Une prison pour mémoires. Montluc, de 1944 à nos jours
Marc André2022, ENS Éditions
How do traumatic but at times competitive memories, anchored in different wars and events, manage to find common ground to forge a shared narrative? How do we reconcile memory and history? Marc André locates the answers to these questions in Montluc, a prison doubly marked by the violence that shook the twentieth century and the tumultuous memory battles that continue to rattle the twenty-first. Since Montluc’s inauguration as a national Memorial in 2010, the prison has stood in the crossfire of heated debates between those speaking for the survivors of the Nazi Occupation on the one side, and those speaking for the anticolonial activists and Algerian nationalists on the other. André refutes the notion of competing memories, however, by exploring the ways in which the multitude of prisoners, their experiences, and memories past and present, came to find solidarity and resonance in Montluc. In the decades following the liberation of the prison in August 1944, Nazi criminals and collaborators were tried and imprisoned in Montluc at the same time as former members of the Resistance who became vocal opponents of colonial oppression during the French-Indochina and Algerian Wars. At one point, a Communist militant was tried for his protest against the French-Indochina War and placed in the same cell as the one he had once occupied under Vichy. Victims of the SS operative in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, drew on their past experiences and memories of imprisonment in Montluc during the Nazi occupation, to rally around the Algerians who were being rounded up, tortured, and ultimately guillotined on the prison grounds in the present. When Montluc survivors gathered in front of plaques along the prison wall in remembrance of Nazi victims, they saw the ceremony as an occasion to denounce the wars of decolonization. These temporal collisions in and around Montluc would soon foster unexpected ties of solidarity between the many prisoners and survivors who had experienced different regimes of oppression. In this meticulously researched and thought-provoking book, André immerses us in Montluc, a space where the shadows cast by past events came to engage in constant dialogue. He brings to life the ensemble of experiences and narratives—in essence, the lives—that converged in Montluc to make it a prison for memories. Résumé : Comment des mémoires traumatiques multiples, ancrées dans différentes guerres et devenues concurrentes, peuvent se retrouver dans un récit commun ? Comment réconcilier la mémoire et l'histoire ? Marc André trouve une réponse dans l'histoire de Montluc, une prison marquée par les violences du xxe siècle et les compétitions mémorielles du xxie siècle. À rebours des logiques concurrentielles révélées lors de la transformation de la prison en Mémorial en 2010 entre les porte-paroles des détenus sous l’occupation allemande, reconnus, et ceux de la guerre d’Algérie, écartés, le livre explore la manière dont la prison a permis aux expériences passées et présentes d’entrer en résonance, d’une guerre à l’autre. Après 1944, des responsables nazis et des miliciens sont emprisonnés à côté d’anciens résistants hostiles à la colonisation ; un militant communiste est enfermé pour sa critique de la guerre d’Indochine dans la cellule même où il était détenu sous Vichy ; des victimes de Klaus Barbie soutiennent des Algériens raflés, torturés, condamnés à mort et finalement guillotinés ; des cérémonies se tiennent devant les plaques commémoratives de la seconde guerre mondiale et servent à condamner la guerre coloniale. Ces collisions temporelles favorisent le scandale et forgent des solidarités imprévues entre les victimes de différentes répressions. En nous immergeant dans cet espace où les ombres dialoguent, ce livre nous permet de saisir l’ensemble des événements, des pratiques et tout simplement des vies qui ont convergé et fait de Montluc une prison pour mémoire.