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As early as the major trials of 1945, the defence of the former Vichy leaders (Pétain, Laval) pleaded the “lesser evil” and the “shield” thesis to justify the complicity of the Pétainist regime in the extermination of tens of thousands of Jews, including thousands of children taken from their parents. Until the end of the 1960s, this revisionist approach (as it was already called, in reference to the campaign by Pétain’s former lawyers to have the 1945 trial reviewed), promoted by former Pétainists and Lavalists, was widely disseminated in popular works and magazines aimed at the general public. In the 1970s, with the emergence of the “Jewish memory” of the genocide and Vichy, the old revisionist arguments were no longer audible: the revisionist rhetoric adapted, becoming more subtle and camouflaged. It no longer denied the anti-Semitism of Vichy, but brought up to date the argument of the “lesser evil” against a background of challenging established knowledge, described as “doxa” and targeting, in the name of national honor, the “American” Robert Paxton or the “militant” Serge Klarsfeld.