Content area
Full text
Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944. By Ian Ousby. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 0-312-18148-5. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 348. $25.95.
Foreigners who live there more than a few weeks quickly come to understand it: the experience of the 1939-45 war has never ceased to pervade French society. Beneath the tranquil douceurs of the countryside, the glitter of the cities, the technical, artistic, and educational brilliance of governing elites, the enormously successful economic transformations, the nuclear badge of authority, and the Gaullian-Pompidolian-Giscardian-Mitterrandian high international style (no less stinging for imperial retreat and fiercely resented overshadowing by superpowers), lurks the awful memory of occupation and the guerre franco-francaise. Only time, that is to say the final demise of that generation, may exorcise this tortured memory, the failed myth of national Resistance, and the frightful price exacted of the nation by the Germans, the French, and the Allies. Ian Ousby has inquired...