Search

This review of recent scholarship on the German occupation of France during the Second World War discusses four subjects: the role of the German military authorities, anti-Jewish policy, economic policy, and relations between occupiers and occupied. The review argues that recent scholarship on the German occupation offers a potential complement to the scholarship on Vichy, which has been dominated by a focus on the French. There is, however, a danger of simply replacing a focus on the French with one on the Germans. The review points to the need for more exploration of the intertwined experiences of occupiers and occupied. This intertwining was evident in the economic and industrial realms and perhaps even more so in the social realm, in which significant numbers of French and Germans interacted with one another on a regular basis. Cet article passe en revue plusieurs études récentes sur l'histoire de l'occupation allemande de la France pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Il traite de quatre sujets en particulier: le rôle des autorités militaires allemandes; la politique antisémite; la politique économique; et les rapports entre les occupés et les occupants. L'argument de l'article est que les études récentes sur l'occupation offrent un éventuel complément aux études sur Vichy, qui sont marquées par une concentration sur les Français. En même temps, il est à craindre que les études récentes remplacent tout simplement une concentration sur les Français par une autre sur les Allemands. L'article avance la nécessité d'examiner les rapports entrecroisés des occupés et des occupants. Cet entrecroisement était évident dans les domaines de l'économie et de l'industrie et peut-être davantage dans celui du social—un domaine dans lequel un grand nombre de Français et Allemands ont dû s'affronter au quotidien.

This chapter examines the career of Marceau Pivert, a prominent French socialist militant during the inter-war and post-war years, focusing in particular on his transnational activism. A self-defined revolutionary, Pivert sought to transform French and European socialism, both of which he castigated as reformist. Confronted with considerable opposition from within the French socialist party (SFIO), Pivert looked to like-minded militants in Europe and beyond for support. A transnational revolutionary socialist network, he hoped, would become an instrument to defeat reformism within the SFIO and the other European socialist parties. In reality, however, Pivert’s fiery brand of international socialism made it easier for his opponents to ignore him, reinforcing his marginalisation within the party. As a result, his international militancy became a substitute for rather than a complement to his national militancy.

In the economic realm, the dominant impression of the German occupation of France is exploitation. Thanks to a variety of tools—massive occupation costs, a highly distorted exchange rate, the manipulation of clearing arrangements, widespread pillaging of material, the placing of contracts with French companies, and the conscription of French men and women for labour in Germany—the occupiers succeeded in extracting considerable resources. In what remains the best overall study of the subject, Alan Milward estimated that in 1943, Germany was using at least 40 % of French resources. A more recent study estimates that the transfer of wealth to Germany amounted to slightly over one-third of France’s GDP in 1941–42, before peaking at over one-half in 1943—levels the authors term “stunning”. Focusing on German contracts to French industry, Arne Radtke-Delacor calculates that 34 % of French production went to the Germans in the first half of 1942, rising to 40 % in the second half of 1943 and 45–50 % in early 1944. Equally striking is the increase in delivery rates of French industry, climbing from just over 50 % of the total value of contracts between September 1940 and December 1943 to 70 % in 1943. During the last two years of the occupation, Radtke-Delacor argues, French industry became an “indispensable element of the German war economy”, accounting for some 40 % of the industrial production that Germany obtained from occupied Europe as a whole. Contemplating such figures, it is little wonder that Peter Liberman, a political scientist, concluded that “conquest still pays”.

Michael Creswell, A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 238 pp., $52.50 (hb), ISBN 9780674022973. Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 358 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 9780520251625. Gerard Bossuat, Les aides americaines economiques et militaires a la France, 1938-1960. Une nouvelle image des rapports de puissance (Paris: Comite pour l'histoire economique et financiere de la France, 2001), 406 pp., €22.87, ISBN 211091050X. Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 259 pp., $23.76 (pb), ISBN 7981845454159. Claire Sanderson, L'impossible alliance? France, Grande-Bretagne et defense de VEurope, 1943-1938 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 471 pp., €32.00, ISBN 2859444815. Raphaele Ulrich-Pier, Rene Massigli (1888-1988). Une vie de diplomate, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 1,539 pp., $85.95, ISBN 9052012601. Helene Miard-Delacroix, and Rainer Hudemann, eds., Wandel und Integration: Deutsche franzosische Annaherungen der funfziger Jahre /Mutations et integration: Les rapprochments francoallemandes dans les annees cinquantes (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 463 pp., €49.80 (hb), ISBN 3486578022. Francois Lafon, Guy Mollet (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 960 pp., €30.00, ISBN 9872213629216. The historical reputation of France s Fourth Republic has undergone a significant rehabilitation since the regimes largely unmourned death in 1958. Writing almost thirty years ago, the French historian Jean-Pierre Rioux announced that it was high time to re-examine the Fourth Republic what he called this 'skeleton in the

