In the course of the last five years, Anglo-Saxon historians have displayed a sustained interest in the study of the second occupation, collaborationism, Vichy, and the Resistance. Much of this preoccupation with the subject as displayed by British, American and Canadian historians can no doubt be attributed to its unfamiliarity in their own national terms. Nor is there any sign of any falling off of research and secondary works devoted to France during this period, though, recently, British historians – as they have done with regard to the study of the French Revolution – have come to address themselves to all these related problems in a more local context, probably the only one, such is the extreme diversity both of collaborationism and resistance, to provide new approaches and valuable reassessments. In the last year I have reviewed Marrus and Paxton’s invaluable and deeply researched indictment, Vichy France and the Jews, Halls’s quite as significant and as deeply researched The Youth of Vichy France (which has, among other qualities, a great deal of unpublished material relating specifically to the Nord), David Pryce-Jones’s Paris in the Third Reich, a work perhaps rather too severe on the Parisians as a whole, but offering new material mostly from interviews with surviving German occupation officials (it also provides first-rate visual evidence of the Franco-German mingling in public and on social occasions, horse races and other leisure activities, a constant and useful reminder of the sheer ‘everydayness’ of the German presence), and, finally, Herbert Lottman’s The Left Bank, a somewhat gossipy account of literary frequentations, who met whom and where, between about 1933 and 1956, which nevertheless provides some quite new material derived from personal interviews. During the same period, I have had occasion to review Richard Griffiths’s excellent Fellow Travellers of the Right, a related subject in that it offers an account of those in Britain who might have become our own vichyssois and our own collaborationists, had circumstances turned out differently. As it was, most of those in this very disparate group – the only thing that they have in common is a varying degree of germanophilia, or, more rarely, of italophilia – were happily preserved from the temptation of having to make a choice that might have brought them into disrepute and disaster. Richard Griffiths’s book certainly helps us to bring a sense of proportion to the study of each of the personal case histories of those in France who took the one choice or the other, as well as of those who refused to make a choice at all. His book is, in this respect, a logical step forward from his previous study, his sober and fair-minded biography, Pétain, written over ten years ago, and still the best account of Pétain avant pétainisme, and of the formation of a Pétain party and a Pétain myth between 1934 and 1939. A few years earlier, I had read for review Roderick Kedward’s Resistance in Vichy France, a magnificent study based on original work on sources in the Southern Zone, as well as on interviews, particularly valuable for its treatment of the terrible choices facing PCF militants in the (for them) extremely difficult period of 1939–41. Anyone who tends to think of the PCF as a monolithic party, minutely controlled from the top, and responding with alacrity to orders from Paris – or from Brussels – should read this invaluable corrective: a description of bewildered individuals, isolated and left to their own devices, often cut off from even local fellow militants, and reduced to acting on instinct or impulse rather than on a ‘party line’ which often failed to express itself clearly. At about the same time, I reviewed David Weinberg’s compassionate and minutely researched Les Juifs à Paris, now published in English in the United States, a book that is a necessary prelude to the work by Marrus and Paxton that takes the dreadful story to its tragic, and, in so many cases, definitive, conclusion. Earlier still, I reviewed Pascal Jardin’s delightful account of his childhood in Vichy at a time when his father, Jean Jardin, was chef de cabinet of Pierre Laval, before fleeing to Switzerland in 1943. A few years after that, I wrote a review – which was never published – of Georgette Elgey’s diary as a schoolgirl, between the ages of 9 and 13, in English translation, under the title, The Open Window. Finally, I have had the pleasure of reviewing M. R. D. Foot’s account of resistance movements, a subject with which he was intimately connected, having accomplished several missions in occupied France; for myself, his book provided me with all the excitement of several dips into occupied France, a flirtation with resistance tourism, without any of the risks involved, risks which I would have been quite unprepared to incur had I been given the chance to do so at the time. I have also had three encounters with Malraux, one of them echoed four years ago in Le Canard enchaîné in his much inflated (indeed largely self-imagined) rôle as a resistance leader, in my reviews of Lacouture’s biography, Max Hastings’s recent study of the SS Division, Das Reich, and Herbert Lottman’s series of literary reminiscences. I have benefited, in different degrees, from all these books, so that, although I have never undertaken any personal research on the occupation period, I have felt that I did not come to the subject as a total stranger. As is the case with Bill Halls, I left just before Act One, and came back just after Act Five, leaving France in the late summer of 1939 and returning to it in midsummer 1944, so that I often had the impression that I had come in just after the end of the play. For someone in my position, Vichy would seem both very close and very distant, almost palpable and quite unattainable. Indeed, I had actually seen Admiral Platon, his colleague and their two aides-de-camp, two elegant lieutenants de vaisseau, during their stay at the Randolph Hotel, in June 1940, just as I had seen trainloads of French sailors as they passed through Oxford station on their way to Aintree – the very opposite direction to Vichy – at much the same time. It was pretty obvious even to an observer as ill informed as myself that the British authorities did not know what to do with these unwanted visitors (the sailors as unwanted as the admirals) and that they had left them entirely to their own devices, that is, to the blandishments of their officers, so that only a tiny proportion of them were to opt to remain in England and in the war, a golden opportunity that was missed by default and from lack of imagination (or, possibly, francophobia, for there was as much of that about in Britain in the summer of 1940 as there was of the counterproduct the other side of the Channel). Again, at much the same time, I had a long conversation with a French army evacuee from Dunkirk who was wounded and in hospital at Aylesbury. He told me that he was from the Pas-de-Calais and that his one idea was to get back there, to his family and his butcher’s shop. I hope that he did, though, by the time of his recovery, that would have been extremely difficult. Much later, in 1943/44, I had the fairly regular, and very moving, experience of broadcasting into occupied France and Belgium. I often wondered about my listeners, trying to give them individual identities, faces, names, professions. Was I heard in Paris? Later, in Roubaix, I encountered a number of people who had recognized my voice. This, too, provided a bridge over the years of enforced absence and separation.
I have tried to make up for these by an exhaustive gutting of literary material, novels and memoirs. I have drawn heavily on the diary of Barthas, on the Liller Kriegszeitung (discovered in the Bodleian) and on Invasion 14, as well as on the memoirs of General Spears, for the First World War. For the second occupation, I have found Guéhenno’s moving Journal des années noires much the most illuminating, though the novels and short stories of Marcel Aymé and Jean Dutourd have provided me with insights similarly intimate, even to the extent that many of their characters can actually make themselves heard to me, often in entirely familiar Paris slang, across the gap of years and the Channel. As a portrayal of the banality and everydayness of the German presence in a small provincial town, over the period of four years, the first volume of the Carnets of the Breton novelist, Louis Guilloux provides a testimony that offers a valuable antidote to overdramatic descriptions of the relations between occupants and occupés. In his daily observations, Guilloux introduces individual Germans of quite convincing human proportions, providing them with names, even accents and places of origin. Reading his muted account, one begins to realize that the Germans, in their regular daily occupations and in their as regular hours of leisure, come more and more to blend with the activities of the inhabitants and with the steady breathing of the coastal cathedral town, through the hours of daylight and darkness and through the seasons.
When I had my first conversation with an inhabitant of l’Hexagone – the first Frenchman I had met in four years who was not a Free Frenchman – an elderly Lower Norman peasant with a straggling sandy moustache, in July 1944, I felt that I was taking up a conversation that I had left off the day before. The years of severance disappeared overnight, I was back where I had started from. And yet, of course, I was not. Experience not shared is an almost uncrossable barrier. So I have tried to cross it above all by addressing myself to works of literature, rather than to historical studies. But probably the best bibliography of all has been supplied by so many of my French friends, both prewar and postwar, and in a few cases – the most interesting – both.
