The Greatest Escape: How One French Community Saved Thousands Of Lives From The Nazis par by Peter Grose (review)

Reviews 245 Collection of Louis La Caze. The title of both the colloquium and the current volume, Delicious Decadence, derives from the Goncourt brothers’ description of the style of François Boucher and the era of Louis XV.By the mid-nineteenth century,the Goncourt brothers were not alone in their reassessment of eighteenth-century art, which had earlier been rejected in favor of the neoclassical aesthetics of the school of David. As Preti clarifies in her introductory chapter, the mid-nineteenth-century reassessment of eighteenth-century painting did not absolve this art from the earlier accusation of “decadence” but rather was founded on a re-interpretation of the word itself from a negative critique of the “immorality” and “hedonism” of both Rococo aesthetics and the lifestyle of the eighteenth-century painters and patrons to an appreciation of aesthetic “modernity.” Several of the chapters investigate the history of art collecting and the changing taste for eighteenth-century aesthetics. In addition to Preti’s study, which focuses on early French amateurs and collectors, and offers suggestions for new research in this field, Marie-Martine Dubreuil’s chapter on transformations in aesthetic appreciation from 1830–1860 and Faroult’s study of Watteau and Chardin examine the relationship between the economic and political climate in France during the early nineteenth century to revisions in aesthetic sensibilities. Jon Whitely and Frances Fowle turn their attention to the reception of French art outside of France, in London, and Scotland respectively, while Vogtherr underscores the important contribution of German scholarship to the “rediscovery” of French eighteenth-century art. Changes in aesthetic tastes and debates amongst art critics comprise the focus of Frances Suzman Jowell’s chapter, which examines the debate between the art critics, Théophile Thoré-Bürger and Charles Blanc, particularly as concerns their assessment of an 1860 exhibition in the Galerie Martinet in Paris,while Pauline Prévost-Mercilhacy investigates the circumstances surrounding the Galerie Martinet exhibition itself. Finally, in the last two chapters, Humphrey Wine and Stephen Duffy explore factors contributing to changes in policy and art acquisition in the National Gallery in London. Delicious Decadence includes fifteen full-color plates of eighteenth-century French paintings, and numerous black-and-white reproductions throughout the volume. It provides a beautiful and critically significant contribution to the scholarship on eighteenth-century French art and the history of art collecting. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Grose, Peter. The Greatest Escape: How One French Community Saved Thousands Of Lives From The Nazis. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2014. ISBN 978-1-85788-626-9. Pp. xxviii + 324. £17. On the plateau Vivarais-Lignon during World War II, there were nonviolent and violent factions resisting both Nazism and Vichy. Because of the early emphasis on nonviolence in Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979) and Pierre Sauvage’s Weapons of the Spirit (1989), and numerous recent studies, the area is primarily known for its nonviolent resistance. During the Holocaust, there was no other nonviolent communal effort on this scale for this length of time anywhere else in Occupied Europe. 5,000 refugees were aided, including roughly 3,500 Jews and large numbers of réfractaires avoiding the STO, Spanish Republicans, and non-Fascist Germans. The twelve villages’ postwar reputation for nonviolent resistance has eclipsed the violent resistance that took place here during the Occupation. This is highly unusual, because in France since 1945 there has been massive recognition of armed resistance but little acknowledgement of rescue. Marianne Fayol remarked in an unpublished interview that her husband, Pierre Fayol, a local resistance leader, wrote Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sous l’Occupation (1940–1944): les résistances locales, l’aide interalliée, l’action de Virginia Hall (O.S.S.) (1990) to depict what had been forgotten:“[O]n connaissait Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, ce village qui a sauvé 5 000 Juifs, et on a complètement oublié Le Chambon-sur-Lignon résistant.”The strength and originality of Grose’s The Greatest Escape is to have made both“the village of rescue”and“the resisting village”the subject of his inquiry. Grose paints an accurate picture of rescue activities on the plateau. He covers all the high...