Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944
by Ian Ousby
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ian OusbyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-04-03
ISBN: 0815410433
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Book Reviews of Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944
Book Review: Entertaining, charming, remarkably comprehensive
Summary: 5 Stars
The French experience of 1940-44 was primarily a cultural happening, rather than a political or military one. This is an obvious fact, but also an inconvenient one. Histories habitually focus on militaria and political squabbling. How do you get a grasp on an era when there were no battles or politics? Ian Ousby's solution is to make a cultural survey of the time, focusing primarily on the minutiae of everyday living under the Occupation, rather than on the self-aggrandizing postwar fables of ideologues and fanatics.
Ousby notes fashion and literary trends--and tells us, inevitably but with a dash of humor, what Sartre was doing. Less frivolously, he tosses us statistical nuggets like the following:
'By 1942 the mortality rate in Paris was 40 percent higher than it had been in the years 1932-8; deaths from tuberculosis among the elderly and young had doubled. In the poorer districts of the city adolescent girls growing up between 1935 and 1944 were 11 centimetres shorter, and boys 7 centimetres shorter, than their predecessors. A generation developed bad teeth. Adults lost anything between 4 and 8 kilos.'
You wouldn't want to read a book of paragraphs like that, but it works very well where Ousby's put it. It's in a fascinating middle chapter, "Are You in Order," which discusses smuggling, rationing, 'Le Systeme D', and how Sartre and de Beauvoir's joint of pork had white maggots in it, though they ate it anyway.
Ousby is a journalist and literary critic rather than an academic or so-called "professional historian." This gives him an enormous advantage over most writers on the period. He does not bring a suitcase of prejudices to the party, or buttonhole us in a corner while explaining how wonderful and innocent the Communists were, or how feckless was De Gaulle, or how corrupt was the small-town postmaster who looked the other way when the Gestapo came to town. Instead he tells what appears to be a fair and balanced and well-researched story.
If you've read a variety of other stuff on the period, you may find Ousby's outlook charmingly naive, even eccentric. For example, most historians regard Paul Reynaud, the last French PM in 1940, as a weak number--a bombastic, egotistical flake, in thrall to his bossy mistress, a little man who talked big and accomplished nothing. Ousby doesn't seem to be aware of this body of opinion. He paints Reynaud as an energetic and able statesman, France's last hope, who came on the scene just a moment too late. But who knows...maybe Ousby's right!
Summary of Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944
France was slow and somewhat ineffectual in organizing resistance movement. In Occupation Ian Ousby challenges the myth that France was liberated " by the whole of France." The author explores the Nazi occupation of France with superb detail and eyewitness accounts that range from famous figures like Simone de Beauvoir, Charles de Gaulle, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gertrude Stein to ordinary citizens, forgotten heroes and traitors.France Books
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