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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 PŽtain, 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.
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?"
Uncompromising, often startling, meticulously documented—this book is an account of the government, and the governed, of colaborationist France. Basing his work on captured German archives and contemporary materials rather than on self-serving postwar memoirs or war-trial testimony, Professor Paxton maps out the complex nature of the ill-famed Vichy government, showing that it in fact enjoyed mass participation. The majority of the Frenchmen in 1940 feared social disorder as the worse imaginable evil and rallied to support the State, thereby bringing about the betrayal of the Nation as a whole.
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.
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.
"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.
This masterful book is the first comprehensive reappraisal of the Vichy France regime for over 20 years. France was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, and the exact nature of France's role in the Vichy years is only now beginning to come to light. One of the main reasons that the Vichy history is difficult to tell is that some of France's most prominent politicians, including President Mitterand, have been implicated in the regime. This has meant that public access to key documents has been denied and it is only now that an objective analysis is possible. The fate of France as an occupied country could easily have been shared by Britain, and it is this background element, which enhances our fascination with Vichy France. How would we have acted under similar circumstances? The divisions and repercussions of the Vichy years still resonate in France today, and whether you view the regime as a fascist dictatorship, an authoritarian offshoot of the Third Reich or an embodiment of heightened French nationalism, Curtis's rounded, incisive book will be seen as the standard work on its subject for many years. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Historians agree: the diary of Léon Werth (1878-1955) is one of the most precious--and readable--pieces of testimony ever written about life in France under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Werth was a free-spirited and unclassifiable writer. He is the author of eleven novels, art and dance criticism, acerbic political reporting, and memorable personal essays. He was Jewish, and left Paris in June 1940 to hide out in his wife's country house in Saint-Amour, a small village in the Jura Mountains. His short memoir 33 Days recounts his struggle to get there. Deposition tells of daily life in the village, on nearby farms and towns, and finally back in Paris, where he draws the portrait of a Resistance network in his apartment and writes an eyewitness report of the insurrection that freed the city in August, 1944. From Saint-Amour, we see both the Resistance in the countryside, derailing troop trains, punishing notorious collaborators--and growing repression: arrests, torture, deportation, and executions. Above all, we see how Vichy and the Occupation affect the lives of farmers and villagers and how their often contradictory attitudes evolve from 1940-1944. Werth's ear for dialogue and novelist's gift for creating characters animate the diary: in the markets and in town, we meet real French peasants and shopkeepers, railroad men and the patronne of the café at the station, schoolteachers and gendarmes. They come off the page alive, and the countryside and villages come alive with them. With biting irony, Werth records, almost daily, what Vichy-German propaganda was saying on the radio and in the press. We follow the progress of the war as people did then, day by day. These entries make interesting, often amusing reading, a stark contrast with his gripping entries on the persecution and deportation of the Jews. Deposition is a varied and complex piece of living history, and a pleasure to read.
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.
Basing his work on French and German archives as well as on interviews and private correspondence, Sweets examines the French response to the Vichy government and Nazi occupation by studying Vichy's application of their experiment to the city of Clermont-Ferrand.