Docudrama and the Revisiting of History

Because it subtends both identity and collective memory, History has a very special place in human sciences. Up until recently, France seemed to be at ease with its History and controversies appeared confined to intellectual and academic spheres. Yet, following the initiatives by television channels to carry out their own investigations into past controversies, these controversies recently started to invade the public sphere again, resurrecting past oppositions and providing them with a new lease of life. In spite of the anachronistic and exegetic interpretations this initiative gave birth to, TV channels can be praised for having reinvigorated the democratic debate The choice the television media made of docudrama, a genre combining the fictional and the evidential modes, largely accounted for the public interest in these past issues. One of the great advantages of this genre lies with its capacity to generate empathy so that modern viewers are placed in conditions as close as possible to the ones that confronted the protagonists. It also brings depth to the issues by taking into account the political, economic, diplomatic but also psychological dimensions of the situation. This paper tries to analyse how far the fictionalisation of historic issues has helped the country come to terms with its past or, conversely, whether it has allowed for the voicing of dissenting approaches hushed up until then by the post-war consensus