting essentially of uncovering new data, the category "argument" is underrepresented in historiography in general, the historiography of the Occupation in particular. Indeed, professional historians so far have sought to augment the scholarship about the period; they have left arguments to journalists and politicians, confining their own use of the genre to articles and especially to reviews. My corpus in this area is thus very small. It is comprised mainly of the work of one scholar, Henry Rousso, who, after making his own contribution to data-gathering in such studies as Les Annees noires [The Dark Years] and Petain et la fin de la Collaboration [Petain and the End of the Collaboration] has devoted his publications to discussing how Vichy is dealt with in contemporary France. The main theme of his books on this subject, The Vichy Syndrome and Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (written with Eric Conan), is "memory," that is, the "social practices [. . .] whose p urpose or effect is the representation of the past and its perpetuation [...] within in a particular group or the society as a whole" (Syndrome 3). To investigate the memory of the Occupation, Rousso turns to case studies. In Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, he thus considers some selected, representative events that took place during the 1990s: the memorial ceremonies that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1942 round ups of the Parisian Jews; the discovery of the "fichier des juifs," the card file containing the names of the Jews in the Seine department that the French police had constituted in October 1940; the Touvier trial; the revelations concerning Mitterand's role in the Vichy administration; the television debates that followed the publication of some provocative books about the Resistance; and the polemics that broke out about the teaching of World War II in secondary schools. Yet Rousso does not organize these case studies in the form of narratives, recounting, for example, what happened after the disclosures about Mitterand's past. Assuming that those events are known, he discusses how issues of memory were addressed on the occasion he is investigating; in the case of Mitterand, he examines how the latter often was judged according to a viewpoint that is "anachronic" and "teleological," the fact that a former Vichy employee could be elected President becoming a "troubling symptom of French political life," even an "implicit rehabilitation of the Vichy mindset" (151).

If The Vichy Syndrome and Vichy: An Ever-Present Past are not narratives, they--as synchronic descriptions do--nevertheless grant some space to storytelling. The first part in The Vichy Syndrome thus consists of a stage narrative, Rousso tracing the changes in the memory of the years 1940-44 from the "unfinished mourning" to the "repressions" to the "broken mirror" to the "obsession." Furthermore, while both studies do not tell once again the stories that they discuss, they often summarize them or report some of their main episodes. Rousso, in fact, needs such stories as front matter for his reassessments and conceptualizations. There is no argument without something to argue about, and Rousso's qualified presentation of the Mitterand case can be taken as a response to such a narrative as "Mitterand worked for Vichy and then sought to conceal his involvement." It remains that Rousso's discussion does not take the form of a new, better narrative, which would offer a more accurate description of Mitterand's po litical trajectory than the one proposed in the biographies that Rousso reviews, such as Catherine Nay's The Black and the Red (Vichy 286) and Pierre Pean's Une Jeunesse francaise [A French Youth] (302). To debate a narrative does not entail writing another narrative oneself, and Rousso here arranges his data according to the logic (or rhetoric) of a demonstration, not along the time sequence of a story.

Historiography and Literary Theory

My conclusion, namely, that historical discourse does not always come in the form of a narrative, calls for two brief remarks that may be relevant to both historiography and literary theory.

The first such remark concerns the role of the corpus. Critics of formalism in general, narrative theory in particular, sometimes have claimed that formalist taxonomies depend to a (too) large extent on features of the texts employed as examples. Feminist scholars such as Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol have thus contended that the lack of an entry for "gender" in the extensive apparatus that narratologists have devised since the 1960s is traceable to the adoption of an almost exclusive male corpus. Including novels by women, they have argued, makes it necessary to account for traits that obviously are gendered ones, like the "engaging interventions" (Warhol) of the narrator in the works of novelists such as Susan Rowson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The historiographic corpus I have selected is susceptible to the same critique, though the issue in this instance is not gender but the nature of the texts and their target audience. Indeed, I have limited my sample to the category "scholarly hist oriography," that is, to studies written by professional historians and geared to people who have been trained to read according to academic standards. Yet expanding that corpus to include examples of "popular historiography" could have led to a different classification. As any trip to French or American bookstores reveals, works written for the general public include mostly the histories I called "linear," in the case of Vichy, biographies and memoirs of people who played some role during the period. [4] But it admits few synchronic descriptions, and even fewer arguments. Adding "popular" histories to my corpus, therefore, could have caused a change in emphasis. It also could have produced new categories, "linear histories" turning out to be too wide a class and having to be further divided. Yet if my taxonomy is based on scholarly works, it does not entirely depend on the works about Vichy France that I have considered here. The examination of a completely different corpus, namely, of studies of the Ancien Regime written by members of the Annales School, produces a similar if not identical classification; scholars in this group also favor synchronic descriptions, stage narratives, and arguments, and they turn to linear storytelling only as a kind of exercise to subvert the form. [5] Furthermore, eschewing narrative is not reserved for French historians. Michael Stanford, in a recent, comprehensive introduction to Western historical research, observes that "most academic works of history" today "are not written in the narrative mode" (102), since their authors--rather than "telling" the past--prefer to "analyze" it, "piece by piece and thread by thread" (104).

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