When it was first broadcast in 2012, Les Revenants quickly became one of France's most successful television series.1 And with good reason. Fabrice Gobert's atmospheric drama depicted a cohort of deceased former inhabitants of an Alpine town who suddenly return to the land of the living. As Catherine Clark and Brian Jacobson suggest in their contribution to France in Flux, Les Revenants deftly borrows tropes usually associated with the zombie thriller and fantastic fiction, but renews those genres with a sleek visual style whose carefully composed shots and long takes invite viewers to luxuriate in the details.2 Beyond the crisp writing (novelist Emmanuel Carrère served as a scriptwriting consultant), gorgeous mountain aesthetic (it was mostly filmed around Annecy), and compelling storyline, the key to the show's popularity lies in its subtle messaging. Reading between the show's plotlines reveals Les Revenants as an allegory about the ghosts in the national machine that seem repeatedly to emerge from the shadows and haunt contemporary France.

Most obvious are the two historical moments that have left their mark on the French national psyche and embody what Henry Rousso and Éric Conan (1994) famously termed ‘un passé qui ne passe pas’ (‘a past that can't be shaken off’). No sooner had the French emerged from the period of Nazi occupation during the Second World War, masking the inevitable complexity and murkiness of the situation beneath de Gaulle’s myth of heroic, collective resistance, than they became caught up in the protracted process of decolonisation during the 1950s and 1960s, which manifested itself most painfully in the ‘guerre sans nom’ (‘war without a name’) (Tavernier and Rotman 1992) in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. While the French government sought for years to obfuscate the difficult truth of these periods – notably the Vichy government's complicit role in the collaboration and the French military's use of torture in Algeria – its attempts to impose a collective, national amnesia were bound to fail as counter-narratives broke cover (Ophüls 1969, Paxton 1972, Stora 1991).

Most recently, the French presidential election of 2017 revealed how the traumatic past is a kind of revenant that refuses to go away.