Nearly two years after the conclusion of the Klaus Barbie trial in France, Alain Finkielkraut's latest book, devoted to this event, has only just been published. The lapse of time, I suspect, was due to more than prolonged reflection on the part of the young French intellectual; a good deal of the book, after all, is the continuation and application of themes pursued by Finkielkraut in earlier works. The lag, it seems, is a deliberate response to what Finkielkraut, in the title of an earlier work, termed the "defeat of thought." The phrase points to an illness of our age, of which the Barbie trial is just a symptom: the transformation of the furniture of our intellectual and moral universe into commodities to be bought, digested, and immediately forgotten. La Mémoire Vaine (Futile Memory) is a brilliant and pessimistic analysis of the eclipse of memory and neglect of history in an age of instant commentary and immediate gratification.

The news of Barbie's arrest in Bolivia and his extradition to France sparked a firestorm of interest and controversy among the French. Though piled and mixed together, the tinder for the flames came from two principal sources, one narrowly historical, the other broadly juridical in nature. The latter first had to do with the legitimacy of the charge of crimes against humanity as applied to Barbie. Barbie was tried under a French law modeled on that of the Nuremberg tribunals; it was introduced in 1964 in order to parry the 20-year French expiration date on all crimes, including those of war, committed in France. The French version resembled the Nuremberg antecedent in that both laws were formulated retroactively—a point of jurisprudence that remains controversial.