Memories of the Second World War continue to make headlines in France and never so controversially as in the cases of Maurice Papon and Raymond and Lucie Aubrac. On the face of it, Maurice Papon, former Vichy civil servant tried for crimes against humanity in 1998, and the Aubracs, celebrated members of the Resistance, would seem to have little in common. However, recent media debates around their wartime actions have thrown up questions about the writing of history in present-day France.

Until recently, Raymond and Lucie Aubrac represented the heroism of the French Resistance. They were founding members of the Resistance group Liberation-Sud, based in Lyon, and met and worked with Jean Moulin, the man who did more than anyone else to spearhead and unify resistance in France. Raymond developed an operational role in the Resistance that led him to be nominated an inspector for the Secret Army in 1943. Lucie was known as an organiser of daring prison escapes. Her spectacular actions culminated in an attack on an armed German escort on October 21st, 1943, freeing her husband as well as other detainees.

The couple's wartime story was the object of sporadic attention in the post-war years - even leading to an American comic strip entitled 'Lucie to the rescue' -- and, since the mid-1970s, they have developed a reputation as spokespeople for the French Resistance. Raymond's actions fitted conventional models of (male) Resistance activism in the late-1940s and 1950s, while Lucie fascinated a later generation of feminist historians who recuperated her life story for a gender-conscious rereading of women's roles in wartime France. Her autobiographical text, Ils partiront dans l'ivresse (Outwitting the Gestapo), is a fictionalised account of her wartime life in Lyon framed in the nine months of her second pregnancy. Its publication in 1984 was to confirm her reputation as an exemplary figure of women's resistance. The couple's status was enhanced in 1997 with the release of a film adaptation of Lucie's book entitled Lucie Aubrac. Directed by Claude Berri, the film retold the couple's war as a love story of heroic dimensions.

However, the dramatic arrest of leading resistance figures, including Jean Moulin and Raymond himself, at Dr Dugoujon's surgery at Caluire on June 21 st, 1943, has coloured their reputations. This is one of the mysteries of Resistance historiography. It is still unclear how the Gestapo came to know of this vital operational meeting which led to Moulin's death after severe torture. Rene Hardy, another Resistance activist, is generally believed to have betrayed the meeting to the infamous Klaus Barbie, but this has never been proved, even though Hardy was tried twice as a Gestapo informer at the Liberation. The appearance in 1997 of Aubrac: Lyon 1943 by Gerard Chauvy re-ignited interest in the Caluire arrests by directly implicating Raymond and drawing attention to contradictions in the Aubracs' accounts of the war years. Chauvy also published, in an appendix, the so-called Barbie Memoir. This was in all probability written by Jacques Verges, lawyer to Klaus Barbie at his trial for crimes against humanity in 1984 in Lyon, and in it Barbie named Raymond and Lucie as the double agents who had informed him of the Caluire meeting and betrayed Jean Moulin.

The controversy over the Aubracs' Resistance activities culminated in a round table meeting at the offices of the French daily newspaper Liberation. On May 17th, 1997, Lucie and Raymond met eight historians to answer the accusations made by Chauvy's book and to discuss the apparent discrepancies in Raymond's resistance record, doubtless seeing this as an ideal opportunity to clear their names. However, the meeting was a disaster. The Aubracs felt they had been interrogated and a number of the historians came away with the feeling that grey areas persisted in the Aubracs' account of events.

Why were Raymond and Lucie Aubrac chosen for such treatment? What made their resistance reputations so open to criticism? The answer lies in deep-seated ambivalences about witness testimony on the part of certain figures in the French historical community. Two members at the Liberation round table discussion, Jean-Pierre Azema and Francois Bedarida, repeated the mantra of a 'scientific history' which they opposed to an ill-defined realm of memory and legend. The Aubracs and the contradictions in their testimonies were perceived to illustrate how the historiography of the Resistance had degenerated into hagiography. Indeed, at the round table, it seemed that there was a battle going on over who had the right to 'make' history. Should witnesses be allowed to own and shape public narratives of the Resistance? Did their words carry weight equal to those of the professional historian? The appearance of the Aubracs on the public stage, particularly with the release of the film Lucie Aubrac, undermined the divide between memory and history which some historians wished to preserve. In a sense then, the `Aubrac affair' saw a number of French historians closing ranks as a professional priesthood, resistant to any challenge to their authority.

