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La France du marché noir (1940-1949) [The Black Market in France (1940-1949)]. By Fabrice Grenard. Paris: Payot, 2008. 352 pp. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, euro23.00. ISBN: 978-2-228-90284-7.
Reviewed by Bertram M. Gordon
One of the most pervasive aspects of life in German-occupied France during World War II was the black market that grew out of the Vichy government's attempt to allocate scarce resources by price setting and economic regulation. To this day, the black market evokes images, popularized in Jean Dutourd's novel Au Bon Beurre, published in 1952, and Claude Autant-Lara's film La Traversée de Paris, released in 1956, of vulgar and greedy peasants and retailers eager to profit illegally at the expense of the greater community (pp. 8-9, 292). Fabrice Grenard asks whether the historical record confirms these stereotypes (p. 9).
The black market and related infractions, which created a parallel economy, were a daily fact of life for the French under German occupation. More than a million charges were brought against individuals, exceeding any other type of violation during the four-year period (p. 7). Grenard's La France du marché noir is the most thorough study of the French wartime black market to date, and it is based in large part on the archives of the Contrôle économique, which the Vichy government created in 1940 to centralize the enforcement of price legislation, and whose authority was extended to cover all economic regulation after 1942 (p. 10).
Grenard notes that, since antiquity, parallel economies developed in times when governments tried to limit prices or ration products. Among the French examples were the rationing of wheat toward the end of Louis XTVs reign, maximum-price decrees during the revolutionary days of 1793, and attempts to regulate commerce near the end...