The Unfree French
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Life Under the Occupation
Richard Vinen
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Richard Vinen describes the inescapable fear and the moral quandaries that permeated life in German-controlled France. Focusing on the experiences of the least privileged, he shows how chronic shortages, desperate compromises, fear of displacement, racism, and sadistic violence defined their lives. Virtually all adult males festered in POW camps or were sent to work in the Reich. With numerous enthralling anecdotes and a variety of maps and evocative photographs, The Unfree French makes it possible for the first time to understand how average people in France really lived from 1940 to 1945, why their experiences differed from region to region and among various groups, and why they made the choices they did during the occupation.
Richard Vinen is on the faculty of the Department of History, Kings College, University of London.
"Even well-informed readers will come away from Vinen's social history with a deeper knowledge of what it was like to live in France during the German occupation. It turns out in his wide-ranging account that it was much bleaker than what we had supposed."—Robert Wohl, author of The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950.
“Exceptionally well-written. . . . Vinen’s piercing chronicle not only captures the squalid physical and moral atmosphere of France’s dark years; it also unnervingly reveals the moral ambiguity that’s the stuff of humanity—and history.”—Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly
“Vinen’s social history . . . offers an alternate perspective to the political and military histories that dominate the subject of occupied France.”—Booklist
"Vinen provides much interesting information. . . . Vinen shows very well, in the rich detail of his different cases, the great variety of ways in which constraints could be evaded or turned to a person’s benefit."—Robert O. Paxton, New York Review of Books
"Vinen has a keen eye for incidents whose sheer absurdity shows just how chaotic and unpredictable things were. . . . Vinen is particularly good at evoking the privations and hardships that served as the backdrop to nearly all French lives between 1940 and 1944."—David A. Bell, The Nation
Publication Date: December 18, 2007
30 illus.
