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Preface
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface This is a book about France during the Second World War, a subject that has been discussed and debated passionately by the French for the past sixty years, replacing the French Revolution as the event that most seriously divided the nation into warring factions. Today, however , it seems that the divisive debate on Vichy has reached a point of exhaustion, maybe even a conclusion of sorts. Maurice Papon’s 1998 trial and conviction for crimes against humanity committed during World War II seems to have ended a long, arduous period in which the French judicial system attempted—not always successfully—to bring the remaining French and German violators of human rights to justice. No more trials are in the offing, mainly because no one is left to be tried. The World War II generation is rapidly dying off in France and with it the memory of what occurred during that dark age. In any case, the issues that divided France during the war are no longer relevant today. The European Union and the economic modernization of the past sixty years have put an end to the ‘‘True France’’ of peasants, folklore, rural values, and the like that produced Vichy’s nostalgic, vicious counterrevolution, better known at the time as the National Revolution. Vichy’s motto, ‘‘Work, Family, Fatherland’’ [Travail , Famille, Patrie] no longer applies to a France in which cohabitation has replaced marriage, the thirty-five-hour week has redefined work, and the broader European community has changed the meaning of the nation state. Vichy’s total failure to impose its vision on France during World War II discredited its ideology, preparing the way for an urban nation with social, political, and economic structures radically different from those of the past. Today, the National Front is the only xii | Preface serious political remnant of the old regime in France. Its strength should neither be underestimated to encourage complacency in the face of extremism nor exaggerated to raise a false specter of fascism gaining power. Nevertheless, in the 2002 election, the French people rejected the Front’s candidate for president by a margin of 82 to 18 percent, proclaiming loudly and clearly that the extremist ideas upheld by the Front did not represent France. Finally, thanks to advances in historical scholarship, including careful studies on collaboration, anti-Semitism, resistance, and the like, we can make judgments and reach conclusions with a complexity of perspective that historians did not possess until recently. As this book will show, France was a potpourri of resisters and collaborators, antiSemites and philo-Semites. There was no French exceptionalism, no shining Resistance movement that stood head and shoulders above the other such movements in Europe. Nor was France notorious as a nation of collaborators or anti-Semites. Put simply, France’s record on these issues was no better or worse than that of other western European countries under Nazi rule, although it should be noted that such comparisons are difficult since each country faced unique situations, including moral dilemmas leading often to surprising outcomes. Nevertheless, certain judgments can be made about this period of French history. We know, for example, that institutions failed miserably during World War II, including the military, the political system, the Vichy government, the Church, and the educational system. As we proceed , we will see that France could have won the opening battles of World War II had it not been for the total failure of military and political elites to act properly and decisively. In the Vichy regime and the National Revolution (which is the subject of the second chapter) elites offered the French little more than collaboration and exclusion as principles of governance. As a result, millions of French men and women suffered severe hardship under the draconian terms of the armistice and collaboration, while Jews, Gypsies, Freemasons, and communists were excluded from French society, incarcerated in concentration camps, and—especially in the case of the Jews—even killed. Sadly, the French Catholic Church went along with much of this, although a few members of the hierarchy spoke out against Vichy and the Nazis. [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:22 GMT) Preface | xiii The heroes in France during World War II were not institutions but individuals and communities that acted upon their convictions, whether secular, religious, ethical, or cultural in nature. Collaboration, as the third chapter argues, was popular among only a small minority of the French. Almost from the beginning—certainly...