Product Description

Defeat in 1940 left the French so chastened and demoralized that they readily supported the Vichy regime, committed not just to pragmatic collaberation but to finding scapegoats for the nation's disgrace. Jews, Communists, pre-war politicians from the Third Republic, school teachers and Freemasons all fell victim to a witch-hunt which left plenty of scope for private grudges as well. Resistance came late: de Gaulle's appeal in 1940 for France to continue to fight went largely unheard, and the Occupation was fourteen months old before the first German soldier was killed by resistants. The public mood changed only as the Reicht's original correctness gave way to brutality and as events outside France prefigured possible German defeat. Even as Liberation approached, resistance was still local, small-scale and divided, never the mass army of later myth. Different visions of who should inherit France complicated the persuit of collaberators and foreshadowed the chaos of post-war politics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52990 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 363 pages

From the Publisher
'A brilliantly written book, the first history - social and cultural as well as political and military - of the Occupation to be published in English for the general reader' - INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY.

About the Author
Ian Ousby wrote widely on subjects both English and French. His recent books include The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English and Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944, which won the 1997 Edith McLeod Literary Prize, given annually to the British book which 'has contributed most to Franco-British understanding', and the 1997 Stern Silver PEN Award for Non-fiction. He died in August 2001.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent and readable
I spend a lot of time in France and have long wanted to learn about the German occupation of World War II, but it's still an exquisitely sensitive subject in France. It took me some time to unearth this book, which is I think the only one in English aimed at the general reader. It is a real find.

Ian Ousby writes about people and human experience as much as events. He spares us the turgid pages of maps and military minutiae that so often make WWII history books a chore and instead tackles some challenging questions head-on. What was it like for the French? And for the Germans? How did the French face the dilemma that any government aiming to defy the Nazis must be a government in exile, whereas an administration choosing to stay in France with its suffering people must be both a compromise and a perilous dalliance with the invader?

Ousby deals impressively with these issues and leads us further into the strange terrain of Occupation, illuminating for instance the vital role of language and symbols. He explains the subtleties of the words and phrases (some still in use) that the French coined to deal with their new existence, and he reveals a paradox: only through silence could most Frenchmen defy the occupier; but beneath the silence there must be communication - an underground current of words, slogans, tracts and literature. A new generation of writers and thinkers grew out of this twilight world, among them Camus and Sartre, and it's easy to forget that the weapon of choice for the vast majority of résistants was the pamphlet rather than the bomb.

As for the symbol, the powerful part that it played had been lost on me, whether the swastika that desecrated the Eiffel Tower, the star that the Vichy regime forced its French Jews to wear, or indeed the V-sign. (According to Ousby, the V-sign was a German symbol appropriated by Churchill and turned against the Nazis. But doesn't legend have it that it originated as the defiant gesture of the English archers at Agincourt who taunted their French foe for threatening to amputate the digits used to draw a bowstring?)

The great strength of this book is that it is unflinching. While Ousby shows sensitivity and empathy, he tells it how it was. Evil was done. Cowards and bullies had their day. Betrayal was rife, and recrimination gripped France not just for the years of Occupation, but for decades thereafter.

This is not entirely an ugly story, though. Ousby charts first the retreat underground and overseas of the champions of French decency and courage, but then the eventual triumph of this great nation over an intolerable ordeal. This was a victory - if a tarnished victory - over subjugation and brutality; a drawing of the poison of betrayal; and the birth of a new society whose pains of labour still resonate across Europe.

The Definitive History of the Occupation
This book should appeal to historians, students and everybody with an interest in history. For me, it is the definitive single-volume history of the Occupation of France. The Author successfully captures the mood of the people in France, and their attitudes towards each other and the occupying forces. From occupation to the first hints of resistance, until the Liberation of France, this book is as hard to put down as any gripping fiction I have read recently. Definitely a history volume for everybody, and not just serious scholars.

Not really an academic work, but well worth reading
Ian Ousby does a good job in this book. He notes modestly that he has no pretensions to being considered an academic expert on modern France or Nazi Germany, but his account of the Occupation is very lively and generally reliable. Recommended for those who want a vivid picture of what ordinary life was like during this most painful episode of French history.