The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers (review)

Fogg analyzes the much-discussed topic of Vichy France and its treatment of outsiders through a new lens. Most studies employ political and legal history to determine Vichy's attitudes toward the "other" or have looked at the treatment of Jews, especially foreigners, and Gypsies from a top-down perspective. Fogg persuasively utilizes a bottom-up view of social history by focusing on everyday interactions, primarily around food, housing, and other shortages, to provide a multifaceted portrait of social relationships in France from 1939 to 1944.

By examining the challenges that all French residents faced when confronted by the government's failure to provide adequate material goods in both the occupied and unoccupied zones, Fogg illuminates major motivations in human relationships in times of crisis. She posits that rather than representing a monolithic response by French people to outsiders, relationships shifted according to material circumstances more than ideological conviction. By examining a rural community, the Limousin—with particular reference to the interactions between locals and Alsatian refugees, Jews, adults and children, Gypsies, and French urban dwellers desperately in need of provisions that they could not secure legally—Fogg has probably arrived at a much truer and richer depiction of Vichy France and its dynamics than her predecessors. Her perspective and methodology provide a fine model for probing other societies and their subsets in times of stress and social breakdown. Her sociological and anthropological way of looking at historical events and source materials, which also incorporates economic history, has created a study that is authentic to everyday experience. This book is grounded in extensive archival research in the best tradition of good social history, while weaving it together with the most recent findings of other scholars from multiple historical perspectives to produce a whole cloth.

Fogg's thinking and methodology may best be illustrated by looking at her comparison of the treatment of Jews and Gypsies. Although both were targets for extermination by the Nazis, Fogg discovers that their ultimate destinies were markedly different: 76,000 Jews living in France died during the Holocaust, whereas 145 French Gypsies were deported—none of them from France but from a Belgian internment camp. Yet French attitudes toward Gypsy and Jewish families and children were distinctly dissimilar, revealing the complexities of both French attitudes and Vichy policies. Without understanding the real and perceived dynamics of Jewish and Gypsy family life, views of the experiences of the two groups remain static and two-dimensional. Although Jews were blamed by government propagandists for shortages, ordinary citizens often knew better and quietly held the government accountable, hoping to avoid calling attention to their own illegal coping strategies. As a result of that view, as well as sympathy for Jewish children and a more positive view of Jewish family life, people of the Limousin frequently aided Jews, but they almost never interceded for Gypsy families who were viewed as dirty, antisocial thieves. By applying a sociological perspective to French perceptions of Jewish and Gypsy families, especially around issues of material shortage, Fogg presents a motion picture of wartime dynamics rather than a snapshot of the treatment of each group. By combining original archival research with a synthesis of the most recent scholarship on Vichy, Fogg sets a new benchmark in local and social history.