Provides the definitive account of Vichy's own antisemitic policies and practices. It is a major contribution to the history of the Jewish tragedy in wartime Europe answering the haunting question, "What part did Vichy France really play in the Nazi effort to murder Jews living in France?"
From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.
"Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy France, 1940-1944 offers an unprecedented view of French life during World War II under German occupation. Most of these images came from the Vichy government office of information and propaganda and have not been seen in historical context. Some have never before been published. Other images, such as posters, newspapers, leaflets, and rare photographs that make evident the activity of the Resistance, as well as the machine of German propaganda, are taken from little-known archival sources."--BOOK JACKET.
In 1920s France the far-right peasantry wanted an authoritarian and agrarian society. This study examines their singular lack of success and the enduring French perception of themselves as a peasant nation.
Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy governmentÑa fateful decision that nearly destroyed the AngloÐAmerican alliance. According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the Òmost shocking single eventÓ of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American responseÑa policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain. The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American plannersÕ strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The USÐVichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained AngloÐAmerican relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Ptain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted USÐFrench relations for decades. Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.
In 1942, the dictatorial regime of occupied France held a show trial that didn‘t work. In a society from which democratic checks and balances had been eliminated, under a regime that made its own laws to try its opponents, the government‘s signature legal initiative – a court packed with sympathetic magistrates and soldiers whose investigation of the defunct republic‘s leaders was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the new regime – somehow not only failed to result in a conviction, but, in spite of the fact that only government-selected journalists were allowed to attend, turned into a podium for the regime‘s most bitter opponents. The public relations disaster was so great that the government was ultimately forced to cancel the trial. This catastrophic would-be show trial was not forced upon the regime by Germans unfamiliar with the state of domestic opinion; rather, it was a home-grown initiative whose results disgusted not only the French, but also the occupiers. This book offers a new explanation for the failure of the Riom Trial: that it was the result of ideas about the law that were deeply imbedded in the culture of the regime’s supporters. They genuinely believed that their opponents had been playing politics with the nation’s interests, whereas their own concerns were apolitical. The ultimate lesson of the Riom Trial is that the abnegation of politics can produce results almost as bad as a deliberate commitment to stamping out the beliefs of others. Today, politicians on both sides of the political spectrum denounce excessive polarization as the cause of political gridlock; but this may simply be what real democracy looks like when it seeks to express the wishes of a divided people.
From 1941 to 1943, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein translated for an American audience thirty-two speeches in which Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government, outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with its Nazi occupiers. Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake such a project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, her apparent Vichy protector. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, treating their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination.
First Published in 1998. Weisberg provides a comprehensive account of the French legal system's complicity with its German occupiers during the dark period known as 'Vichy'. Drawing on archival sources, personal interviews, and historical research, this book reveals how legalized persecution operated on a practical level, often exceeding German expectations. All while comparing the Vichy experience to American legal precedents and practices, opening the possibility that postmodern modes of thinking ironically adopt the complexity of Vichy reasoning to a host of reading and thinking strategies.
This book, first published in 1985, examines various aspects of the intellectual achievements of writers and artists in the Vichy period; a strong emphasis on the ambiguity of much of their work emerges from the research. It goes a long way in answering the question of what it was like living under the fascist Vichy regime, and what the collaborators and resistance thought about their purpose and patriotism.
Provides a new history of parliamentary conservatism and the extreme right in France during the successive crises of the years from 1870 to 1945. Charts royalist opposition to the newly established Republic, the emergence of the nationalist extreme right in the 1890s, and the parallel development of republican conservatism.