Download or read book The Vichy Past in France Today written by Richard J. Golsan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-20 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory is an interdisciplinary study examining the continuing impact of the memory of Vichy and World War II in French politics, literature, intellectual discourse and debates, and the law. It argues that despite multiple efforts in all of these areas to come to terms with France’s World War II past and to fulfill a “duty to memory” to Vichy’s Jewish victims, the nation is still not reconciled to the so-called “Dark Years,” even seventy years after the Liberation. Indeed the Vichy past “occupies” important recent works of literature, inflects much political discussion and debate, often serving as a metaphor for political (and moral) evil. Its legacies include the passage of problematic laws that dangerously distort and simplify complex historical realities. Chapter I examines the historical and legal legacies of the 1990s trials for crimes against humanity and traces their impact on the so-called “memorial laws” of the new century. Chapter II revisits the 2002 presidential elections in France and the impact of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first round victory on intellectual and cultural debate. Chapter III explores Alain Badiou’s controversial characterization of Sarkozy’s presidential victory as a return of “Petainism” in The Meaning of Sarkozy. The discussion is cast against the backdrop of Badiou’s “radical” political thought and Sarkozy’s political uses and misuses of the World War II past. Chapter IV examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006) and its morally and historically problematic portrayal of an unrepentant Nazi and SS officer. Chapter V discusses Yannick Haenel’s fictional recreation of the Polish resistance hero Jan Karski (The Messenger, 2009) in his novel by that name, and the polemics between the novel’s author and the maker of the classic Holocaust documentary film, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann. The Conclusion first explores the ways in which the memory of Vichy inflects literary and political reflections on the recent terrorist attacks in France. It also examines strategies proposed by French philosophers for moving beyond the “impasse” of Vichy’s memory in France before concluding with a different strategy proposed by the author for the French nation to move beyond the memory of the Dark Years.
Download or read book When France Fell written by Michael S. Neiberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy governmentÑa fateful decision that nearly destroyed the AngloÐAmerican alliance. According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the Òmost shocking single eventÓ of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American responseÑa policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain. The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American plannersÕ strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The USÐVichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained AngloÐAmerican relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Ptain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted USÐFrench relations for decades. Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.
Download or read book The Vichy Past in France Today written by Richard J. Golsan and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the continuing impact of the memory of the Vichy regime and World War II in France. It analyzes recent political and intellectual debates, trials and the passage of contentious laws, historical controversies, and literary works and argues that the country has not yet reconciled with its past.
Download or read book Vichy France and the Jews written by Michael Robert Marrus and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the definitive account of Vichy's own antisemitic policies and practices. It is a major contribution to the history of the Jewish tragedy in wartime Europe answering the haunting question, "What part did Vichy France really play in the Nazi effort to murder Jews living in France?"
Download or read book England s Last War Against France written by Colin Smith and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genuinely new story of the Second World War - the full account of England's last war against France in 1940-42. Most people think that England's last war with France involved point-blank broadsides from sailing ships and breastplated Napoleonic cavalry charging red-coated British infantry. But there was a much more recent conflict than this. Under the terms of its armistice with Nazi Germany, the unoccupied part of France and its substantial colonies were ruled from the spa town of Vichy by the government of Marshal Philip Petain. Between July 1940 and November 1942, while Britain was at war with Germany, Italy and ultimately Japan, it also fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Petain's Vichy French. When the Royal Navy sank the French Fleet at Mers El-Kebir almost 1,300 French sailors died in what was the twentieth century's most one-sided sea battle. British casualties were nil. It is a wound that has still not healed, for undoubtedly these events are better remembered in France than in Britain. An embarrassment at the time, France's maritime massacre and the bitter, hard-fought campaigns that followed rarely make more than footnotes in accounts of Allied operations against Axis forces. Until now.
Download or read book France 1940 written by Philip Nord and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revisionist account of France’s crushing defeat in 1940, a world authority on French history argues that the nation’s downfall has long been misunderstood. Philip Nord assesses France’s diplomatic and military preparations for war with Germany, its conduct of the war once the fighting began, and the political consequences of defeat on the battlefield. He also tracks attitudes among French leaders once defeat seemed a likelihood, identifying who among them took advantage of the nation’s misfortunes to sabotage democratic institutions and plot an authoritarian way forward. Nord finds that the longstanding view that France’s collapse was due to military unpreparedeness and a decadent national character is unsupported by fact. Instead, he reveals that the Third Republic was no worse prepared and its military failings no less dramatic than those of the United States and other Allies in the early years of the war. What was unique in France was the betrayal by military and political elites who abandoned the Republic and supported the reprehensible Vichy takeover. Why then have historians and politicians ever since interpreted the defeat as a judgment on the nation as a whole? Why has the focus been on the failings of the Third Republic and not on elite betrayal? The author examines these questions in a fascinating conclusion.
Download or read book Vichy written by Eric Conan and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1998 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A plea for a more moderate, balanced, and accurate view of the Vichy regime.
