The author looks at the French artistic scene after the 2nd World War, from a basic standpoint: due to a series of reasons, it was impossible for the French culture to carry out the "work of mourning" for the victims of Nazism. Based on this hypothesis, this paper analyses works that deal with life, death, violence, memory and oblivion. Because of the impossibility to condense the memory of the horror into rituals or monuments, art after Auschwitz can only formulate issues, such as the reversibility of the roles of the artist and the spectator and the historical necessity of a live memory after the scandalous, asymbolic, unnamable violence.
Art; war; death; memory; France
