France Under the Germans

Burrin, a professor of international history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, argues that the options faced by the French during the German occupation of WWII were not just between the extremes of collaboration and resistance. Although the Vichy government set the official example by collaborating with the Nazis, most French citizens chose the expedient (and sometimes profitable) path of passive accommodation. The first third of this detailed study traces the history of Vichy France during the first years of the occupation. The rest of the book deals with how the French people (not their government) either accommodated or collaborated. Those who actively resisted the occupiers seem to have been such an insignificant group that they are barely touched on here. According to Burrin, the French found German soldiers cleaner and more polite than they expected. The Germans found the French anti-British, anti-American and anti-Semitic. The major portion of this scholarly study shows how various groups came to terms with the Germans: labor unions, the church, the banks, the military, businessmen, prostitutes, small-time entrepreneurs, petty crooks, the intelligentsia. Also covered is the German propaganda machine and the use it made of regional separatism within France. The artistic community, Burrin suggests, was never as brave in standing up to the occupiers as it liked to pretend, largely because the Germans were quite permissive, except on the subject of the Jews. As for the Jews, his most damning charge is that when the Nazis demanded that adult Jews be shipped east to the camps, the French insisted that the children had to go with them. This is not easy reading, but in its unhurried, academic pace, it packs a punch. (Feb.)