Attempted Pacification of France through Letters and the Arts

This is an ambitious study on a broad and opaque topic—the continuation of French cultural life after France signed the armistice agreement with Nazi Germany in June of 1940 and until the liberation of 1944. "Artists and intellectuals … behaved as all human beings always behave in dark times," writes Frederic Spotts, a British scholar living in France: "In ways honourable and dishonourable, they sought to survive." A general examination of such a capacious and nettlesome subject can only be, Spotts admits, reductive and selective. Specialists in French literature, art, music, and cinema might at times be a bit frustrated by the synoptic treatment or cursory mention of certain artists and writers (whole books have been consecrated to many of the protagonists), even if most of the major players of the period are present (René Char and Jacques Debû-Bridel are exemplary of a few who are absent).

With the difficult opposition of "honor and dishonor" in an analytical margin, Spotts comes up with about as many true villains as artistic resisters, though by far the largest cast in the drama is comprised of the many "attentistes" and discreet survivors who find themselves somewhere between the two extremes along a continuum where, in Spotts's view, the slippery slope seems to be privileged over higher ground. Moreover, while anchoring his investigation in many of the best available sources, Spotts seems to eschew, in his overall design, what Michèle C. Cone has called "the rhetoric of ambiguity … convenient for French honor." Spotts gives the impression of wanting to make harder calls than some of his predecessors having examined the same topical area; but the reader has the sense that, by the end of his task, Spotts's critical gaze has softened a bit en route, especially in his concluding chapter (whose title, "Human, All Too Human," was borrowed from Nietzsche) treating the épuration period. Spotts ends up considering grayer questions than some of those that inform his earlier attempts to size up the cultural scene: "The consequent rush to judgement was all too human…. What were the standards?" Be that as it may, the author does not waver in suggesting that a majority of French artists and intellectuals did waver during the occupation. And he pursues his thesis with good research and writing.

Spotts examines cultural life in France's occupied zone (especially Paris), as well as in the unoccupied zone until November 1942 when the so-called Pétainist "Free Zone" would likewise fall under the military and cultural jackboot of the increasingly nervous Nazis. Chapter 1 presents Hitler the aesthetician, and Spotts is on terra firma here, inasmuch as he published another successful study on Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2001). Hitler understood that France and, in particular, Paris—"the centre of Western art and culture" at the time—could best be controlled by appearing lenient in the near-sacred area of French art and letters, while quietly establishing some norms with the collaborationists of Vichy. After such an attack during the initial months following the armistice, Hitler then "launched a second blitzkrieg—this time artistic—with the intention of making Germany as supreme culturally as it was militarily." The ultimate goal was to take not just political freedom from the French but their cultural soul as well. With that kind of total victory as Hitler's endgame, the myriad cultural battles fought on various and sundry fronts and the defense mustered—what defense there was—flesh out the succeeding chapters and shape Spotts's often painfully revealing story.

Spotts cleverly borrows titles from the literary and performing arts to frame each of his chapters: e.g., "Good-bye to All That" (chapter 2), as artists and intellectuals—like almost all Parisians—are depicted fleeing the capital for the French provinces and, in many instances, further still to other countries of exile, particularly in the jeopardized cases of Freemasons, Socialists and Communists, and Jews. While such flight was chaotically...