Thanks for the memory

Fifty-seven years after the liberation, you still come across the Vichy regime almost every day in France. It crops up in the murky past of some ageing literary or political figure, the way a young person dismisses an unpleasant neighbour as a "collaborator", the reluctance of a Vichy resident to tell you where he comes from.

Adam Nossiter grew up in Paris in the 1960s, when his father Bernard was posted there for the Washington Post. At the time, the official version of history was that France "forever and always resists the invader". In 1972, the American historian Robert Paxton published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, and the lie began to crumble.

The most prestigious French publisher, Gallimard, rejected Paxton's book, but gradually the truth took hold. As Nossiter writes, "Far from being a policy pressed on weak French officials by overbearing Nazis, (collaboration) had been just the opposite: a goal in which the Germans were only mildly interested, but one ardently pursued nonetheless by leaders of the Vichy government".

France, along with Bulgaria, was the only country which handed over Jews from territory that was unoccupied by the Germans. To study what he calls "different phases of intensity in the relationship with the past", Nossiter lived in three towns that have not quite recovered from the second World War. In Bordeaux, he attended the 1997-1998 trial of the former finance minister Maurice Papon. Papon's trial for crimes against humanity lasted six months - the longest in French history - and Nossiter was helpful to me and other journalists who could not stay for the duration.

Nossiter confesses feeling uneasy about the Papon trial. The witnesses' testimony about deported family members was wrenching, but "not a single one credibly connected Papon to the fate of his or her relatives". And, the author admits, Papon's longevity "put him in a spot dozens of other French functionaries could have occupied". Many Vichy bureaucrats participated in the deportation of Jews, if only by signing papers. Papon was punished because at the age of 87, the machinery of French justice finally caught up with him.

Nossiter captures the old man well - his perfect mastery of the subjunctive, taste for Chateau Margaux, amiable friendships among the acadΘmiciens. Papon's courtroom demeanour, his head always turned slightly away from the civil plaintiffs, demonstrated an innate sense of hierarchy. For the most part, the French working classes "believed in the moral continuity of past and present", Nossiter concludes, while wealthier Frenchmen "had been primarily interested in saving (their) furniture".

From Bordeaux, Nossiter moved on to Vichy itself, a town where many still revel in the "guilty pleasure" of secret admiration for the ageing first World War hero and Nazi puppet, Marshal Philippe PΘtain.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the US State Department's support for the Marshal. Nossiter quotes grovelling birthday greetings sent by an American diplomat to PΘtain, and a telegram from Washington scolding another diplomat for alerting them to mass deportations of Jews in southern France. "It is not apparent what clearly recognisable American interest . . . is involved in this message", the department cabled back.

Ultimately, Nossiter's book is about how the guilty blot out the past, but the victims' pain is unending. "These events have lasted for 50 years," Hersz Librach, whose father, brother and cousin were deported from Bordeaux to Nazi death camps, testified at Papon's trial. "I've never been able to forget. I live with them. It's a wound that doesn't heal, that cannot heal."

This suffering - increased rather than diminished with time - is almost unbearable in Tulle, the last of three French towns where Nossiter lived. On June 9th, 1944, the Germans hung 120 innocent men from lamp posts and balconies on the main street, in retaliation for an attack by the Resistance. "Look, it's been 56 years, but I'm not sure I would be able to control my emotions," a woman whose brother was hanged outside their parents' shop tells Nossiter, refusing to talk to him.

The widow of Charles Godillon, a factory worker, shows him the note her husband scribbled before he was hanged: "Goodbye my dearest, my little ones, and all my family that I loved so much. Call the one who is coming Charles, or Marie . . ."

Nossiter's book is so beautifully written, so thoughtful and unsettling, that it seems churlish to find fault. But for readers unaware that the Vichy agency for Jewish affairs was housed in the Algeria Hotel, the book's title is confusing. Nossiter's editor might have weeded out the gallicisms, and an index would be helpful.

Lara Marlowe is Paris correspondent of The Irish Times. She is currently reporting from Afghanistan