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Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation
In France, the German occupation is called simply the "dark years." There were only the "good French" who resisted and the "bad French" who collaborated. Marianne in Chains, a broad and provocative history drawing on previously unseen archives, firsthand interviews, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, uncovers the complex truth of the time. Robert Gildea's groundbreaking study reveals the everyday life in the heart of occupied France; the pressing imperatives of work, food, transportation, and family obligations that led to unavoidable compromise and negotiation with the army of occupation.
528 pages, Paperback
First published March 22, 2002
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About the author
Robert Gildea
18 books18 followersRobert Nigel Gildea is professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and is the author of several influential books on 20th century French history.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 14, 2023
What did I know of France under the German occupation? Very little, it turns out, and after reading this book even that seems like a cartoon version of history. I would have said that France was united in its opposition to the Germans, who were dangerous but often bumbling, easily fooled by the clever French; that the Resistance was much loved and widely supported, and could count on the people to provide useful intelligence and hide them if necessary. And I would have said that the Resistance was critical to the fight against the Germans, using sabotage and ambushes to tie down vast numbers of the enemy. Also, the country eagerly awaited the arrival of the Allies, and de Gaulle especially. The Vichy government would not have appeared at all in this account.
That might be the Hollywood version of events (possibly via Hogan’s Heroes), but as Marianne in Chains shows, reality was far messier and more complex. Even the question of loyalty depended on who you asked, where they lived, whether they were rich or poor, and if they were conservative, Catholic and Royalist, or atheist and communist or socialist.
Life for most people was hard, and always subject to arrest and imprisonment. People could be denounced to the Germans for acts of opposition, or simply to settle old scores, and later in the war this would often lead to torture and murder or deportation to German concentration camps. For those loyal to the Pétain government denouncing others was seen as a patriotic gesture, at least until it became clear that it was only a matter of time until the Liberation and Germany’s defeat.
Price controls were implemented, but this meant that producers withheld their goods from the official economy and sold them for much higher prices on the black market. Some farmers and middlemen grew rich exploiting this system, though it meant the poor and those without connections often went hungry.
The French economy was in disarray after the surrender, and the Germans helped restore it by offering contracts to the factory owners, though this meant direct war production for Germany in the form of ships, aircraft, ammunition, and material. It also meant the factories became targets for Allied bombers, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties and the wholesale destruction of towns. By 1944 the industrial economy would be almost at a standstill as shortages of fuel combined with Allied bombing of the power grid reduced the amount of electricity available to less than 5% of what it had been in 1940.
The Germans made demands for vast amounts of food and other products in order to supply their war effort, backed up with threats of fines and arrest for failing to meet the quotas. They also wanted workers, both skilled and unskilled to work in Germany, under conditions that were almost slave labor. At first the system was voluntary, although there was a quota for each town and factory, but later they became compulsory. Workers had a chance to be excluded from these call-ups, but only by working for factories engaged in direct war production, which paid twice what the civilian factories offered, but once again exposed them to punishing bombing raids. Evasion of these labor demands was widespread, but carried dangerous consequences for being denounced or otherwise found out.
As anyone who has read about the Dreyfus affair knows, there has always been strong anti-Semitic sentiment in parts of French society, often allied with the conservative and Catholic factions. The Jews in France were already mostly stateless refugees, and many Frenchmen felt no responsibility toward them.
When these unfortunates were rounded up and deported they found few friends among the French. And when the Germans turned to the native-born Jews there were no serious protests; there was, indeed, a disgraceful rush to plunder the assets and expropriate the businesses of Jews being deported.
Both the French and the Germans often lumped Jews together with communists. “In the demonology of occupied France, communists were second only to Jews. For the Germans, “Judaeo-Bolshevik” was often run together as the compound most dangerously opposed to the Third Reich.” When the Germans demanded hostages who would be shot if there were any incidents, the French were happy to turn over their fellow citizens so long as they were Jews or communists.
Many French people truly believed the choice was between Pétain and communism, and that a communist-inspired revolution was a real possibility. “[T]here is still in some French circles a coherent and passionately held Pétainist position. According to this view, Marshal Pétain was the legitimate ruler of France, acclaimed by the National Assembly and a martyr to the protection of his people. De Gaulle is seen as a deserter who had, in any case, fallen prey to the communists.”
Pétain was adamantly opposed to the Resistance, as an affront to his authority and as a reason for the Germans to clamp down even harder. There were many Resistance groups, broadly divided into communist and republican forces, but they were often poorly organized and almost unarmed, and they lived under the constant threat of betrayal. They were also largely ineffective, in part because they knew any actions they took against the Germans would result in massive retaliations against the local civilian population. Most ordinary French people were wary of them, a concern which was borne out by several massacres of civilians as the Wehrmacht retreated across France after the D-Day invasions.
