The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation

(Paperback)

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Description

In the summer of 1940 the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory. In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estrange middle-aged Jews, who found themselves on the same train to Auschwitz. The Unfree French is extremely moving and a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.

Reviews

"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."
-- Robert Wohl

Author Bio

Richard Vinen is Reader in History at Kings College, University of London. His last book was the highly acclaimed A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century.