Ah, the blueprint that historians will draft of this! The angles they will plot to lend shape to the mess! They will take the word of a cabinet minister, the decision of a general, the discussion of a committee, and out of that parade of ghosts they will build historic conversations in which they will discern far-sighted views and weighty responsibilities. They will invent agreements, resistances, attitudinous pleas, cowardice.
(A. de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras (Penguin edn. 1961), 87)
Such as we are, we can be certain that history will mention us, will dwell on us. It will put a great full stop after 1940, and 1941 will begin a new chapter. We will be in that chapter. We will say: ‘I was there, such and such a thing happened to me.’ We will be interrogated. We will be quoted. Our ailments will be studied; our words will cast light or cause scandal. The most silent among us will be asked to speak. We will have the honour of quotation marks.
(Paul Morand, Chroniques de l’homme maigre (1941), 162)
It has become a habit to look for signs of decomposition in the France of 1922–1935.… Our epoch is in the process of constructing a representation of itself to cut the ground from under the feet of historians.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 1939–May 1940 (1984), 175)