Overall, life in occupied France was a matter of negotiation and survival, helping the Germans enough to stay out of trouble, but not doing so much as to gain the resentment of patriots. Pétain was respected by many; De Gaulle was cheered by some and dismissed by others, in part because there was a widespread belief that he wanted to set himself up as dictator (a view shared by President Franklin Roosevelt). There is little in this book that is black and white; it is, instead, about the thousand shades of gray that each person had to navigate as they carefully picked their way between defiance and compliance. There is great courage to be found here, but just as much cowardice and complicity. In short, they were ordinary people, neither angels nor demons, just trying to make it through another day and longing for peace.
That might be the Hollywood version of events (possibly via Hogan’s Heroes), but as Marianne in Chains shows, reality was far messier and more complex. Even the question of loyalty depended on who you asked, where they lived, whether they were rich or poor, and if they were conservative, Catholic and Royalist, or atheist and communist or socialist.
Matters were complicated by the fact that there was not one patrie: there were two or three. People might be loyal to Vichy as the established or legitimate government. They might, however, feel loyal to de Gaulle and the Free French in London, later to become the provisional government of the Republic in Algiers, on the grounds that they considered Pétain a usurper and traitor. They might even have a first loyalty to Moscow, because after 1941 the Soviet Union alone resisted Hitler militarily and alone preserved the hope for delivery of Europe.
Life for most people was hard, and always subject to arrest and imprisonment. People could be denounced to the Germans for acts of opposition, or simply to settle old scores, and later in the war this would often lead to torture and murder or deportation to German concentration camps. For those loyal to the Pétain government denouncing others was seen as a patriotic gesture, at least until it became clear that it was only a matter of time until the Liberation and Germany’s defeat.
Price controls were implemented, but this meant that producers withheld their goods from the official economy and sold them for much higher prices on the black market. Some farmers and middlemen grew rich exploiting this system, though it meant the poor and those without connections often went hungry.
The French economy was in disarray after the surrender, and the Germans helped restore it by offering contracts to the factory owners, though this meant direct war production for Germany in the form of ships, aircraft, ammunition, and material. It also meant the factories became targets for Allied bombers, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties and the wholesale destruction of towns. By 1944 the industrial economy would be almost at a standstill as shortages of fuel combined with Allied bombing of the power grid reduced the amount of electricity available to less than 5% of what it had been in 1940.
The Germans made demands for vast amounts of food and other products in order to supply their war effort, backed up with threats of fines and arrest for failing to meet the quotas. They also wanted workers, both skilled and unskilled to work in Germany, under conditions that were almost slave labor. At first the system was voluntary, although there was a quota for each town and factory, but later they became compulsory. Workers had a chance to be excluded from these call-ups, but only by working for factories engaged in direct war production, which paid twice what the civilian factories offered, but once again exposed them to punishing bombing raids. Evasion of these labor demands was widespread, but carried dangerous consequences for being denounced or otherwise found out.
As anyone who has read about the Dreyfus affair knows, there has always been strong anti-Semitic sentiment in parts of French society, often allied with the conservative and Catholic factions. The Jews in France were already mostly stateless refugees, and many Frenchmen felt no responsibility toward them.
Most vulnerable were foreign Jews, who accounted for 70 percent of the Jewish population of 300,000 in France before the war….They had come in waves: Russian, Romanian, and Polish Jews after pogroms in the 1880s, Baltic, Hungarian, and more Romanian and Polish Jews after the formation of the new national states of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1917–18, and German Jews after the triumph of the Nazi party in 1933.
When these unfortunates were rounded up and deported they found few friends among the French. And when the Germans turned to the native-born Jews there were no serious protests; there was, indeed, a disgraceful rush to plunder the assets and expropriate the businesses of Jews being deported.
Both the French and the Germans often lumped Jews together with communists. “In the demonology of occupied France, communists were second only to Jews. For the Germans, “Judaeo-Bolshevik” was often run together as the compound most dangerously opposed to the Third Reich.” When the Germans demanded hostages who would be shot if there were any incidents, the French were happy to turn over their fellow citizens so long as they were Jews or communists.
Many French people truly believed the choice was between Pétain and communism, and that a communist-inspired revolution was a real possibility. “[T]here is still in some French circles a coherent and passionately held Pétainist position. According to this view, Marshal Pétain was the legitimate ruler of France, acclaimed by the National Assembly and a martyr to the protection of his people. De Gaulle is seen as a deserter who had, in any case, fallen prey to the communists.”
