Occupation : The Ordeal of France, 1940-44

by Ian Ousby

Defeat in 1940 left the French so chastened and demoralized that they readily supported the Vichy regime, committed not just to pragmatic collaberation but to finding scapegoats for the nation's disgrace. Jews, Communists, pre-war politicians from the Third Republic, school teachers and Freemasons all fell victim to a witch-hunt which left plenty of scope for private grudges as well. Resistance came de Gaulle's appeal in 1940 for France to continue to fight went largely unheard, and the Occupation was fourteen months old before the first German soldier was killed by resistants. The public mood changed only as the Reicht's original correctness gave way to brutality and as events outside France prefigured possible German defeat. Even as Liberation approached, resistance was still local, small-scale and divided, never the mass army of later myth. Different visions of who should inherit France complicated the persuit of collaberators and foreshadowed the chaos of post-war politics.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, World War II, Military History, 20th Century, Holocaust

363 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

I an Ousby's life began - and ended - in tragedy. The birth was tragic, or at least bleak, because his army officer father had been stabbed to death in the India of 1947, independence year, while his mother was pregnant with him. The death was tragic, or at least deeply sad, because his industry, insight, versatility, critical and literary skills, which had created a considerable reputation for him as a writer in diverse fields, have been cut off by cancer at the relatively early age of 54.
Ousby never seemed a very contemporary figure and eschewed fashion and fashions of all kinds. Mannered and slightly languid - but not eccentric - in speech and dress, he was an essentially shy man who was able, through the clarity of his thought and the manner of his expression, to get trenchantly to the heart of the matter, somewhat like a 19th-century essayist but without a hint of the dilettante. As writer, scholar and broadcaster, his contributions ranged through several genres: the study of detective fiction, travel, literature and modern French history among them. His readers were far flung: his book on the American novel was translated into Russian, on detectives in fiction into Japanese.
Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, he had a reputation as a rebel at school, Bishop's Stortford College. A young and liberal headmaster was not quite liberal enough for Ousby, and he fulminated in the school magazine, of which he was editor, against the public schools as "the last institutions in which changes in national attitude, thought or social pattern are reflected". An active member of CND from his early teens, he would go on the Easter marches, and proselytised in the provinces for the newly published Private Eye.
Yet all this was misleading. Pitchforked into American student unrest at the end of the 1960s when he went to Harvard for his doctorate, he found the radicalism unpleasant and the time-wasting unacceptable. Writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1972, he observed: "Mercifully, political consciousness seems to have diminished, so they [the students] won't be going on strike all the time."
The author of several books on early tourism and of Blue Guides to Literary Britain and Ireland (1985), England (1989) and Burgundy (1992), he had most recently been working on a major study, The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War, news of which has been greeted with excited anticipation in the world of books, and which will be published early next year. As a young man Ousby had quoted Martin Luther King approvingly: "You can never get rid of a problem as long as you hide the problem." In private life, like many or most of us, he probably failed to live up to that; in his writing, he triumphantly exemplified its message.

Biography source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/a...

Reviews

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It depends on how you view the collaboration of many of the French people during the occupation of their country, especially Paris, by the Nazis during WWII as to how you will enjoy or dislike this book.
If, however, you have no preconceived notions about that period of French history, it will provide an interesting window on a time of defeatism, ennui, collaboration, and resistance.

The author has done well documented and in-depth research into the activities of the government, both at Vichy and in London/Algiers where DeGaulle was the titular head of the provisional government......the Free French. Some of the the myths that are held as truths today are questioned, particularly regarding the strength, inner turmoil, and organization of maquis, the resistance group(s). Neither is the author an apologist for nor a condemner of Marshal Petain and his Vichy government but treats him as fairly as possible as an aged, naive, and misguided man who actually believed he was doing the best for France.

This history tends to bog down periodically but no enough to have an effect on my rating. It is a detailed history of a very troubled time in French history.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched, well organised, philosophical overview of France under Nazi occupation. The author depicts a humiliated, abject nation where collaboration and opportunism are much more common than resistance. How the Nazis found a lot of extreme right wing anti-semitic feeling in France to exploit and thus were often able to let the willing French do their dirty work for them. It's interesting how novels mostly depict the French as heroic freedom fighters which seems a case of ignoring the many and singling out the few. When the tide of the war turned and it became clear Hitler was going to lose it's true there was more opposition but this book depicts a country at war with itself, a country going through an identity crisis and finally a country that emerges from the war with far more shame than glory. The Vichy government for example has to stand up as one of the most pathetic cynical governments in the history of Europe. Petain, a vain and virtually senile old man, who has lost all contact with reality - ring any bells? It's extraordinary how a lot of men rise to power. The world is full of intelligent gifted clear sighted individuals and yet we end up with nut jobs like Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, Hitler, Mussolini and Petain governing us. Make sense of that if you can!

