Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
After the Fall
By Stanley Hoffmann
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944
by Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 418 pp., $10.00
The four sinister years that followed the fall of France in June, 1940, have not received the meticulous attention from historians that has been given to Nazi Germany. In France, there have been studies, memoirs, charges and countercharges about this complicated and excrutiating period. But few writers have been able to do full justice to it. Robert Aron in Histoire de Vichy[1] attempted to be comprehensive, and fair but succeeded only in being superficial and uncertain. French writers have tended to split along partisan lines, each side defending a legend. The first is the legend of the Resistance, which celebrates a nation that rose against German oppression after a brief moment of confusion. According to this view, shared by Gaullists and communists alike, the Vichy government and the Paris collaborators with the Germans were merely a handful of reactionaries or traitors, without roots in French history or lasting effects on it.
Review, 3324 words
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