Pétain was adamantly opposed to the Resistance, as an affront to his authority and as a reason for the Germans to clamp down even harder. There were many Resistance groups, broadly divided into communist and republican forces, but they were often poorly organized and almost unarmed, and they lived under the constant threat of betrayal. They were also largely ineffective, in part because they knew any actions they took against the Germans would result in massive retaliations against the local civilian population. Most ordinary French people were wary of them, a concern which was borne out by several massacres of civilians as the Wehrmacht retreated across France after the D-Day invasions.
Overall, life in occupied France was a matter of negotiation and survival, helping the Germans enough to stay out of trouble, but not doing so much as to gain the resentment of patriots. Pétain was respected by many; De Gaulle was cheered by some and dismissed by others, in part because there was a widespread belief that he wanted to set himself up as dictator (a view shared by President Franklin Roosevelt). There is little in this book that is black and white; it is, instead, about the thousand shades of gray that each person had to navigate as they carefully picked their way between defiance and compliance. There is great courage to be found here, but just as much cowardice and complicity. In short, they were ordinary people, neither angels nor demons, just trying to make it through another day and longing for peace.
May 3, 2025
I am sure there must now be an almost insurmountable generational divide between those of us brought up, at least in the UK or USA, brought up on the simplistic combination Hollywood myths and the post liberation 'Pacto del Olvido' (see footnote *1 below) with regards to what happened in the countries occupied by Germany. In France Charles de Gaulle created the template for the legend when he announced on his arrival in Paris:
"...Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and help of the whole of France, the France that fights, the only France, the true France, the eternal France."
Variations on this theme would dominate the story of France's 'Dark Years', as the time of the resistance, when all good and true men supported, helped and participated in its activities. Those who didn't were monsters. It was simplistic to the point of idiocy. But WWII left scars on even those who were not invaded (i.e. the UK) and myths were more comforting than fact. In many ways countries like France have accepted a more nuanced and less glorious story of the war time years then England who tenaciously cling to the fig leaf of the 'standing alone' against Hitler legend as absolution for all the bloody misdeeds in their history.
If it isn't obvious let me make it clear, Robert Gildea, reveals in this splendid book a different more complicated story. It is an adult tale of what happens when you are living within history and how it is going to end is unknown.
Understanding what happened in France, or any of the occupied western European countries is an essential part of WWII (the countries in the east and south east of Europe were a different but equally important story). That it is not the simple, good/bad, black/white, narrative beloved of film and propaganda makes it only more interesting.
A first rate book by an excellent historian.
*1 'Pacto del Olvido' or Pact of Silence is the term used to refer to what happened in Spain post Franco that ignored, denied, covered up, refused to recognise, talk about or seek justice for the illegalities and monstrous crimes of the Franco years. It was adopted to ensure the successful transition to Democracy. Once Western European countries like France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway and even Italy were 'liberated' an undeclared but effective Pact of Silence was proclaimed that drew a veil over the war years.
"...Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and help of the whole of France, the France that fights, the only France, the true France, the eternal France."
Variations on this theme would dominate the story of France's 'Dark Years', as the time of the resistance, when all good and true men supported, helped and participated in its activities. Those who didn't were monsters. It was simplistic to the point of idiocy. But WWII left scars on even those who were not invaded (i.e. the UK) and myths were more comforting than fact. In many ways countries like France have accepted a more nuanced and less glorious story of the war time years then England who tenaciously cling to the fig leaf of the 'standing alone' against Hitler legend as absolution for all the bloody misdeeds in their history.
If it isn't obvious let me make it clear, Robert Gildea, reveals in this splendid book a different more complicated story. It is an adult tale of what happens when you are living within history and how it is going to end is unknown.
Understanding what happened in France, or any of the occupied western European countries is an essential part of WWII (the countries in the east and south east of Europe were a different but equally important story). That it is not the simple, good/bad, black/white, narrative beloved of film and propaganda makes it only more interesting.
A first rate book by an excellent historian.
*1 'Pacto del Olvido' or Pact of Silence is the term used to refer to what happened in Spain post Franco that ignored, denied, covered up, refused to recognise, talk about or seek justice for the illegalities and monstrous crimes of the Franco years. It was adopted to ensure the successful transition to Democracy. Once Western European countries like France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway and even Italy were 'liberated' an undeclared but effective Pact of Silence was proclaimed that drew a veil over the war years.
