Volume 25, Number 17 · November 9, 1978
Who Said No?
By Stanley Hoffmann
Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivation in the Southern Zone 1940-1942
by H.R. Kedward
Oxford University Press, 311 pp., $21.00
The last years of the 1930s were a period of intense confusion for the French. Traditional anti-German chauvinists had become apostles of appeasement. Leftists had found that their pacifism overwhelmed their antifascism. The Popular Front deeply divided the French. It had been at first a tremendous source of hope for its followers; it turned into a fiasco and a bitter disappointment for them. French fascists were split into rival sects arguing over what to do about the threat from Germany. Communists, had moved in a few years from revolutionary defeatism to antifascist patriotism, from class warfare to pleas for national union.
Review, 4522 words
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