This book is about four writers - Sartre, Eluard, Blanchot, and Celine - whose works confront and respond to the purge of collaborationist intellectuals in postwar France. It investigates how their writing argues for or against the different positions outlined during the purge and how it reflects or distorts the competing theories about literature to emerge from the trials.

In their reactions to the purge, these writers mobilized a number of discourses, ranging from the historical, economic, and literary to the sexual, medical, and corporeal. To understand their views on the trials, it is useful to read their texts as allegories of the purge. At one point or another they all speak about the purge through a series of metaphoric substitutions maintained through an extended narrative - whether this narrative is a critical essay, a novel, or a collection of poems.

The texts also give the reader a code for reading them allegorically, and this code is the purge archive, whose records, debates, and arguments reshaped the way writers understood their craft.