I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.

I think the French have come to grips with their past, and that was true up until about - until the '70s. And then there were things like the film "The Sorrow And The Pity."

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

Well, almost everything is open - the political documents, the (unintelligible) of cabinet meetings. What has been opened now and what had been closed are things that many governments still close, and that is police files and trial records, trial records of the special courts set up by Vichy. And especially interesting are the trial records of the Purge Trials after the war.

I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Well, he worked for a fairly harmless agency. He worked for the agency that looked after French prisoners of war. Though he was capable of some horrendous blunders when he was president. He once said that the Vichy legislation against Jews affected only foreign Jews, which was, of course, absolutely wrong. So he obviously wasn't too well-informed about what is going on in the Vichy government.