Demythologizing de Gaulle: History as Myth and Myth as Hermeneutic in France after Vichy and Algerian Independence

Abstract

History, like fiction, is a narrative interpretation of events, and its writing or telling of the past is always mediated from a present position. The narratological turn in historical discourse from the 1960s challenged the assumption that accounts of the past were the objective accumulation of documented facts and emphasized the ideological mediation of historiography. With a focus on Roland Barthes’s poststructuralist theory of myth as a hermeneutic structure for historical interpretation, this article argues that demythologization is less an elimination of ideological structures than an illumination; a counter- or re-mythologization that perpetuates interpretative work. As a demythologizing critique of Charles de Gaulle’s myth of post-Occupation resistancialism, Michel Déon’s Les Poneys sauvages (1970/2010) undermines the myth of a unanimous and united France and opens up spaces of ambiguity and subjectivity that reveal interpretative conflicts over the historical narratives of the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence.