France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944
by Julian Jackson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julian JacksonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-03-27
ISBN: 0199254575
Number of pages: 688
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944
Book Review: Embracing Contradictions and Complexity to Construct a Usable Memory for the Future
Summary: 5 Stars
`The history of France in this period cannot be understood in separate compartments like `the Vichy regime,' `the Resistance', or `collaboration': these existed in dynamic relation to each other, and the history of France in this period must be conceived as a whole. These are strands but they make up one history.' `Vichy contained modernizers as well as conservatives... reinserted Vichy into a longer historical context, drawing out continuities with France's past and future. The future of the history of the Resistance needs to embrace its full diversity - Gaullist and non-Gaullist, Communist and non-Communist, North and South, men and women, French and immigrants - but also to reconnect the history of the Resistance to the society around it, to the French past, and to the Vichy regime.'
The social ideology of the governing elite after the fall of France owed its pedigree to the crisis of confidence in parliamentary Republic during the 1930s. `Maurras's movement, Action francaise synthesized royalism, nationalism, and Catholicism into a single doctrine which he called "integral nationalism".' `Nonconformists of the 1930s' whose disillusion with the Republic went deeper,' and their `Order Nouveau' repudiated liberal capitalism as `incapable of developing a rationally organized society.' The political paralysis after the Great Depression (the 1932 elections and their seventeen ministries in eighteen months; radical governments and their efforts to rally conservative support for socialist policies.) opened the way for `direct action by social groups,' where the `illustration of political polarization was less the violence of the extremes than the blurring of the boundaries between the parliamentary right, and the extreme right.' The massive majority that empowered Daladier to revise the constitution `revealed an erosion of faith in the institutions of the Republic across the entire political spectrum.'
Vichy was `a testimony to the long-term corrosive effect of Action francaise on French liberalism: all strands of French conservatism were present at Vichy.' Its National Revolution `defined itself first and foremost in opposition to liberal individualism which uprooted people from the `natural' communities of family, workplace, and region.' In its measures against foreigners, like the repeal of the 1939 Marchandeau decree prohibiting the publication of material inciting racial hatred, `Vichy was only extending legislation which had been started under the Republic.' Nonetheless, the National Revolution took a back seat to economic realities (e.g. married women became liable for labor service in Germany, regional constitution reinforcing state control rather than returning to `natural communities.') `The regime, or organizations which developed with its benediction, had up to a point, enjoyed many intellectuals' support, is testimony to the crisis of traditional republican values in France at the end of the 1930s. All these people had shared a certain number of preoccupations: a sense of living through a profound crisis of civilization which required a remaking of mankind; a belief that liberal individualism was incapable of embracing humanity in all its wholeness; and a conviction that the void which had opened up in France in 1940 offered vast possibilities.'
On collaboration, Vichy `realpolitik was wishful thinking based on a complete misreading of Germany': the regime `believed that it had trump cards - the fleet, the Empire, the Free Zone - but paradoxically the very existence of these prevented a more robust policy. Precisely because it did have something to lose, the Vichy government was always terrified to push its case too far for fear of provoking the Germans. Vichy only won paltry concession.' In the abortive Protocols of Paris May 1941, Darlan `had taken France to the brink of military collaboration and that he drew back for want of German political concession.' In 1940, `Laval's policy of collaboration had had little chance of success because the Germans hardly wanted anything France had to offer; in 1942, it had no chance of success because the Germans wanted so much that nothing the French offered would be enough.' With the German occupation of the rest of France in November 1942, `everything Vichy had salvaged from the catastrophe of 1940 was irremediably lost: the fleet, the Armistice Army , the Free Zone, and the Empire.'
In spite of the higher Jewish survival rate in France than in much of Western Europe, Jackson inculpated Vichy's role in Jewish persecution for its active co-operation with the Germans. According to Jackson, `the fate of the Jews depended on a variety of factors: the presence of an independent government able to interpose itself between the Jews and the Germans; the willingness of such government to do so; the numbers of German occupation troops; the timing of German anti-Jewish policies; the reactions of public opinion and the organizations which expressed it; the effectiveness of rescue networks; the geography and topography of the country; the size and distribution of the Jewish population. None of these factors was decisive in itself, and what mattered was how they combined.' `Without French police cooperation, it would have been difficult for the Germans to arrest the foreign Jews. About ¾ of all Jews were arrested by French police.' Furthermore, `Vichy's desire always to keep up with the Germans meant that anti-Semitism spiraled continuously in a more radical direction; Vichy continued to implement its own separate policy of persecution. (e.g. the French government imposed the Jewish Statutes, not the Germans). `The truth is that without Vichy's co-operation, it would have been impossible for the Germans to arrest as many Jews as they did.'
Demonstrating the dynamic relationship between Vichy and the Resistance, `being directly confronted with Vichy, the Southern movements evolved in response to it, while the Northern ones did not. In the North, those starting hostile to Vichy remained so; other were slow to rethink their position. In the South, however, ideology became central to the self definition of the Resistance, which started to develop a common rhetoric, drawing on the traditions of French republicanism.' `Given the reputation of the Republic by the end of the 1930s, this reassertion of republican values was not self-evident. It was a situation which Vichy itself created by becoming so identifiably a right-wing regime. It was Vichy which ensured that the Resistance would be Republican.' Jackson assailed the de Gaulle's Resistance myth - despite a few traitors, the French nation, united behind de Gaulle, had liberated itself and what occurred between 1939 and 1944 was represented not as a French civil war, but as an episode in a longer struggle against Germany - was problematic because `it imposed a unitary vision on what had been highly fragmented experience.'
Jackson concluded that `clearly any attempt to build an identity around the idea that Vichy was not France will be doomed to failure: de Gaulle's assertion that Vichy was null and void no longer serves any purpose in contemporary France. On the other hand, it is no less misleading to repudiate the existence of a Resistance which also represented `France'... the French past must be faced in all its contradictions and complexity. Only then can it be critically evaluated, and instead of serving to salve the conscience of the present, it can become a usable memory for the future.'
Summary of France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944
This is the first comprehensive study of the German occupation of France between 1940 and 1944. The author examines the nature and extent of collaboration and resistance, different experiences of Occupation, the persecution of the Jews, intellectual and cultural life under Occupation, and the purge trials that followed. He concludes by tracing the legacy and memory of the Occupation since 1945. Taking in ordinary peoples' experiences, this volume uncovers the conflicting memories of occupation which ensure that even today France continues to debate the legacy of the Vichy years.France Books
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