Occupied France: 5 Books

1. Occupation 944.0816 O
By Ian Ousby
St. Martin's Press, 1997

Nothing can be more degrading for a nation than to be occupied. In the case of France, the German Occupation even extended to the ancient practice of hauling people off to be slaves -- in this case as forced laborers in German factories. Ian Ousby's "Occupation" is an outstanding introduction to this horrible-fascinating subject. The author's apparent disqualifications -- not a historian and not a scholar of French history -- are the very qualities that make him an excellent guide for the general reader who knows nothing about the subject and wants lucid answers to the simple questions: What really happened, what was heroic, what was shameful, and in what proportions did they flourish in the same soil and why?



2. Vichy France 320.944 P and 944.0816 P *
By Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 1972

Nearly four decades ago, Robert O. Paxton's "Vichy France" touched off what came to be regarded as a sort of Copernican revolution in studies of French collaboration. Paxton was the first to show that the collaborationist policy of the French government in occupied France was voluntary -- even, as with Vichy's anti-Semitism, anticipating and going further than the Germans had asked. Paxton's classic inspired young French scholars, opening the way to a flood of works that seems to widen with the passage of time. Justice done? Far from it. French television regularly broadcasts fictional stories of the Resistance but rarely one of collaboration. A year ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an address to his nation: "The true France was not at Vichy [and] never collaborated." Official myth and historic fact continue to live side by side. And shame persists.

3. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 [also gets differing Deweys: 944.0816 J, 940.5421 J]
By Julian Jackson
Oxford, 2001

This is the fullest one-volume account of both the high politics of Vichy and the daily life of the French populace, written by Julian Jackson, an eminent authority on the Occupation. One of the book's many virtues is the honest way it explores the subtleties and complexities of "collaborationism." Was a mayor, honest and efficient before the Occupation, a collaborator for continuing to be an honest and efficient mayor under the Nazis? Was the owner of a factory making equipment for the Germans guilty of collaboration for keeping his plant going so that his employees could earn money to buy food? "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944" is densely packed with fact and analysis and may be too detailed for some readers, but it is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the topic.

4. Paris in the Third Reich
By David Pryce-Jones
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981

After having been stranded in 1940 in France as a 4-year-old, David Pryce-Jones returned to the country many years later to write this eminently readable and marvelously illustrated large-format book about daily life in the capital during wartime. The text concludes with a number of historically valuable interviews with German Occupation officials and some key collaborators. The book includes more than 100 photographs, many of them in color, rare at the time. But reader beware: Some of the photos are by André Zucca, a collaborationist photographer for Signal, a magazine established by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to convey the idea that occupied France was a happy place. An exhibition in Paris last year of 250 of these photographs created a scandal, demonstrating how the Occupation remains a raw subject to this day.

5. Occupied France
By H.R. Kedward
Blackwell, 1985

In a mere 80 pages, studded with shrewd observations distilled from years of study, H.R. Kedward, now an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, takes the reader through the Occupation at a gallop. Collaboration and resistance began the same day -- the moment the armistice was signed on June 22, 1940 -- and Kedward shows that from the start, the two responses to German rule had myriad meanings and myriad practitioners. Blacks and whites shade into gray in this account, but true villains and true heroes remain. Resistance, whether refusing to speak to a German on the street or committing acts of violent sabotage, may often have been ineffective, but it was a vital help to Allied forces come D-Day. The central lesson of "Occupied France" and the other titles is simple. Collaboration -- like appeasement before it -- failed totally because it willfully misread Hitler's intentions.

Mr. Spotts is the author of "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Occupation" (Yale University Press, 2009)

*: 320.944 P and 944.0816 P
An interesting commentary on libraries and cataloguing. Same book is classified in two different ways: 320 is political science; 944 is General history of Europe; France & Monaco.