In 1915, the Action Française journalist Léon Daudet published an essay entitled ‘L'Entre-deux-guerres’. The essay, in fact, was a survey of French politics and literary milieux from 1870 to 1914 from a Royalist and anti-Republican perspective, and, as such, added little to previous Action française polemic. Its significance, however, lies in the title itself, which pre-dates the more common connotation of ‘entre-deux-guerres’ as the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. As such, in the same way that Marshal Foch is alleged to have declared that the Versailles Peace Conference did not usher in peace, but merely a twenty-year armistice, the pre-existence of a term for a period between wars signifies that, for the French, any point between 1918 and 1939 could be viewed, and indeed was viewed, as part of the inevitable progress towards renewed conflict. This consciousness of living through a stay of execution inflects on the processes of French memory in and of the inter-war years and beyond and the writing which translated that memory, not least in terms of the Occupation, the ‘guerre franco-française’ of 1944–5, and the colonial wars in Indochina and North Africa. This in its turn leads to various overlapping and interlocking conjunctures of memory, history, and writing, initially centred on a number of apparently distinct periods and locations, but which merge and reposition themselves as the memory recedes into the past.