Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
France Without Glory
By Tony Judt
BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s
by Eugen Weber
Norton, 352 pp., $25.00
Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Intrigue, and the French between the Wars
by Michael B. Miller
University of California Press, 448 pp., $35.00
French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939
by Robert Soucy
Yale University Press, 352 pp., $35.00
French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture
by David Carroll
Princeton University Press, 299 pp., $29.95
Prison Journal 1940–1945
by Edouard Daladier
Westview Press, 376 pp., $34.95
La France à l'heure allemande, 1940–1944
by Philippe Burrin
Paris: Seuil, 560 pp., FF160
Etre juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale
by Renée Poznanski
Paris: Hachette, 859 pp., FF95
Paris after the Liberation, 1944–1949
by Antony Beevor, by Artemis Cooper
Doubleday, 479 pp., $27.50
The Locust Years: The story of the Fourth French Republic, 1946–1958
by Frank Giles
Carroll & Graf, 431 pp., $26.95
In the tenth arrondissement of Paris, against the imposing façade of the Gare de l'Est, there is a large square, the Place du 11 Novembre 1918. From the south the square is approached and bisected by the Boulevard de Strasbourg; the Avenue de Verdun enters it from the east, while just to the west the Boulevard de Magenta leads away toward the Rue de Rocroy: three famous French battles and the date marking France's victory in World War I, which saw the recovery of Alsace and its capital. Observing this evocation of the glory that was France, the casual visitor could be forgiven for failing to notice that one corner of the square and a nondescript block to the west of it are officially the 'Rue du 8 Mai 1945.' Between the proud celebration of bloody national glories, with the war that ended in November 1918 the bloodiest of them all, and a modest acknowledgment of the Allied victory over Hitler the contrast is quite striking.
Review, 6403 words
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