Rock around the Bunker: The Contestation of War Memories in French Pop Music

In the aftermath of the Second World War, French society established crucial myths to understand the meaning of the French defeat, the experiences of the Nazi Occupation, and the role of the Vichy Regime.  Under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, a national myth was enshrined in which France was understood as a nation of resisters and that the Vichy Regime acted as a shield for the French people.  This myth remained strong during the 1950s and ‘60s but was eventually challenged in the late 1960s and early ‘70s by filmmakers and novelists.  The war provided a dramatic setting to reexamine these events, and the writers using this technique were grouped together under the rubric of le mode retro.  But pop musicians also threw light on the history of fascism, the Occupation, and the Vichy Regime, forcing French society to reexamine the myths built up since the end of the war, creating an aural mode retro.  These artists used lyrics that evoked the Nazis, the leader of the Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain, and the French Resistance to present a dramatically different story of the French defeat.  This paper will examine the music of several artists, including Serge Gainsbourg and Métal Urbain, to illustrate how pop musicians were attempting to undermine the consensual French public memory of the war during the 1970s.