On the everyday administration of a great and complex city such as Paris, and on the daily cooperation between French and German technical services – power, public health, transport – Henri Michel’s latest work, Paris allemand has been a mine of information. Drawing mostly on the Bulletin municipal as a primary source, his account of these years of Parisian administrative history is likely to be definitive. I have also used Amouroux’s four volumes of material concerning the occupation years, a veritable ragbag of miscellaneous and often unrelated information, derived from a variety of sources that seem to constitute a private archive: document inédit en la possession de l’auteur is often the only indication of provenance, though there is no need to doubt the authenticity of a fonds that seems to have been collected in rather a haphazard manner. As a general rule, when all other sources are silent, it may be assumed that Amouroux will have the answer. He is particularly informative on the accidents and intimacies of personal relationships, especially between French and Germans, some of these even stretching back to the First World War and to the French occupation of the Rhineland, an event that produced its long-term results in the birth of a number of Franco-German children. It is only from Amouroux that one can discover that some of the conquerors of 1940 were themselves half French, or that some of the occupés of the same year had German daughters. Amouroux is a masterful observer of encounters of such an intimate and unexpected kind. He depicts an elderly Breton peasant resolutely refusing to open her door to a German soldier whom she recognizes as her son, a man who had deserted to the Germans in 1917 and who had returned to his former country in 1942. I have myself met the illegitimate daughter of a German admiral in command at Brest and a local prostitute from the rue de Siam.
Pascal Ory offers an admirable record on the political origins of the various forms of collaborationism. For the first occupation, apart from Barthas and van der Meersh and the German soldiers’ newspaper in Lille, I have made use of the official Michelin guide for Lille published in 1920, as well as a number of articles devoted to Lille, Douai, Valenciennes and Roubaix in the Revue du Nord and the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine. I have also drawn on the childhood recollections of two of my friends, Arthur Birembaut and Emile Auvray, the former from Hénin-Liétard, the latter from Lens. I have also found much useful material in Perreux’s book on civilian life during the First World War. Finally, I examined the thesis devoted to Marcel Déat presented at Oxford for the D.Phil. by Clive Youlden. A detailed list of works consulted appears below.
Amoretti, Henri. Lyon capitale 1940–44. Paris, 1946.
Amouroux, Henri. Le Peuple du désastre. Paris, 1976.
——. Quarante millions de pétainistes. Paris, 1977.
——. Les Beaux Jours des collabos. Paris, 1978.
——. Le Peuple réveillé. Paris, 1979.
——. Les Passions et les haines. Paris, 1981.
Aron, Robert. The Vichy Régime. Philadelphia, 1966.
——. Léopold III ou le choix impossible. Paris, 1977.
Aymé, Marcel. Le Vin de Paris. Paris, 1947.
Barthas, Louis. Les Carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier, 1914–1918. Paris, 1979.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. D’un château l’autre. Paris, 1957.
Cobb, Richard. ‘The Anatomy of a Fascist’. In A Second Identity. Oxford, 1969.
——. Promenades. Oxford, 1980.
Dabit, Eugène. Journal intime 1928–1936. Paris, 1939.
Dejonghe, Etienne. ‘Aperçus sur la zone réservée’. Revue du Nord, 1978.
——. ‘Aspects du régime d’occupation dans de Nord et le Pas-de-Calais pendant le seconde Guerre mondiale’. Revue du Nord, 1978.
Delarue, Jacques. Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation. Paris, 1968.
Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre. L’Homme couvert de femmes. Paris, 1925.
——. Mémoires de Dirk Raspe. Paris, 1966.
Ducasse, André, Meyer, Jacques, and Perreux, Gabriel. Vie et mort des Français 1914–1918. Paris, 1959.
Dutourd, Jean. Au Bon Beurre. Paris, 1964.
Duvertie, Dominique. ‘Amiens sous l’occupation allemande 1940–1944’. Revue du Nord, 1982.
Elgey, Georgette. The Open Window. London, 1973.
Fabre-Luce, Alfred. Journal de France 1939–1944. Geneva, 1964.
