This article explores the use of multidirectional memories in humanitarian and interventionist discourses in France during the first half of the 1990s. It does this through two sets of responses to mass violence: from 1991 to 1995 following the break-up of Yugoslavia, and during 1994 in Rwanda. While the Bosnian crisis, as many called it at the time, extended over years, the genocide in Rwanda took place over the course of a hundred days. In both cases, however, outside responses consisting of emergency relief became the subject of intense criticism from advocates of more robust forms of intervention. Faced with violence in the Balkans, memories of the Second World War offered a rhetorical tool for the construction of moral imperatives in critiques of the insufficiency of humanitarian aid as in calls for diplomatic and military intervention. However, this multidirectional appeal was not applied to the genocide in Rwanda to the same degree of intensity. By concentrating on French actors and forums, this article highlights the importance of a particular formulation of the “Holocaust metanarrative”: one that emphasised the concept of complicity and which was discursively linked to the country’s Second World War experiences of occupation, collaboration, and resistance.