Une prison pour mémoire

In 2010 the prison of Montluc in Lyon was transformed into a Memorial and became one of France's ten major sites of national memory. Right away, this transformation engendered a memorial competition between those representing prisoners of the German occupation (Jews, hostages, members of the resistance) and those speaking in the name of prisoners of the Algerian War (Algerian militants on death row, FLN supporters, draft evaders). Combining meticulous archival work with oral history interviews, the book offers an alternative history of previously disregarded instances of solidarity. Following its liberation on 24 August 1944, Montluc became a space of commemoration for its wartime survivors while continuing to function as a repressive apparatus, trying and incarcerating war criminals and collaborators alongside supporters and opponents of decolonization. In this context, memorial communities of past repressions came to the aid of repressed communities of the present. Klaus Barbie's victims lent their support to victims of colonial oppression, who often found themselves locked in the same prison cells ; the incarceration, side by side, of former persecutors of the Nazi period and of former members of the resistance who were now opposing colonialism caused outrage ; the imprisonment of a protester under Vichy and again during the war in Indochina raised uncomfortable questions, as did the transformation of former resistance fighters into uncompromising accusers of anticolonialist independence fighters ; old practices such as mass roundups and arrests, torture, and executions were deployed again, resurecting painful memories of the occupation; and the Algerians, the most severely repressed political adversaries in the history of French military justice, discovered the graffiti left by their Montluc predecessors, confronting France to its own history. By uncovering the mechanisms interlinking the memories of a traumatic past to a dramatic history in progress, it became possible to overcome the identity conflicts that dominated the public space for decades. To do so, it was necessary to explore the closed space of the prison and listen carefully to the echoes within.