The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (review)

The focus of Richard Vinen's history is the daily lives of a diverse and broad range of ordinary people, effectively held captive under Nazi rule, and as told through (for example) published diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, police reports, and the records of intercepted telephone calls. In a thoughtful introduction, Vinen takes care to position himself in relation to his material and to the issues of moral ambiguity that necessarily accompany any study of this period of French history: he is interested in 'the French rather than in France' (unlike De Gaulle and his infamous 'certain idea of France' which opens the book) and those that were normally resident in France, not only those who held French citizenship, with an emphasis on those at the lower end of the social scale. His aim is 'to understand the period in terms of people's individual lives and in terms of the constraints and problems that faced particular individuals', while placing these in their social and economic contexts and indeed showing how individuals were affected by these forces, emphasizing therefore social history rather than political history. A more complex additional ambition is 'to understand and evoke the circumstances that governed how people behaved', without passing moral judgement on the French. Vinen also overtly positions himself to other historians of the period, making his methodology clear as well as his object of study, openly acknowledging it as based on the work of other historians, against whom he does not necessarily seek to react, and using the wealth of archive material consulted for illustrative purposes rather than in order to suggest new interpretations of the period. An example of this is his emphasis in the account of the summer of 1940 on the huge numbers of refugees on the road and on soldiers who became French Prisoners of War, or later on the young men drafted to work in Germany in the Service de Travail Obligatoire, rather than on military and political events. Other groups that attract his attention are, necessarily, the Jews, Frenchwomen and their relationships to and with the Germans, those acting on a small scale such as the young gentiles who took to wearing the yellow star in 1942, and a wide range of those involved in the large-scale effort of simply surviving in a variety of circumstances and environments. Vinen himself notes that the study of the competing memories of wartime France has become something of an academic industry. Well-researched and well-written, with often compelling macro- and micro-narratives, an awareness of the pitfalls of using the memories and records of individuals and a recognition of current Memory/History debates, this book makes a welcome addition to that proliferation of studies. In addition to social and cultural historians, those interested in the literature and cinema of the period, and which subsequently take this period as their context, will find much to inform their knowledge and appreciation of what it was to be constrained to continue to make a life under a multi-faceted Occupation.