More than forty years have passed since the military coup of the 11th of September 1973, which overthrew the Government of Popular Unity headed by Salvador Allende and incarnating at that point of the Cold War the only hope of an alternative socialist model capable of spreading throughout the world. If 2013 marked an important moment of commemoration of the coup, notably in France, this article proposes an analysis of the effects of that event on the family memories of Chilean exiles and the retornados (literally “the returned”) who predominately lived in France. In other words, this article addresses the issues of inheritance and construction of the self in the framework of a specific sociological case: exile and its corollary of return, alongside experiences of forced migration marked by political engagements with the left of the political spectrum and extreme violence, which has traumatized at least two generations.