Books in Brief

France During the German Occupation, Translated by Philip Whitcomb (Stanford, 3 vols., $20.00). The drama of France from 1939 to 1945 consisted of three acts: the defeat, the occupation, and the liberation. The background and the details of each are slowly becoming history, as diaries, memoirs, documents and more comprehensive studies emerge in print. The latest to appear in America is this collection of testimonies, reminiscences and documents by people—mostly French, but also a few Americans and Germans—who were closely connected with the Vichy administration or were confidants of men like Pétain, Laval and their collaborators. The reader who goes through these fascinating volumes, either for purposes of scholarly research or out of general interest in French affairs, must be warned that most of the documents were assembled by the late Premier’s daughter and her husband, the Count de Chambrun, to present an apologia for Vichy’s policies, and in particular an apologia for Pierre Laval. Many of the texts were thus prepared as sympathetic replies to the family’s request, and have, as a consequence, no claim to being well-established history. A large number of them, however, were written by civil servants and experts on subjects like agriculture, labor, prisoners, police, education, foreign affairs, etc., and bring out many features of life and administration under German rule and the Vichy regime. The publication of these documents deposited with the Hoover Institution at Stanford must be welcomed, for they present the drama of 1940-45 from a side that has hardly been allowed to reach the public, or if so only in a distorted form.

T. MOLNAR

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France During the German Occupation, Translated by Philip Whitcomb (Stanford, 3 vols., $20.00). The drama of France from 1939 to 1945 consisted of three acts: the defeat, the occupation, and the liberation. The background and the details of each are slowly becoming history, as diaries, memoirs, documents and more comprehensive studies emerge in print. The latest to appear in America is this collection of testimonies, reminiscences and documents by people—mostly French, but also a few Americans and Germans—who were closely connected with the Vichy administration or were confidants of men like Pétain, Laval and their collaborators. The reader who goes through these fascinating volumes, either for purposes of scholarly research or out of general interest in French affairs, must be warned that most of the documents were assembled by the late Premier’s daughter and her husband, the Count de Chambrun, to present an apologia for Vichy’s policies, and in particular an apologia for Pierre Laval. Many of the texts were thus prepared as sympathetic replies to the family’s request, and have, as a consequence, no claim to being well-established history. A large number of them, however, were written by civil servants and experts on subjects like agriculture, labor, prisoners, police, education, foreign affairs, etc., and bring out many features of life and administration under German rule and the Vichy regime. The publication of these documents deposited with the Hoover Institution at Stanford must be welcomed, for they present the drama of 1940-45 from a side that has hardly been allowed to reach the public, or if so only in a distorted form.

T. MOLNAR