February 19, 2016
I wish I could give this book more stars. Robert Gildea's thesis is that the traditional view of the French as suffering under the oppressive German occupation is much too simplistic. In fact, French experience covered the gamut from active resistance to open collaboration, with every shade of opinion or activity in between. And being a supporter of Pétain didn't necessarily mean that you welcomed the Occupation. As Gildea writes, "Relations between French and Germans were sometimes more complicated than a crude division between oppressors and oppressed." The myth about Resistance and Liberation quickly overlaid the complexities of life in France under the Occupation.
Gildea carried out detailed research on the Occupation in the lower Loire Valley, which was in the Occupied Zone. This included eye-witness oral accounts from people who were already very elderly and of whom few are now still alive (the book was published in 2002). While applying the caveats that must always be employed with oral accounts, they were nonetheless a valuable corrective to "official" histories and archive material.
The problem is that this is a sprawling book that is not served by Gildea's thematic approach. Information is often presented several times in different places. And the level of detail sometimes goes beyond what is required even in a scholarly work. I found myself skipping passages as a result. The writing style can be a bit heavy, too.
Having said this, this is still a valuable work that explodes the myths around this period of French history and leaves one with a clearer idea of its complexity and ambivalence. I would have liked to understand a little more about the everyday lives of ordinary people but, at this remove, this information is now hard to uncover.
Gildea carried out detailed research on the Occupation in the lower Loire Valley, which was in the Occupied Zone. This included eye-witness oral accounts from people who were already very elderly and of whom few are now still alive (the book was published in 2002). While applying the caveats that must always be employed with oral accounts, they were nonetheless a valuable corrective to "official" histories and archive material.
The problem is that this is a sprawling book that is not served by Gildea's thematic approach. Information is often presented several times in different places. And the level of detail sometimes goes beyond what is required even in a scholarly work. I found myself skipping passages as a result. The writing style can be a bit heavy, too.
Having said this, this is still a valuable work that explodes the myths around this period of French history and leaves one with a clearer idea of its complexity and ambivalence. I would have liked to understand a little more about the everyday lives of ordinary people but, at this remove, this information is now hard to uncover.
September 14, 2022
The German Occupation of France between 1940 and 1944 was marked by a continuous series of negotiations, not only between Germans and French, or the Wehrmacht and Vichy or between so-called collaborators and resisters, but also between differing historiographical interpretations of what the Occupation meant both to contemporaries and those who came later, and it is as much this latter negotiation that Robert Gildea seeks to explore as the former in this excellent history of the experience of the French in the Loire valley under Occupation.
Gildea's approach is intentionally limited geographically to three départments of western France, centred upon the cities of Nantes, Tours, and Angers, and his primary focus is on events and office holding in the small towns and villages within this region, not only in the particular, but also as they related to regional and national policies and decisions. In this sense, this book for an English-reading audience is well within the French Annalist historical tradition, pioneered by historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which, by examining in depth a limited local or regional area within a specific period of time, draws out significant historical explanations that can be extrapolated to other and larger geographical and political areas of the same society. Gildea has therefore chosen his region with care, lying as it did predominantly above the demarcation line between Occupied and Unoccupied France (between 1940 and 1942), but also one which included Atlantic ports with German garrisons, so that, providing a microcosm of France, he can explore the French experience of Occupation across areas with differing levels of German penetration and control, differing social and political make-ups, and between socialist towns and conservative villages, all of which encountered the same dilemmas of how to accommodate the Germans and relate to Vichy, problems which became increasingly acute as the War progressed, particularly after the Normandy invasion, and produced differing solutions.
Gildea's history is an important contribution to understandings of the Occupation, not just because of its value as a well-researched and coherent regional study, but because, rooted as it is in archival research and bolstered by oral interviews conducted by the author, it successfully debunks two myths of the period which dominated French historiography in the fifty years after the War: one, that there were two distinct experiences of France divided between those who collaborated and those who resisted, when the reality was much less distinct and more complex; and, two, the Gaullist myth that Vichy was a political aberration between the Third and Fourth Republics, when in fact there was a great deal of continuity between 1939-40 and 1944-5, with Vichy, for all its uniqueness, serving more as an historical mode of transmission between pre- and postwar France, rooted in the former and playing an important part in forming the latter, than an ahistorical, or even somehow un-French, fissure between the two.
