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Reviewed by:
  • Paris at War, 1939–1944 by David Drake
  • Martyn Cornick
Paris at War, 1939–1944. By David Drake. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. viii + 545 pp., ill.

The demand for books on occupied Paris remains steady. This volume comes hot on the heels of Ronald Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), and, before that, Alan Riding's survey of Parisian cultural life, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). David Drake's book is a refreshing and wider-ranging alternative to these. His ambition is to go beyond the 'bland depiction of the city' (p. 1) such as that presented in an exhibition of images taken by the photographer André Zucca (who worked for the Germans), and to delve further into how the inhabitants of the French capital experienced the harsh realities of life under the Occupation, on the whole trying 'to survive hardship and deprivation while making as few compromises as they could' (p. 427). Drake has mined a wide array of diaries and instant histories (that is, French works containing fresh testimony that appeared just after the Liberation and which tend nowadays to be overlooked), and succeeds in weaving a rich and multi-layered narrative on occupied Paris. Uppermost, too, in Drake's mind is the need to remember that those on whose testimony he draws did not have the benefit of hindsight: throughout the book he conveys the sense of overwhelming uncertainty dominating people's lives. To which he adds further insights gleaned from the archives of the Paris Police, principally the fortnightly reports of Renseignements généraux agents who hung around in cafés and political meetings gathering information. There are some engaging pages on the impact the sudden influx of German soldiers had on greater Paris at a time when 1.2 million French soldiers were absent, either caught up in the exode, or on their way to POW camps. According to German figures, in addition to authorized brothels, 'freelance' and part-time prostitutes 'numbered between 80,000 and 100,000'(p. 99); Drake deals empathic-ally with the difficulties associated with this extraordinary phenomenon. One advantage of his approach is that the reader grows to know certain individual witnesses. Now and again, their voice falls silent, bringing the realization, as in the case of Joseph Biélinky in early 1943, that round-ups and deportations were a devastating fact of everyday life. In addition to individual trajectories, it is possible here, owing to the excellent index, to follow key themes running through the book. Drake deals well with how crucial events outside [End Page 294] France impacted there, for instance the consequences of Hitler's invasion of the USSR. The titanic ideological struggle unleashed in the East acted as a spur to Communists' activities. We learn how this news changed the mood, and, indeed, how it changed people's lives. Among the Paris collaborationists, too, the offensive 'triggered an explosion of joy' (p. 195), one galvanizing effect being the establishment of the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme (LVF), bringing a concomitant upsurge in anti-Semitism. To combat the 'terror' of the Communist-led resistance, an escalation of repression was bound to follow. Drake is to be congratulated for producing such a readable narrative, based all the while on meticulous research and engaging sources.

Martyn Cornick
University of Birmingham
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