Robert Frank, in his essay “La mémoire empoisonnée [Poisoned Memory],” distinguishes five types of “group memory” among the French who have been affected by World War II: the memory of the Resistance members; of the prisoners of war; of the camp survivors; of the people who were sent to forced labor; and finally, of the collaborationists. Out of thirty-two pages, Frank devotes only nine lines to that last category, insisting that its members never constituted a unified community (554–5). Frank does not stipulate how many people it takes for their recollections to form a genuine “group memory.” It can only be pointed out that dozens of individuals branded as collaborationists have written books to account for their activities during the Occupation, whether as ministers in the Vichy government (e.g., Yves Bouthillier, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Jérome Carcopino); as political activists (e.g., Raymond Abellio, Pierre Andreu, Henri Charbonneau); as journalists (e.g., Lucien Rebatet, Lucien Combelle, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau); or as literary and show business personalities (e.g., Sacha Guitry, Arletty, Henri Béraud). The question, therefore, is not to know whether there is a memory of the collaboration or not; it is to determine whether those many testimonies are homogeneous enough to comprise a “collaborationist memory,” which in turn would be a subset of what Frank describes as France's “collective memory” (546).

Restricting the issue to the texts written by the volunteers, I would submit that they have enough common features to constitute a community of reminiscence that might be called “outcast memory.”