Vichy, Kingdom of Shadows

Abstract

Growing up in northern Britain, Christopher Lloyd’s initial discovery of French language and culture was mediated more through literary and visual texts than personal encounters. People and places encountered during four formative years in the 1970s that were spent teaching in France had more resonance subsequently when the French experience of World War Two became his central preoccupation in the 1990s. This ego-history explores the trajectory of such literal and figurative encounters with Vichy (as a site of wartime government and a symbol of Collaboration), which, though sometimes fleeting or vicarious, still capture ‘history’, often acquiring significance by a process of retrospective accretion; the enduring impact and fascination of imaginative works in particular suggest that they belong to a more intimate and higher creative order than the purely factual writing of history.