The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation - Hardcover

Vinen, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300121326 ISBN 13: 9780300121322

Publisher: Yale Univ Pr, 2006

Synopsis

Richard Vinen's book shows how the Occupation seeped into everyone's lives. He brings to life the fear and the moral nightmares of this world - a world emptied of young men (festering in POW camps or working in the Reich), of chronic shortages, desperate compromises, racism and violence. He tries to see the Occupation through the eyes of the least privileged French people, as well as capturing the oddities of the period. Why, for example, did certain young gentile French people choose to wear the yellow star in 1942? Why did so many Parisian criminals impersonate policemen? Why did some French prisoners of war return from Germany with Polish lovers?

About this title

Review:

"Even well-informed readers will come away from Vinen's social history with a deeper knowledge of what it was like to live in France during the German occupation. It turns out in his wide-ranging account that it was much bleaker than what we had supposed."-Robert Wohl, author of "The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950."
-- Robert Wohl

About the Author:

Richard Vinen teaches history at King's College, London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0300121326
• ISBN 13: 9780300121322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 460