Implicit within Gildea's narrative is the concept that Vichy France was as much France and representative of the reality of French life and experience as republican France, that it was the Free French of De Gaulle which was the exception, and that in 1944-5 this latter had to adjust to the realities revealed by the Liberation, including the need of accommodation with those who served Vichy, but within a narrative then defined by the Gaullist interpretation of resistance, one which downplayed both the role of French communists and the military contribution of the marquis guerrillas, but sought to accommodate within it as many French people as possible and with the broadest definition of what marked out acts as ones of resistance. The irony of this is that after 1944 Liberation France proved more willing to incorporate Vichy personnel, excepting those most obviously compromised by too close association with the Germans or Pétain, and even Vichyite political and social values, than Communist resisters, let alone communist ideology. De Gaulle sought to reunify France by creating a simple narrative that saw France as liberated by its own efforts, excluding the primary role of the Allied armed forces, and one in which, but for a few clearly 'bad apples', all Frenchmen and women, regardless of the compromises into which circumstances forced them, were at heart resistant, and that what constituted resistance was that which was subsequently authorised by or accepted by the Provisional Government, and, by implication, by De Gaulle himself.
What Gildea successfully shows is however much this political narrative may have been necessary to prevent civil conflict in 1944-5, to allow a smooth transfer of authority from the dying Vichy regime to the Provisional Government, and specifically to prevent either the communists seizing power or the imposition of Allied military government, while also preventing the Moscow-aligned Communist Party from defining the resistance narrative as one of internal fight and not that of or given the post facto imprimatur of the Free French, after 1944 constituted as the only legitimate France, excluding both communists and Vichy, it is not one with historical validity. Instead Vichy France was, as it were, as much, if not more so, the real France as Free France, and the Occupation a time of constant negotiation and renegotiation by which the French, with the exception of the small minorities who joined the Free French or the active Resistance and those who were ardent collaborators, sought to exist under German occupation.
Gildea explores two major elements of the Occupation which went to the heart of the experience and defined much of the post-war interpretations of the period. Firstly, the exclusion, internment and deportation of the Jews, and, secondly, the forced conscription of labour to work originally for the German Todt Organisation in military industries within France, and then, after 1942, in German factories themselves under the Service du Travail Obligatoire, and how resistance to the former was at best passive, while the arrests and deportations were only possible with active French collaboration, whilst the latter was more forcibly opposed and played an important role in bolstering resistance organisations from those who dodged the draft. He also shows how these differing experiences had an impact upon post-war narratives of the Occupation, including how those who complied with the STO struggled to be accepted as victims of the Germans, often being harshly identified as collaborators, even if unwilling ones, and how in the five decades after the Liberation the crimes against the Jews were underplayed by the French state and society until the emergence of Holocaust studies in France in the 1990s reconfigured the Occupation with the Jews as the primary victims and the French regarded more as either perpetrators or as bystanders. Gildea makes a valid historical point that while it is important that the suffering of the Jews and the complicity of many French in the crimes against them are recorded, these should not be the prime lens through which the Occupation is viewed, but more as an important part among others of the French experience between 1940 and 1944.
Similarly, he shows that simplistic definitions of who constituted a resistant and who a collaborator undermine the more complex historical experience, the more blurred and often overlapping reality of resistance and collaboration within both communities and individuals, and how for most French there was not so much a choice between the two, but rather a series of negotiations within a single Occupation paradigm, encompassing both collaboration and resistance, imposed by the actualités of Occupation, the primary object of which was survival, but which also came to inform the narratives that developed after the War and have influenced the ongoing negotiations within France to determine what the Occupation meant for those who lived and died in the years 1940 to 1944, whatever moral or political choices these made in response to a unique and challenging situation: the Occupation as negotiation and existence rather than just collaboration and resistance.
Gildea's approach is intentionally limited geographically to three départments of western France, centred upon the cities of Nantes, Tours, and Angers, and his primary focus is on events and office holding in the small towns and villages within this region, not only in the particular, but also as they related to regional and national policies and decisions. In this sense, this book for an English-reading audience is well within the French Annalist historical tradition, pioneered by historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which, by examining in depth a limited local or regional area within a specific period of time, draws out significant historical explanations that can be extrapolated to other and larger geographical and political areas of the same society. Gildea has therefore chosen his region with care, lying as it did predominantly above the demarcation line between Occupied and Unoccupied France (between 1940 and 1942), but also one which included Atlantic ports with German garrisons, so that, providing a microcosm of France, he can explore the French experience of Occupation across areas with differing levels of German penetration and control, differing social and political make-ups, and between socialist towns and conservative villages, all of which encountered the same dilemmas of how to accommodate the Germans and relate to Vichy, problems which became increasingly acute as the War progressed, particularly after the Normandy invasion, and produced differing solutions.
