France under Fire: German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II by Nicole Dombrowski Risser (review)

This rigorous study encompasses the haphazard evacuation of civilians from endangered departments after the outbreak of war in 1939, and the largely spontaneous exodus of millions after German invasion in 1940. It also considers the fate of returnees to the forbidden zone (Nord and Pas-de-Calais), who endured years of Allied bombing. The author explores the intentions of political figures at municipal, departmental, and national levels for dealing with the flight of civilians before and after it occurred; the administrative structures they devised, which were renegotiated in the face of shifting military and material circumstances; and, crucially, the efforts made by domestic refugees themselves to secure flight, resources, and repatriation. The result is a nuanced contribution to our understanding of the social history of the war and defeat that also illuminates the administrative roots of Vichy exclusion. Archive-driven case studies (principally of the Marne and Corrèze) offer systematic analyses of the management, scale, and experience of civilian flight, scrupulously set within the national context. State authorities (whether the Bureau of Civil Defence or the refugee service set up in late summer 1939 under Robert Schuman) were overwhelmed by the popular desire — expressed in northern departments far outside the designated evacuation areas of Alsace and Lorraine — to flee anticipated aerial bombardment. In that climate centralized efforts crumbled. Despite standardized welfare payments, refugee relief was fragmented once millions hit the road in summer 1940, as the great volume of angry letters to mayors — written predominantly by women — attest, in a language of refugee rights that was to have post-war resonance. Tolerance of the displaced in southern departments was uneven: the social-democratic tenor of Corrèze facilitated myriad initiatives to house refugees and find them work, whereas the population in neighbouring Dordogne jealously guarded resources already diminished by the large influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. In many places women played a key role as ‘first-responders in the national emergency’ by becoming heavily involved in this civic relief effort (p. 177). After July 1940 a remade refugee service remained in tight negotiation with the German Armistice Commission over the passage of civilians between zones of occupation, and its head, Louis Marlier, initially declined to operate German-imposed filters regarding ‘race’ when overseeing refugees’ attempts to return home. Yet, simultaneously, prefects in the nascent Vichy regime required all refugees to declare their ‘Aryan’ or Jewish identity, in a bid to manage public assistance; and increasingly, as public hostility towards refugees began to bite along with material shortages, Vichy authorities enforced German ethnic restrictions so that German personnel did not stymie French repatriation efforts by turning back northbound trains full of civilians. Dombrowski Risser thus shows how ‘[t]he Line of Demarcation emerged as a fundamental tool in the racialization of bureaucratic practices’ (p. 203). In highlighting the links between exclusionary tendencies and competition over scarce resources, and by stressing the importance of women’s social action to our understanding of Occupation-era politics, the book complements recent scholarship by Hanna Diamond, Julia Torrie, and Shannon Fogg.