Histoires

Histoire(s) was the theme of the 15th annual academic conference of the Irish Association for French and Francophone Studies. The conference took place over three days at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. The theme, Histoire(s), reflects the tension at stake between narratives of official History and less accessible, hidden and plural histories of individual or minority-group experience. The poster illustrates this tension by highlighting a dark period in France’s past — the German Occupation of Paris (1940–1945) — and, more precisely, the French collaboration. A period, which the French state in the years subsequent to the war attempted to reframe and effectively forget through promotion of narratives of resistance and ideas of a ‘true’ France embodied most clearly by the mythologizing of de Gaulle. More generally, the theme reflects the idea that history is not a grand or truth narrative, but rather a polymorphous and plural collection of changing and competing stories.