Gildea's history is an important contribution to understandings of the Occupation, not just because of its value as a well-researched and coherent regional study, but because, rooted as it is in archival research and bolstered by oral interviews conducted by the author, it successfully debunks two myths of the period which dominated French historiography in the fifty years after the War: one, that there were two distinct experiences of France divided between those who collaborated and those who resisted, when the reality was much less distinct and more complex; and, two, the Gaullist myth that Vichy was a political aberration between the Third and Fourth Republics, when in fact there was a great deal of continuity between 1939-40 and 1944-5, with Vichy, for all its uniqueness, serving more as an historical mode of transmission between pre- and postwar France, rooted in the former and playing an important part in forming the latter, than an ahistorical, or even somehow un-French, fissure between the two.
Implicit within Gildea's narrative is the concept that Vichy France was as much France and representative of the reality of French life and experience as republican France, that it was the Free French of De Gaulle which was the exception, and that in 1944-5 this latter had to adjust to the realities revealed by the Liberation, including the need of accommodation with those who served Vichy, but within a narrative then defined by the Gaullist interpretation of resistance, one which downplayed both the role of French communists and the military contribution of the marquis guerrillas, but sought to accommodate within it as many French people as possible and with the broadest definition of what marked out acts as ones of resistance. The irony of this is that after 1944 Liberation France proved more willing to incorporate Vichy personnel, excepting those most obviously compromised by too close association with the Germans or Pétain, and even Vichyite political and social values, than Communist resisters, let alone communist ideology. De Gaulle sought to reunify France by creating a simple narrative that saw France as liberated by its own efforts, excluding the primary role of the Allied armed forces, and one in which, but for a few clearly 'bad apples', all Frenchmen and women, regardless of the compromises into which circumstances forced them, were at heart resistant, and that what constituted resistance was that which was subsequently authorised by or accepted by the Provisional Government, and, by implication, by De Gaulle himself.
What Gildea successfully shows is however much this political narrative may have been necessary to prevent civil conflict in 1944-5, to allow a smooth transfer of authority from the dying Vichy regime to the Provisional Government, and specifically to prevent either the communists seizing power or the imposition of Allied military government, while also preventing the Moscow-aligned Communist Party from defining the resistance narrative as one of internal fight and not that of or given the post facto imprimatur of the Free French, after 1944 constituted as the only legitimate France, excluding both communists and Vichy, it is not one with historical validity. Instead Vichy France was, as it were, as much, if not more so, the real France as Free France, and the Occupation a time of constant negotiation and renegotiation by which the French, with the exception of the small minorities who joined the Free French or the active Resistance and those who were ardent collaborators, sought to exist under German occupation.
Gildea explores two major elements of the Occupation which went to the heart of the experience and defined much of the post-war interpretations of the period. Firstly, the exclusion, internment and deportation of the Jews, and, secondly, the forced conscription of labour to work originally for the German Todt Organisation in military industries within France, and then, after 1942, in German factories themselves under the Service du Travail Obligatoire, and how resistance to the former was at best passive, while the arrests and deportations were only possible with active French collaboration, whilst the latter was more forcibly opposed and played an important role in bolstering resistance organisations from those who dodged the draft. He also shows how these differing experiences had an impact upon post-war narratives of the Occupation, including how those who complied with the STO struggled to be accepted as victims of the Germans, often being harshly identified as collaborators, even if unwilling ones, and how in the five decades after the Liberation the crimes against the Jews were underplayed by the French state and society until the emergence of Holocaust studies in France in the 1990s reconfigured the Occupation with the Jews as the primary victims and the French regarded more as either perpetrators or as bystanders. Gildea makes a valid historical point that while it is important that the suffering of the Jews and the complicity of many French in the crimes against them are recorded, these should not be the prime lens through which the Occupation is viewed, but more as an important part among others of the French experience between 1940 and 1944.
Similarly, he shows that simplistic definitions of who constituted a resistant and who a collaborator undermine the more complex historical experience, the more blurred and often overlapping reality of resistance and collaboration within both communities and individuals, and how for most French there was not so much a choice between the two, but rather a series of negotiations within a single Occupation paradigm, encompassing both collaboration and resistance, imposed by the actualités of Occupation, the primary object of which was survival, but which also came to inform the narratives that developed after the War and have influenced the ongoing negotiations within France to determine what the Occupation meant for those who lived and died in the years 1940 to 1944, whatever moral or political choices these made in response to a unique and challenging situation: the Occupation as negotiation and existence rather than just collaboration and resistance.