For others, however, the treatment of the Aubracs gave rise to some painful soul-searching. If they had harboured an unease about Lucie Aubrac's media profile, they were less than happy about the way the round table had gone. They rejected the interrogatory tone of the questions posed and were dismissive of the methodological approach. For them, the role of journalists is to disseminate the findings of history, not to help create it. Historians should work in a safe environment, and only their final results should be published, not tentative first impressions. Also, the tenor of the meeting was seen to be counter to the project of oral testimony, which is founded on a dialogue between historian and witness where each must trust the other. The controversy arose partly because the Aubracs were seen as objects of study rather than as human subjects or actors who offer a lived experience without which history could not be made.

Coming four months before the Papon trial, the round table meeting at Liberation was inevitably coloured by pre-trial debates over the role of historians in the courtroom and the extent to which witness testimony, over fifty years later, could be relied upon. The trial of Maurice Papon from October 1997 to April 1998 represented for many the final opportunity to try the Vichy regime and to assess French responsibility for the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. Wartime regional prefect of the Gironde, Papon was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity for the deportation of Jews residing in the Bordeaux region. His trial posed the question of how much a Vichy civil servant, and therefore the regime, knew about the Final Solution. Newspapers presented the debate as of critical importance for contemporary France. It was covered extensively in the press, and newspapers drew on eminent historians to write opinion pieces and summaries of the key issues.

In the courtroom, historians were asked to come to the stand as witnesses, though as 'impartial experts' they had no access to key documents and were required to testify to the current state of research on the period. Historians were therefore required to take on a pedagogical role and teach France about its past, helping the nation to assume a collective memory of the Vichy regime and its actions. At the same time, they had a juridical role when testifying to the likely knowledge Papon possessed of the Final Solution.

Both these functions required the historian to be an 'objective witness' who could provide a mass of information and opinion to be interpreted by the legal system. Yet this may be at odds with the basic methodology of historical analysis, as hypotheses and careful reflection are replaced by the need to reject or confirm the conclusions of recent research, itself still under debate. As French historian Henry Rousso commented, historians became prisoners of their mode of analysis, pushed into providing answers to unanswerable questions about knowledge and culpability in the Final Solution.

The debate about the trial was detrimental to the Aubracs as they sought 'justice' for their treatment in Chauvy's book, both at the Liberation round table and later in a successful bid to sue Chauvy and his publishers for defamation. Meanwhile, the emphasis on collaboration and persecution during the war prepared the public for a round of demystifications and a questioning of sacred cows, such as the heritage of the Resistance. With historians called as witnesses at the Papon trial, the divide between witness and historian has been undermined, leading to a perception that history has been taken out of the hands of historians and is being constructed by judges, historical actors and journalists.

The Papon trial and the treatment of the Aubracs have both demonstrated the problems of history being made, judged and interpreted in the context of the newspaper world and the courtroom. The recent explosion of interest in the witness-- based 'memorial' approach to history has changed the role and purpose of history in the public arena. Are we seeing the democratisation of history with historical actors commanding the same respect and attention as established historians? Or is the volume of witnesses' accounts in danger of confusing personal life histories with real historical analysis?

The Aubracs have now largely withdrawn from the public sphere in protest at their treatment. In the past, their accounts provided the texture of recent history for present-day readers. Such testimony can enrich the writing of history and open up new avenues of research for historians. It is sad that this collaborative relationship has broken down at a time when few voices such as the Aubracs' remain for the historical record.