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'enfer, c'est les Autres. . The polite Wehrmacht tourist soldiers, the SS, la Gestapo, the polite policiers who checked whether your papers were in order and rang your door in the morning. They were behind the hungry queues, the improvised wartime chic in their beflowered turbans, the French workers who slaved on the Dora V-2 site along Russian P.O.W.'s.

Sartre's oft misanthropically expanded line suits an atmosphere of ambiguity which runs like a grey thread throughout the book. The ordeal of France was akin to a civil war by proxy in the highest echelons, where the armed forces of the Free French and Vichy France faced eachother in Syria. At the grass roots level, the necessities of primus vivendur overrode consciences and turned eyes blind. Trains steaming into Paris from the countryside earned food-themed nicknames as they fueled a profilic black market that frayed the law and enriched both career criminals and a new class of profiteers.

Yet it also counterbalanced a German extraction policy that depleted the entire country not just of foodstuffs but of myriad household goods until it was impossible zu leben wie Gott in Frankreich unless you were one of 'them'. What can you do when your café is designated for German soldiers, close up shop? What can you do when official rations are so inadequate that vitamin deficiencies raised a generation of zazou teenagers several centimeters shorter than their pre-war counterparts?

There is no verdict on the mythology of the Fifth Republic, with De Gaulle as the titan of a united and tenacious national Resistance, but it is revealed to be a mythology: his position as the leader of the free French was far from secure before Normandy and the casualty rate among both the urban Resistance and the Maquis of the rural south was high due to a mix of amateurism and a dire lack of weaponry. Patriotism was no match for the cold professionalism of a totalitarian security apparatus, even if its numbers were minute relative to the demographic under surveillance, and highly dependent on the French police force and the inevitable flock of civilian informants.

Exasperated SOE agents attributed this trait to that peculiar 'French openness' while they did their best to orchestrate accurate parachute drops for resistance groups as ill-equipped as the ZOB in the Warsaw ghetto. The distribution of explosives changed the nature of the Resistance from poorly orchestrated murders and symbolic deeds such as defacing propaganda posters to an undervalued contribution to the Allied landings, in the form of a centralized sabotage offensive that supported the brute force of tactical bombing like a lancet in the night.

A perfect introduction, no more, no less. Fresh off The Road to Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism I was surprised to learn Ousby was not an accredited historian, but he makes up for that with an unashamed love for a country that was first uprooted and then turned on itself.

There is a lot fit within these 300 pages, like a beautiful stained glass window, but it is crafted in an uneven manner: only at the end do you realize just how much Résistance was written here. By contrast, assimilated Jewish neighbours disappear as fading stars in the fog rather swiftly. Pétain and the Vichy government are present, but their very powerlessness in the face of Nazi overlordship keeps them out of focus, like a person trapped under ice.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

The occupation of France during the Second World War has to be viewed from a distance to be brought into focus at all. It is done brilliantly by the Englich historian Ian Ousby. He searched original sources to capture the attitudes of the times, as well as specific events. France suffered swift military defeat and then the humiliation of a collaborationist government. Petain's Vichy government hoped to negotiate better terms for French citizens, and it seemed to be working until Germany's need for food and workers became too urgent. As deprivation became more severe, clusters of resisters, "Maquis", rural guerillas, sprung up, as individual clusters, some Communist, some not. They were good at sabotage, and to attempt to control them, an opposing French militia, "Millice", was developed. The internal war became Frenchmen-against-Frenchmen. By the end of the war, retribution became the order of the day, again, Frenchman against Frenchman, often for no clear reason. Anti-semitism was near-universal. All this sad story is told in flowing prose, with attention to the level of documentation available. It is an attempt to portray that dismal era as accurately as possible. This is what a history should be: a readable book, well-researched, as neutral as possible, and enlightening.

[Basicallyrun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is, quite simply, brilliant. If you want a guide to how life was actually lived under Nazi rule, look no further. I'm studying the topic in French lessons at the moment and this book has been invaluable. It's readable, interesting, and if you've an interest in French writers like Sartre it gives you a rather unique perspective on their role in the Resistance. Also, quite a few of the terms are left untranslated, making it pretty useful for all the essays I'll have to write come summer. One caveat: it's awfully slow going. Not disinteresting, but I did find I could only read a couple of dozen pages at a time, which is very rare for me.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book on the occupation of France and the Fascist Vichy government under Petain, that replaced "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with "Work, Family, Country".

[Elizabeth Whitman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating narration and analysis of the 1940-44 Nazi Occupation of France, which I set out to explore after reading two novels set during this period: the sad and wonderful Suite Française and the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See. In this book you learn about what Germany sought to accomplish through the Occupation and how the French government came to agree to it. You learn about what daily life was like for French citizens and about why some of them became “collabos” while others, through gestures grand or small, became résistants. You learn about the unspeakable treatment of French Jews in particular, not only by the Nazis but by the occupiers’ compliant French partners as well. You learn about how de Gaulle and the Allies finally ended the Occupation and about the rough efforts made to bring collaborators to justice after the Liberation. After reading the book you understand why to this day the Occupation is a source of shame as well as sadness for France.

