"It's a strange idea, really, to go stirring up all these dead things." For decades after the Second World War, mainstream French culture felt much the same as the narrator of Patrick Modiano's novel Ring Roads. With the economy soaring, the consoling myths of the Resistance locked in place, and France a high-fashion exporter of formalistic, anti-historical schools of thought and art, the bitter shame and division of the Occupation years could be safely buried.
