History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: Visuality of the Vichy Past through the Silent Image of Women

The selective and repetitive use of tondue photographs in representing French collaboration has the potential to support a reductive mythologisation of the Nazi Occupation of France through the implication that collaboration was a question of a passive and feminised compromise to the Nazi occupiers rather than a product of the self-defined, anti-semitic and right-wing regime that was Vichy France. In an attempt to unravel this silent manipulation, the tondue photos are examined here as texts in which something fundamental is revealed about the relationship between gender, visuality and historical memory. The primary claim presented is thus that the tondue photographs continue to support the curious admixture of denial and obsession that constitutes the 'Vichy syndrome' through an unacknowledged visuality in which gender features voicelessly and implicitly. Discussing psychoanalytic visions of trauma as a photographic fixing, this article claims that 'memory' envisaged through visual representation of women is concretely bound to mythologies of denial in which gender and sexual betrayal are powerfully, because non-verbally, implied to be associated with national collective humiliation in French history.