Ripsman and Levy’s argument merits attention for at least two related reasons. The arst is the renewal of interest in appeasement within the international relations and security studies aelds. Piqued by the repeated use (or misuse) of the appeasement analogy by the administration of George W. Bush, several scholars have recently turned their attention to the international politics of the 1930s to assess what lessons should be drawn from the events of the period for today’s decisionmakers. 2 More speciacally, they question whether appeasement is sometimes justiaed or is always misguided. The second reason is that many of these scholars embrace what might be called a “rational

This article examines France's efforts to prepare for war during the interwar period. Immediately following the First World War, French political and military leaders, convinced of the possibility (and indeed the likelihood) of another European war, set about preparing the country for a conflict that was expected to be total in nature. Given the importance that French planners attached to economic factors in such a conflict, the article focuses on industrial and economic preparations for war during peacetime. Industrial preparations involved placing French industry in a position to produce large quantities of armaments as quickly as possible once war began, while economic preparations consisted of organizing the non-military sectors of the economy to meet wartime civilian needs. The article argues that France's economic and industrial preparations for war fell far short of what was needed — an assessment that reflects the huge gap between the plans drawn up in the wake of the First World War and the results achieved on the eve of the Second World War. Much of this failure, moreover, can be attributed to the weaknesses of the Conseil supérieur de la défense nationale, the institution charged with preparing the country for a future war. In addition to highlighting the concrete aspects of industrial and economic preparations for war, a focus on institutions not only throws light on how the interwar French state worked in practice, but also directs attention to a critical factor in the success of any regime: its ability to translate policy goals into concrete measures.

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.

For much of the interwar period, the Labour Party's international policy had been characterized by a profound dislike and distrust of France. During the Phoney War, however, Labour policy towards France underwent a transformation, and by early 1940 Labour leaders openly advocated the establishment of a permanent Anglo-French alliance. This transformation merits study for it had important implications for Labour's international policy in general, and the issue of alliances and the postwar organization of European security in particular. These implications, moreover, cast doubt on the usefulness of terms such as `realistic' or `idealistic' that are frequently used to describe Labour's international policy.

This article examines the activities of the French statesman Paul Reynaud during 1938–40 across three realms: the economic, political, and strategic. Although Reynaud has been relatively neglected by historians interested in the Third Republic's final years, he played a critical role in each of these three realms as finance minister and then as premier. Equally important, an examination of Reynaud's activities sheds new light on the contested subject of France's response to the challenge posed by Nazi Germany. In particular, it suggests that a middle ground is possible between those scholars who denounce France's response as wholly inadequate in light of the debacle of May–June 1940 and those who defend it as reasonable given the possibilities and constraints under which French leaders operated. Cet article examine les activites de l'homme d'Etat francais Paul Reynaud, entre 1938 et 1940, sous trois angles: economique, politique et strategique. Bien que Reynaud ait ete relativement neglige par les historiens specialistes des dernieres annees de la IIIe Republique, il a joue un role preponderant a chacun de ces trois niveaux, d'abord comme ministre des Finances, ensuite comme president du Conseil. En outre, l'examen des activites de Reynaud eclaire le sujet controverse de la reaction francaise au defi pose par l'Allemagne nazie. En particulier, il suggere l'existence d'une position mitoyenne entre les historiens qui croient a une complete inadequation de la reponse francaise, a la lumiere de la debâcle de mai–juin 1940, et ceux qui la jugent raisonnable et coherente, en prenant en compte l'eventail des possibilites et contraintes pesant sur les dirigeants francais.

Did Ford SAF sabotage the German war effort by deliberately manufacturing fewer vehicles than they could have? Ford SAF claimed after the war that they did. Exploring the nature and limits of industrial collaboration in occupied France, Horn and Imlay trace the wartime activities of Ford Motor Company's French affiliate. The company began making trucks and engine parts for the French military; but from 1940 until Liberation in 1944 was supplying the Wehrmacht. This book offers a fascinating account of how the company negotiated the conflicting demands of the French, German and American authorities to thrive during the war. It sheds important new light on broader issues such as the wartime relationship between private enterprise and state authority; Nazi Germany's economic policies and the nature of the German occupation of France, collaboration and resistance in Vichy France, and the role of American companies in Occupied Europe.

This article examines the efforts of French and British intelligence services to assess the German economy before and during the opening stage of World War II. The French and British, attached to a long‐war strategy based on the assumption time worked in their favour, looked to economic intelligence to indicate whether this was in fact the case. Yet for a variety of reasons clear and consistent assessments were impossible. Rather than accept uncertainty, the French and British chose to impose certainty by assuming the worst, a decision which contributed to the abandonment of a long‐war strategy as the Allies began to search for some way to win a short war.