Product Description

In the summer of 1940 the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory. In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz. Extremely moving and brilliantly readable, The Unfree French is a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108766 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Literary Review
`A history of the French people under occupation from their point of view ... immaculately researched, well-written and original'

Scotsman
`An utterly absorbing, eye-opening account'

Oldie
`A masterly survey of the years when the French learned to live under the rule of the Nazis'

Customer Reviews

Excellent wide-ranging history of France's 'Dark Years'
The Unfree French covers the most important aspects of life under the German occupation - collaboration and resistance, keeping body and soul together under severe restrictions, and so on. It also describes subjects less often touched on in books on the topic: emotional relationships between French men and women, French and Germans, the changing position of women in society, the sufferings (or not) of the two million-odd French prisoners of war in Germany, town-country relations.

Overall, a very good history of the times, full of new archival material that always illustrates the dilemmas of life under occupation. Like Robert Gildea's 'Marianne in Chains", Mr Vinen's book draws very much on regional archives and masters and doctoral theses from regional universities. While this provides fascinating content, it tends to reduce events in Paris to a mere sideshow in some ways. This was slightly disappointing, which explains the four stars; otherwise, the book is easily a five-star success.

Rather dry yet informative
This book gives a good overview of circumstances effecting different sections of French society through the years of the occupation. Through largely statistical evidence it provides a history which tends to read very dryly and does not give the reader an emotional overview or development of general life through the occupation. Of course this is a very complex issue and each individual would have had their own experience; making it impossible to stereotype a typical experience, however this particular publication does prove to be a little too 'academic' to be classed as enjoyable. In terms of giving statistical evidence to support his work, Vinen does very well, but unfortunately these statistics make the book rather less readable than the work of Ian Ousby which I would recommend over this particular publication.

Miserable for most, plushy for some
The excellence of this book on occupied France lies in the author's skill in creating order out of the chaos of factors that confronted the French against each other. Degrees of collaboration, degrees of resistance, living in a city, living in an agricultural region,living in the Free Zone, living in the occupied zone, age, sex, (and sex), and of course Jewishness and attitudes towards it. In spite of being minutely documented and written in a rather impersonal tone, this remains a very readable account of a society split in so many ways against itself. The impersonal tone lets the facts, some of them horrific, speak for themselves.
I did expect to find more mention of the Resistance, which remains largely off-stage. But no doubt there is already an enormous literature on that subject - and perhaps they counted as "free French"?.

Essential reading for anyone interested in war-time Europe.