In keeping with the spirit of my title, let me begin with some questions: is the Vichy Syndrome—the memory malady haunting post-Second World War France first diagnosed by Henry Rousso in 1987—still alive today? If so, in what form or forms? In which institutions, discourses, and disciplines does it manifest itself? Given that, according to Henry Rousso, the memory of Vichy has passed through several ‘phases’ since the Liberation of 1944, has it entered a new phase in the new millennium, one distinct from the ‘Obsessions’ phase of the 1980s and 1990s? What does the word ‘Vichy’ signify? Does it refer to a precise historical moment and place, a specifically French trauma? Or, due to the impact of globalization, the weight of other traumatic memories, and the abuse of the word by politicians and others, has ‘Vichy’ come to signify something different, but perhaps equally unsettling? Finally, what is the impact of the memory of Vichy on French culture, on the French national psyche, today? If that impact is harmful, is there some way to be done with the shadow of Vichy once and for all? Is there a ‘cure’ for the Vichy Syndrome?

These are broad and difficult questions, and answering them in a definitive or exhaustive fashion is well beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest here some partial or provisional answers by way of addressing the larger question raised by my title. Without anticipating my conclusion, I want to argue that ‘Vichy’ and its memory mean different things today than they did in the final decades of the twentieth century.

So first: does the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ still exist today? Rousso, for his part, tends to think not. In the 2013 edition of the 1995 book Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas, he argues that since the issues raised and the scandals that erupted in the 1990s have been dealt with and largely put to rest, the Vichy Syndrome is essentially moribund today. It no longer constitutes a national obsession or preoccupation.