Download or read book France s New Deal written by Philip Nord and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-26 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France's New Deal is an in-depth and important look at the remaking of the French state after World War II, a time when the nation was endowed with brand-new institutions for managing its economy and culture. Yet, as Philip Nord reveals, the significant process of state rebuilding did not begin at the Liberation. Rather, it got started earlier, in the waning years of the Third Republic and under the Vichy regime. Tracking the nation's evolution from the 1930s through the postwar years, Nord describes how a variety of political actors--socialists, Christian democrats, technocrats, and Gaullists--had a hand in the construction of modern France. Nord examines the French development of economic planning and a cradle-to-grave social security system; and he explores the nationalization of radio, the creation of a national cinema, and the funding of regional theaters. Nord shows that many of the policymakers of the Liberation era had also served under the Vichy regime, and that a number of postwar institutions and policies were actually holdovers from the Vichy era--minus the authoritarianism and racism of those years. From this perspective, the French state after the war was neither entirely new nor purely social-democratic in inspiration. The state's complex political pedigree appealed to a range of constituencies and made possible the building of a wide base of support that remained in place for decades to come. A nuanced perspective on the French state's postwar origins, France's New Deal chronicles how one modern nation came into being.
Download or read book The Hunt for Nazi Spies written by Simon Kitson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.
Download or read book The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy written by Kevin Passmore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new history of parliamentary conservatism and the extreme right in France during the successive crises of the years from 1870 to 1945. Charts royalist opposition to the newly established Republic, the emergence of the nationalist extreme right in the 1890s, and the parallel development of republican conservatism.
Download or read book National Regeneration in Vichy France written by Debbie Lackerstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creators of the Vichy regime did not intend merely to shield France from the worst effects of military defeat and occupation; rather the leaders of Vichy were inspired by a will to regenerate France, to establish an authoritarian new order that would repair the degenerative effects of parliamentary democracy and liberal society. Their plan to effect this change took the form of a far-reaching programme they called the National Revolution. This is the first study of the National Revolution as the expression of Vichy's ideology and aims. It reveals the variety and complexity of both right wing and other strands of French thought in the context of the turbulent years of the 1930s - when Vichy's history really begins - and under the Occupation, when internal rivalries and divisions, as well as the pressures of war, doomed Vichy's programme of national regeneration. The book is structured around a consideration of the rhetoric of right-wing ideology and such key catchwords as 'decadence', 'action', 'order', 'realism' and 'new man', and shows how these phrases only served to mask the political and ideological incoherence of the Vichy government.
Download or read book Assassination in Vichy written by Gayle K. Brunelle and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy’s murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the “Cagoule,” a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy tells the story of Dormoy’s murder and the investigation that followed. At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France’s deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory.
Download or read book Bad Faith written by Carmen Callil and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bad Faith tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and con men—Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and “Commissioner for Jewish Affairs” in France’s Vichy government.Darquier set about to eliminate Jews in France with brutal efficiency, delivering 75,000 men, women, and children to the Nazis and confiscating Jewish property, which he used for his own gain. Carmen Callil’s riveting and sometimes darkly comic narrative reveals Darquier as a self-obsessed fantasist who found his metier in propagating hatred—a career he denied to his dying day—and traces the heartrending consequences for his daughter Anne of her poisoned family legacy. A brilliant meld of epic sweep and psychological insight, Bad Faith is a startling history of our times.
Download or read book French Peasant Fascism written by Robert O. Paxton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1920s France the far-right peasantry wanted an authoritarian and agrarian society. This study examines their singular lack of success and the enduring French perception of themselves as a peasant nation.
Download or read book Vichy s Afterlife written by Richard Joseph Golsan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the distinctive features of the "Vichy Syndrome"?the persistence of the memory of the Vichy regime in French political and cultural life?is that it has been extremelyødifficult for an authoritative historical discourse to impose itself. Why does Vichy, and all that the name entails, fascinate and even obsess the French, inflecting not only discussions of the past but of the present as well? In Vichy's Afterlife, Richard J. Golsan explores the complexities of some of the most provocative episodes of Vichy's curious persistence in France's national consciousness. He argues that each of these episodes, events, and scandals constitutes a crossroads where history and "counterhistory"?different or competing versions of the past?encounter one another, often with explosive and even destructive consequences.
Download or read book French Colonialism Unmasked written by Ruth Ginio and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Vichy regime, there was ostensibly only one France and one form of colonialism for French West Africa (FWA). World War II and the division of France into two ideological camps, each asking for legitimacy from the colonized, opened for Africans numerous unprecedented options. French Colonialism Unmasked analyzes three dramatic years in the history of FWA, from 1940 to 1943, in which the Vichy regime tried to impose the ideology of the National Revolution in the region. Ruth Ginio shows how this was a watershed period in the history of the region by providing an in-depth examination of the Vichy colonial visions and practices in fwa. She describes the intriguing encounters between the colonial regime and African society along with the responses of different sectors in the African population to the Vichy policy. Although French Colonialism Unmasked focuses on one region within the French Empire, it has relevance to French colonial history in general by providing one of the missing pieces in research on Vichy colonialism. Ruth Ginio is a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of articles in International Journal of African Historical Studies, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, Cahiers d'etudes africaines, and several other journals.
Download or read book Denaturalized written by Claire Zalc and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration in the world. As awful as that truth is, its social consequences—recycling offenders through an overwhelmed criminal justice system, ever-mounting costs, and a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are even more devastating. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the practical insights gained through her work on criminal justice reform, Rachel Barkow reveals how dangerous it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for a transformative shift toward data and expertise.