September 22, 2013
Gildea sets out to present occupied France during WWII in a new light. He shifts focus away from the Resistance and attempts to dispel the commonly accepted notion that occupied France was not such a brutally repressive place. Gildea does not ignored the harsh treatment and reaction of the Germans and the hardships that the French endured during the years of occupations but he instead focuses on how the French people learned to adapt and survive. He traces the emergence of new relationships between French and Germans in both business and pleasure and even demonstrated how the French did not view Vichy as negatively as believed. Not that the French are to be viewed as German supporters but in Gildea's mind they were not "poor victims" either. Very interesting, well researched, well documented work. This is quite a lengthy book but Gildea's writing form keep the reader interested--not as dry as a good number of other historical works!
May 20, 2014
Good description of the WWII occupation of several departments along the Loire at the Atlantic Coast. Lots of excellent local observations and stories. I was disappointed in the summary and conclusions: he tried to mediate the complex forces at work without ranking them or discussing their relative importance morally and politically, as though the treatment of the Jews could be compared to the forced labor of young men and women, which, by the way, was more resisted by the government and police than the forced emigration of the Jews.
November 10, 2021
A large and in-depth study of daily life in the three departments of the Loire Valley running from the Demarcation Line to the Bay of Biscay during the German Occupation. This area includes rural farmland, regional cities like Angers and Tours, and the major ports (and U-boat bases) at St-Nazaire and Nantes, and as such the book covers in depth the murder of 48 hostages by the Nazis in reprisal for the assassination of a German colonel in Nantes in 1942.
Gildea thoroughly debunks any notion of moral simplicity, whether that’s the good French of the Resistance, the bad French of Vichy or even the poor French of the common people, and instead paints a picture of life under German occupation as one of navigation, negotiating between the competing demands of protecting and providing for one’s family, abiding by the hardships that war had put into place, and the demands of one’s conscience. He’s clear that whatever mediation local elites were able to offer common Frenchmen from German demands did not extend to protecting local Jews from persecution. Gildea also treats the Liberation, when suddenly everyone claimed to have been part of the Resistance and small time collaborators were far more likely to be punished harshly than powerful elites were, and the generations of national myth building that have followed the Occupation as the localities involved have sought to reshape their histories to something more palatable. I was particularly to read about people (all of them aristocrats) in the 1990s still saying in interviews that Pétain was a noble servant of France and de Gaulle a deserter, and that the Resistance did nothing other than provoke the Germans into atrocities.
Gildea thoroughly debunks any notion of moral simplicity, whether that’s the good French of the Resistance, the bad French of Vichy or even the poor French of the common people, and instead paints a picture of life under German occupation as one of navigation, negotiating between the competing demands of protecting and providing for one’s family, abiding by the hardships that war had put into place, and the demands of one’s conscience. He’s clear that whatever mediation local elites were able to offer common Frenchmen from German demands did not extend to protecting local Jews from persecution. Gildea also treats the Liberation, when suddenly everyone claimed to have been part of the Resistance and small time collaborators were far more likely to be punished harshly than powerful elites were, and the generations of national myth building that have followed the Occupation as the localities involved have sought to reshape their histories to something more palatable. I was particularly to read about people (all of them aristocrats) in the 1990s still saying in interviews that Pétain was a noble servant of France and de Gaulle a deserter, and that the Resistance did nothing other than provoke the Germans into atrocities.
June 7, 2025
Este libro desmonta con rigor y valentía uno de los grandes mitos del imaginario colectivo francés: la omnipresencia de la Resistencia durante la ocupación nazi. Según Gildea, más que una realidad extendida, la Resistencia ha sido uno de los productos más exitosamente "exportados" por Francia en las últimas ocho décadas. Una narrativa con mucho de marketing y épica retrospectiva, pero que no refleja la complejidad del día a día bajo la ocupación.
A través de un estudio detallado de la región del Loira —una zona fronteriza entre la Francia ocupada y la Francia de Vichy— el autor nos muestra un panorama mucho más ambiguo y humano. Lejos de las representaciones cinematográficas llenas de heroísmo y represión indiscriminada, el ejército alemán rara vez recurrió a la violencia sistemática contra la población civil (salvo en represalia por atentados). La Gestapo, más que la Wehrmacht, era el verdadero rostro del miedo. El verdadero infierno, nos recuerda Gildea, no estaba en Francia sino en el Frente Oriental.
El libro también arroja luz sobre cómo parte de la sociedad francesa aprovechó la situación como un ajuste de cuentas contra los avances sociales y políticos de la Tercera República. Un conflicto de clases y valores que encontró en la Ocupación un escenario perfecto para expresarse de nuevas formas.