Field, Frank. Three French Writers and the Great War: Barbusse, Drieu la Rochelle, Bernanos. Cambridge, 1975.
Foot, M. R. D. Resistance: European Resistance to Nazism 1940–1945. London, 1976.
Galtier-Boissière, Jean. Mon journal pendant l’occupation. Paris, 1944.
——. Mon journal dans la drôle de paix. Paris, 1947.
Gascar, Pierre. Les Bêtes. Paris, 1958.
Gordon, Bertram M. Collaborationism in France during the Second World War. Ithaca, 1980.
Griffiths, Richard. Pétain. London, 1970.
——. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–1939. London, 1980.
Guéhenno, Jean. Journal des années noires 1940–1944. Paris, 1947.
Guilloux, Louis. Carnets 1921–1944. Paris, 1978.
——. Carnets 1944–1974. Paris, 1982.
Halls, W. D. The Youth of Vichy France. Oxford, 1981.
Hamilton, Alastair. The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945. London, 1971.
Hastings, Max. Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division through France, June 1944. London, 1981.
Jardin, Pascal. La guerre à 9 ans. Récit. Paris, 1971.
Kedward, Roderick. Resistance in Vichy France. Oxford, 1978.
Lageat, Robert. Robert des Halles. Paris, 1980.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Paris-Montpellier PC-PSU, 1945–1963. Paris, 1982.
Lille Before and During the War. Clermont-Ferrand, 1919.
Liller Kriegszeitung. 1915–1918.
Marrus, Michael, and Paxton, Robert. Vichy et les Juifs. Paris, 1981. (Vichy France and the Jews. New York, 1981.) The French edition contains a full set of documents concerning anti-Semitic legislation.
Meyers, W. ‘Les Collaborateurs flamands de France et leurs contacts avec les milieux flamingants belges’. Revue du Nord, 1978.
Michel, Henri. Paris allemand. Paris, 1981.
Moulin de Labarthète, Henri du. Le Temps des illusions. Souvenirs (juillet 1940–avril 1942). Geneva, 1946.
Ory, Pascal. Les Collaborateurs. Paris, 1976.
Paquis, Jean Hérold. Des illusions … Désillusions (15 août 1944–15 août 1945). Paris, 1948.
Paxton, Robert. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order. New York, 1972.
Perreux, Gabriel. La Vie quotidienne des civils en France pendant la Grande Guerre. Paris, 1966.
Peyrefitte, Roger. Les Amitiés particulières. Paris, 1943.
——. Manouche. Paris, 1972.
Plumyène, J., and Lasierra, R. Les Fascismes français. Paris, 1966.
Pryce-Jones, David. Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation 1940–1944. London, 1981.
Rousseau, M. ‘Douai 1939–1945’. Revue du Nord, 1979.
Sicard, Maurice-Yvan, under the pseudonym Saint-Paulien. Histoire de la Collaboration. Paris, 1966.
Spears, Edward. Two Men Who Saved France: Pétain 1917. De Gaulle 1940. London, 1966.
——. Liaison 1914. London, 1939.
——. Assignment to Catastrophe. London, 1955.
Teissier du Cros, Janet. Divided Loyalties. A Scotswoman in Occupied France. London, 1962.
Trouillé, Pierre. Journal d’un préfet pendant l’Occupation. Paris, 1972.
Vandenbussche, R. ‘Le Pouvoir municipal à Douai sous l’occupation 1914–1918’. Revue du Nord, 1979.
Van der Meersch, Maxence. Invasion 1914. Paris, 1935.
Vidalenc, Jean. L’Exode de mai-juin 1940. Paris, 1957.
Warner, Geoffrey. Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France 1931–1945. New York, 1968.
Weinberg, David. Les Juifs à Paris de 1933 à 1939. Paris, 1974. (A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s. Chicago, 1977.)
White, Ralph, and Hawes, Stephen, eds. Resistance in Europe 1939–1945. London, 1979.