Première parution : Nicolas Lebourg et Céline Sala, « The Rivesaltes Camp Memorial : institutionnalisation of a memoir », Observing Memories, december 2023, n°7, pp. 60-65.

In 2015, the Rivesaltes Camp Memorial [MCR in French] was inaugurated in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France, several kilometres form the Franco-Spanish border. This inauguration marked the patient construction of the memorial process of a camp that had been omitted from the collective memory for a long time. This camp was originally a military camp, built in 1939 for the colonial troops from Senegal, Madagascar and Indochina. However, from 1939 to 2007 Spanish refugees fleeing the Franco regime, foreign Jews, French gypsies, prisoners of war from the Axis countries, collaborators, colonial auxiliary soldiers from the French army and civilians fleeing postcolonial nations, illegal immigrants… were grouped together and detained there. Although the MCR today stands as a pilot site of the most recent policies on remembrance, its construction was complex, from absolute oblivion to the citizens’ movement claiming it, to its eventual establishment.

Social phenomenon and citizens’ movement

In the aftermath of the war, the permanence of the use of the site on the one hand and the general remembrance of political deportation on the other, explain why the camp was not given much attention.

Thus, when a conference was held in Rivesaltes in July 1945 by former internees from Buchenwald they urged the former political internees of Rivesaltes to join the Society of Deportees of the Resistance. However, there was no internment here, and, on the other hand, no mention was made in the post-war period to issues relating to the place and to racist deportation. The demonstration by the guards organised by the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) two days before the camp was due to close is another very evocative example of the gap between the way the camp is remembered today and the way it was remembered at the time of the Liberation. Likewise, following the legislation adopted by the Federal Republic of Germany concerning “compensation for national-socialist persecutions” (1956), the German ambassador in France received requests to compensate Spanish refugees who had been in Rivesaltes in the spring of 1940. He contacted the prefect of the Pyrénées-Orientales department, to obtain information to be able to process these cases. The process between social memory demands and legal innovation is striking, but the prefect’s response asserted that the Groups of Foreign Workers, made up of Spanish internees, “comprised almost the entire population of the Rivesaltes military camp”, disregarding the other internments and, in particular, the special camp that housed 7,148 Jews. On this subject, false information was circulated for a long time, arising from the first memorial institutionalisation.

The first attempt to understand the history of the Rivesaltes camp was by the president of the Departmental Committee of Liberation (CDL), Camille Fourquet. He undertook to write a series of reports for the Second World War History Committee, an inter-ministerial body linked to the Presidency of the Board, founded by decree (17^th December 1951). However, on the second page of his document, Fourquet wrote that he did not believe there were any survivors from the conveys that left Rivesaltes. This statement was constantly repeated, until the early 2000s, by the management of the Rivesaltes memorial project – which subsequently financed the works of the historian Alexandre Doulut, demonstrating that there were 84 survivors. Thus, the storytelling of the place is simultaneous to its mythification.

However, there is no social memory of the place. A scandal led to the revelation. Under the signature of journalist Joël Mettay, the Roussillon daily newspaper L’Indépendant of 8^th May 1997 revealed that a private individual had found bundles of original documents relating to Jewish internees from the Rivesaltes camp at the Perpignan waste disposal site. In its context, this revelation is all the more significant because it was preceded by the “Jewish file” scandal in 1991. Serge Klarsfeld revealed the existence of such an object that had been kept after the war. The affair turned out to be false, but stirred up public opinion to such an extent that in 1997 it became known as the “Rivesaltes Jewish file affair”. Similarly, in 1993, the local elections in Perpignan, prefecture of the Pyrénées Orientales department, were marked by the desecration of the town’s Jewish cemetery, which the National Front (FN; the largest city to support Le Pen since 2020) denounced as a plot to undermine it – according to the discursive strategy model used during the anti-Semitic desecration of Carpentras in 1990 which launched a wave of profanation in France and beyond. The prefect conflated the desecration and discovery and stated that the journalist was part of a plot to destabilise the election. After claiming that the documents were false, he pursued the journalist for concealment of files, with the support of the ADPO. In fact, the investigation by the Judicial Police revealed a lengthy malfunction in the archive services that had led to the documents being disposed of.

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