Chapter 4 analyzes the institutional factors fueling the contestation of economic liberalization. The dirigiste model was rooted in the premise that top-down governance, free of interference by interest groups, offered the best way to modernize the country. The institutions of the Fifth Republic reinforced this exclusionary orientation by centralizing power in the executive. While France’s top-down or “skinny” approach may be effective when governments are extending popular new benefits, it is problematic when they are trying to avoid blame for unpopular measures, as is generally the case with economic liberalization, since with concentrated power comes concentrated accountability. Despite this problem, Chapter 4 shows that French authorities have refused to break with skinny politics. In the late 1990s, the “social refoundation” tried to shift reform away from the contested political arena to negotiations among the social partners but was blocked by governments of left and right alike. Finally, through analyses of liberalizing initiatives during Chirac’s second presidency and the case of French pension reform, Chapter 4 shows that skinny politics almost invariably triggers popular contestation and, even when successful, tends to yield half-measures that antagonize the populace without fixing the fiscal and economic problems that motivated action in the first place.

Chapter 3 analyzes the party-political legacies fueling the contestation of economic liberalization. Because of France’s dirigiste past, it is not just the left that is ambivalent toward economic liberalization, but also the right. The French right was in power during the heyday of the dirigiste system, so statist and nationalist principles became central to its economic outlook. In addition, leaders of the right emerged from the upheaval of May 1968 upheaval with a deep fear of strikes and protests. Finally, much like the left, the right never developed a legitimating discourse for economic liberalization, instead blaming it on external forces, notably European integration. Because of these legacies, the right has been an inconsistent backer of economic liberalization. Chapter 3 describes several characteristic behaviors of the right that foster the contestation of economic liberalization both in the streets and within governing circles: (1) a nationalist understanding of the economy that leads to extensive intervention to prevent foreign takeovers of French companies; (2) a fear of social upheaval that inclines conservative governments to retreat from reforms in the face of strikes and demonstrations, thereby encouraging further protests; (3) a fair-weather liberalism that gives way to statist revival in times of economic crisis.

There is a brief epilogue that discusses President Jacques Chirac’s 1995 address at the Vél d’hiv memorial site, in which he acknowledged the French state’s complicity in the implementation of the Final Solution. I interpret the speech and subsequent developments which enshrined the idea that France was nation of Justes (a handful of misérables apart) as an effort to incorporate the Shoah itself into a national narrative with a neo-Gaullist inflection. I just sketch in the idea. As much as I admire Lanzmann’s movie, I didn’t want the reader to think that the history of deportation memory ended there.

In the conclusion, I return to the questions raised at the outset, the most important ones having to do with resistant-centered concentrationary memory and the purported silence about the fate of the Jews. In my view, the received wisdom on these issues, although not altogether wrong, is misleading in several respects. From the outset, the Deportation and how it was remembered were politicized phenomena, generating competing narratives and a fragmentation of memory (concentrationary memory was never as unified as it is often said to have been). Jews joined in the fracas, once again right from the outset, but they positioned themselves as one voice among many, not as the dominant voice. And everywhere, in the first postwar decades, religion—whether Catholic or Jewish—and religious forms shaped the ways in which the Deportation was represented. Indeed, Catholics and Jews entered into dialogue in these early years about the Jews’ special fate, an exchange that was often painful and tense but that over time enabled a level of mutual understanding, all the while bringing the reality of the genocide to public attention and this well before the Six Day War or even the Eichmann trial. In one critical respect, I do not propose to alter received wisdom: the Jewish side of the story gained in strength with the passage of time. It was not turning points like 1961 or 1967, however, that proved decisive so much as processes: interfaith dialogue and the openings it created for Jews to make themselves heard and generational shift which injected a new and transformative note of militancy into the Jewish story and its dissemination.