If cultural memory is taken to mean the transmission of accepted understandings of the pasdt, then those understandings will inevitably vary in function of the ideological environment of different subcultures. One such subculture - or rather, set of subcultures – is constituted by the French extreme right. It shares most of the structural features of the dominant culture, including its particular respect for intellectualism and its fascination with history, but the meanings which it assigns to the national present in the light of the national past are often different from, and opposed to the dominant interpretations transmitted by wha it disparagingly calls the Establishment. Contestatory interpretation of French history has, in fact, been one of the principal fields of cultural struggle by the extreme right since the time of the Revolution.

This paper focuses on the recent manifestation of that revisionist tradition in the work of historians, intellectuals and publicists associated with the FN and its offshoots. From the late 1980’s through the 1990’s issues of historical memory were a major focus of attentionamong French intellectual of all political colours. One of the spurs was the series of commemorations of the Revolution and of events of the Second World War, overlapping with the trials of Paul Touveir and Maurice Papon on charges of crimes against humanity. In the climate of retrospection centering on these divisive issues other equally problematic aspects of the past were revisited, ranging from the Algerian War to wider discussions of totalitarianism and genocide, fascism, and communism. Intellectuals of the extreme right were largely disbarred from debates in the mainstream media but this was not because they did not write on these subjects. On the contrary, they wrote extensively on these and other historical questions. Outside extreme right-wing circles, their arguments and interpretations were not normally perceived as valid or significant contributions to the debates. When they were cited, commentators usually took their claims as expressions of propaganda in the service of the ideological and political project represented by the FN. The charge was not without justification. There was undoubtedly a convergence between extreme right-wing writers’ desire to set the historical record straight, as they saw it, and their wider goal of reshaping the ideological and eventually the political climate of the country. Although all currents of the nationalist right shared this goal, it was particularly characteristic of those who had emerged from the New Right.