Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation 1940-1945. - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002

Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation 1940-1945. Robert Gildea. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]20.00. 524 pages. ISBN 0-333-78230-5. Attitudes to the collapse of France in 1940, to the German occupation, the puppet Vichy Government and the role of the Resistance divided France in the period under survey and divide it still.

'The French' Mr Gildea states, 'have never faced up to their wartime past in any sustained and systematic way'. To find out what really happened the author made use of the departmental archives for a specific region, the Loire Valley in the north-west of France, from St Nazaire in the west to Tours in the east. One of his main concerns is to show how collective morality was defined by Frenchmen under occupation and how it was defined after the Liberation. His study shows that Frenchmen in this period were not so much heroic or villainous but 'imaginative, creative and resourceful . . . in pursuit of a better life'. He also shows how the German attack on the U.S.S.R. profoundl y altered the situation by turning French Communists against the Germans. The popular division of 'good French', 'bad French' and 'poor French' is too narrow to fit the reality of occupation. The situation in 1940 was not the same as in 1945. The Vichy government was not 'as authoritarian nor as reactionary' as frequently portrayed. People's sufferings were never so bad as to cause an uprising. To write good history is always difficult and to write well about the Occupation is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks facing any historian. Mr Gilden has given us a good history. (J.M.)