I found the book eminently readable. It is in the middle of a spectrum running from very academic to very popular – for me, the sweet spot. It is not loaded with pedantic detail and dry analysis but at the same time is sober and well researched. The author was not a professional historian but rather a professor of literature (which must be why the book is so well written). Alas, he died, at a fairly young age, not long after Occupation was published. I wish he had lived to write more history books. (He did also write one about Verdun in World War I, as well as a couple of books about mysteries and literature.)

If this book sounds interesting, you should also take a look at Suite Française and All the Light We Cannot See and watch The Sorrow and the Pity and perhaps also Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (with a screenplay by Patrick Modiano).

[Ajj · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Ousby to be a skilled historian and engaging writer. "Occupation" exposes the precarious situation of the Vichy regime and depicts the hardships of living under harsh military occupation.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intricate, detailed account of life under occupation.

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A psychological evaluation and moral judgment by a perceptive British historian, not a detailed accounting of the Occupation regime as such, Ousby nevertheless gives a comprehensive look at the quality of French life under Nazi rule. Thanks to his incisive questioning of stereotypes he peels away the layers of what collaboration and resistance meant in real terms, finding that an individual could represent both, especially in the muddied moral terrain of Vichy. Is a Parisian who defies the Nazi dress code on the Champs Elysee the equivalent of a maquisard risking death, pistol in hand? A hungry mother selling herself to German soldiers the equivalent of a milicien torturing that same maquisard in prison? Ousby doesn't accuse directly, but he demands the reader follow him down the dark lanes of choice open under Nazi rule - a regime dedicated to destroying the freedom and very ability to choose.

Probably most damaging is his view of DeGaulle as spokesman for all "the French," in a grand gesture of conciliation that ultimately mocked both the sacrifices of the Resistance and the opportunism of the "collabos." The current US scorn of France as a nation of "surrender monkeys" turns DeGaulle's attempt on its head, reopening these wounds. The surrender of 1940 belies such shallowness: was half a loaf not better than no bread at all and no roof under which to eat it? Germany compromised as well, in treating the French as a "civilized enemy," as opposed to Poland or Russia.

Yet the French Resistance also defies the American prejudice. Jean Moulin would have regarded such opinionated Americans as no better than Nazi collaborators, seeming to justify German rule over a nation of bon vivants dancing on their own graves. If the Anglo-American allies supplied the real muscle power of liberation, its spirit remained French. Yet the Occupation years raise a specter that America has never faced outside of the Southern states after its own civil war. Robert E. Lee was no "surrender monkey"; the Ku Klux Klan has not survived as a heroic resistance.

[Roger Eustis · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone who, like me, has travelled in France since childhood Ian Ousby's account of the Occupation is a must-read.

British kids of a certain age grew up with some very blinkered myths handed down by their parents about France under the Nazis. Which in turn were fostered by wartime British propaganda for the Home Front, plus stories from returned soldiers.

The key myth of course was that the heroic French Resistance had ' liberated France'.

Ousby's book covers all aspects of a dark time for the French people and is unflinching in its examination of the extent to which a large proportion of the French population was complicit in collaborating with the Occupation.

Equally he reveals the impact of both the forced labour scheme and the sytematic looting of France by the German occupation forces.

Well worth a read - and a book full of surprises.

[Steve Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is English. I’m pretty sure he establishes that in the first sentence of the book. And then he proceeds the throw in phrases that are in French in practically every paragraph as if to demonstrate his knowledge of, and fluency in, French. Sometimes he translates them into English and the rest of the time he doesn’t, as if we should just know what the hell he just said, means. It’s annoying as hell and detracted from an otherwise outstanding history lesson.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dry & brief, large in concept, yet minimal detail.

[T. Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a very literate writing style, without going into intricate details, Ousby presents a good picture of the complex issues of the German occupation of France.

[Eldon New]

Really informative. Timely.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent short history of the defeat, occupation and liberation of France. Ousby chronicles both the politics (Vichy government, Petain, De Gaulle, etc) and the various factions/types of resistance (urban, country, communist, maquisards, etc). The romanticized versions you see in most WW2 movies leave out the difficult and complicated truths. It's hard to understand the French without knowing this story.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story of the French under German occupation is one well worth a good book. That book is not this one. Scattered and disorganized, devoid of any human element, this book commits the cardinal sin of telling history: it fails to make us care, relegating the story to facts and figures stripped of any emotional context. A laborious read.

[Cpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

the story of the nazi occupation of france is not all about resistance but about the daily struggle to preserve normality. couldn't help but think about us occupation of iraq, where resistance is much fiercer and the occupiers are much less welcome. damn.

[Ross Parkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A British take on a complex subject. Interesting.

[Max Carmichael · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the plus side, remarkably balanced in its portrayal of the politicians and fighters; on the minus side, far too focused on the politicians and fighters