Una lectura densa por momentos, pero profundamente reveladora. Ideal para quienes quieran comprender la Ocupación más allá de los clichés y las películas de Hollywood.
A través de un estudio detallado de la región del Loira —una zona fronteriza entre la Francia ocupada y la Francia de Vichy— el autor nos muestra un panorama mucho más ambiguo y humano. Lejos de las representaciones cinematográficas llenas de heroísmo y represión indiscriminada, el ejército alemán rara vez recurrió a la violencia sistemática contra la población civil (salvo en represalia por atentados). La Gestapo, más que la Wehrmacht, era el verdadero rostro del miedo. El verdadero infierno, nos recuerda Gildea, no estaba en Francia sino en el Frente Oriental.
El libro también arroja luz sobre cómo parte de la sociedad francesa aprovechó la situación como un ajuste de cuentas contra los avances sociales y políticos de la Tercera República. Un conflicto de clases y valores que encontró en la Ocupación un escenario perfecto para expresarse de nuevas formas.
Una lectura densa por momentos, pero profundamente reveladora. Ideal para quienes quieran comprender la Ocupación más allá de los clichés y las películas de Hollywood.
November 17, 2022
Before his book on the French Resistance that I'd previously read, Robert Gildea wrote this detailed study of several departments in Western France along the lower Loire during the German occupation.
It avoids most of the flaws I called out in his later work, by focusing more narrowly on a smaller part of France. Even here, we see a large cast of characters across multiple cities and many villages. But, we do get some major recurring characters - mayors, German commanders, and some farmers and townspeople who told their stories afterwards - whose stories we can follow through Gildea's book.
As a history, Gildea seems to have told the story of these departments well. As a story, the flaw seems to be the prosaicness of it. Due to not having good places for Resistance fighters to hide (among other reasons), there wasn't much of any Resistance in this part of France. The story is basically one of getting along and trying to reach an accommodation with the German occupiers. There was some success, and then failure as Germany started losing the war and their policy got harsher, and then liberation by outside forces.
But, history doesn't always tell satisfying stories.
It avoids most of the flaws I called out in his later work, by focusing more narrowly on a smaller part of France. Even here, we see a large cast of characters across multiple cities and many villages. But, we do get some major recurring characters - mayors, German commanders, and some farmers and townspeople who told their stories afterwards - whose stories we can follow through Gildea's book.
As a history, Gildea seems to have told the story of these departments well. As a story, the flaw seems to be the prosaicness of it. Due to not having good places for Resistance fighters to hide (among other reasons), there wasn't much of any Resistance in this part of France. The story is basically one of getting along and trying to reach an accommodation with the German occupiers. There was some success, and then failure as Germany started losing the war and their policy got harsher, and then liberation by outside forces.
But, history doesn't always tell satisfying stories.
April 13, 2020
Aside from the historiographical contribution it makes by challenging the oversimplified and even romanticized myth of the French plight under German occupation during World War II, Marianne in Chains immerses the reader in daily life in the region along the Loire from Tours to St-Nazaire. The research is meticulous and varied, producing a compelling argument fortified by anecdotes whose layers of significance Gildea reveals through adroit analysis. The final chapter on the complexity of collective memory of the Occupation in France generally and this region specifically is especially interesting. I had expected the book to be interesting and informative but hadn't expected it to be such an enjoyable read.
July 27, 2017
Probably the best book I've ever read on the effects of the German occupation of France during World War 2. I can't recommend this book enough.
November 11, 2022
Published in 2002, for something that happened in the 1940s. By that day all witnesses are dead, and it's people born decades after that talk about it. How convenient.
December 31, 2014
A very insightful, well-written, and engaging history of varying French responses to the Occupation years of 1940-1945. For the most part the author eschews high level political intrigues in order to show the impacts on and actions taken by everyday French citizens. I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second simply because the first half seemed more focused on everyday citizens and their stories while the second half drifted more into political realms. Even so, the book was highly informative and a valuable resource for researching my novel, which is set in 1930s/1940s France. Go forth and read it.
May 15, 2007
Possibly the best, and certainly the best-written, account of la vie quotidienne in Second World War France. Fantastic.
February 22, 2011
I read this book as part of my research for my new novel. A fascinating look at life under the occupation.
September 17, 2017
This book is very well -written and researched, and had I been in the mood for an academic rather than anecdotal overview of the German Occupation of France, it would be perfect. I was and am in the mood for "stories," so I didn't finish this. But don't let that deter you!
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