Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [24]
An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Klaus Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940–1945, Ted Morgan (William Morrow, 1990). Morgan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a young boy in Paris at the time of the armistice, when he and his family left for Spain and then the United States. He returned to France in 1987 to cover the Barbie trial for the New York Times Magazine, and he had access to thousands of pages of secret documents prepared for the trial, including hundreds of depositions that were never made public. Due to these documents, Morgan is able to provide much detail about major events and the everyday lives of residents under occupation. Morgan notes that there were more journalists in Lyon for the Barbie trial than for the Nuremberg trials, and that younger people, mostly students, stood in line every day for hours hoping to get one of the one hundred seats set aside for the public. He wondered why, and he answered, “Because the French had to look into this particular mirror, however distorted. Because there was a generation of young people that was still picking up the tab for World War II.”
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, Robert O. Paxton (Knopf, 1972). Paxton’s is the single definitive volume on Vichy, and if you’re only going to read one, read this one. Paxton documents the inner workings of the Vichy government, the politics between Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, and François Darlan, and the surprisingly slow growth of the Resistance. The revelation that the Vichy government enjoyed such mass support came as somewhat of a shock upon the book’s publication in 1972, though it is accepted knowledge that the French wanted to avoid the destruction of France at all costs. Paris remains a beautiful city in part because of accommodation and collaboration, but the history of this period is far more complicated than that. As Paxton writes, “It is tempting to identify with Resistance and to say, ‘That is what I would have done.’ Alas, we are far more likely to act, in parallel situations, like the Vichy majority.… The deeds of occupier and occupied alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values, one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”
The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honour: 1940–1942 (Simon & Schuster, 1955); Unity: 1942–1944 (Simon & Schuster, 1959); Salvation: 1944–1946 (Simon & Schuster, 1960). I bought these hardcover volumes at a used-book store about fifteen years ago and I hadn’t even realized that De Gaulle had written them, probably because they do pale in comparison to Churchill’s volumes. I was sure they would be pure puffery, but I was only partially right—no one ever said De Gaulle was modest, after all—and I was quickly swept up in his certaine idée de la France (which included a certain place for him). De Gaulle’s voice was the voice of occupied France, and his memoirs stand alone. Carroll & Graf published a single paperback volume of this work in 1998.
World War II: The Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941–1945, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen (Random House, 1996). This is a great reference with more than twenty-four hundred entries by two military historians who are also coauthors of a number of other books and articles. The book is definitive, but its uniqueness lies in the fact that it “looks at World War II through American eyes,” which is why it begins in 1941. (Events that happened before December 7, 1941, are covered in a chapter entitled “Prologue to War.”)
FRANCE AND THE FRENCH
There are a staggering number of books