Marianne in Chains

In France, the German occupation is called simply the "dark years." There were only the "good French" who resisted and the "bad French" who collaborated. Marianne in Chains, a broad and provocative history drawing on previously unseen archives, firsthand interviews, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, uncovers the complex truth of the time. Robert Gildea's groundbreaking study reveals the everyday life in the heart of occupied France; the pressing imperatives of work, food, transportation, and family obligations that led to unavoidable compromise and negotiation with the army of occupation.
Robert Gildea is a professor of modern French history at the University of Oxford. His previous books include "France Since 1945" and "The Past in French History." For "Marianne in Chains" he received the prestigious Wolfson History Prize and was a finalist for the British Academy Book Prize. He lives in Oxford, England.
In France, the German occupation is still called simply the "dark years." It is remembered as a time of hunger, fear, cold, and the absence of freedom, when the French population was cruelly and consistently oppressed by the enemy. There were only the "good French" who resisted and the "bad French" who collaborated. Yet "Marianne in Chains," a broad and provocative new history, uncovers a rather different story, one in which the truth is more complex, and more humane.
Drawing on previously unseen archives, firsthand interviews, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, Robert Gildea wholly reveals everyday life in the heart of occupied France. He describes the pressing imperatives of work, food, transportation, and family obligations that led to unavoidable compromise and negotiation with the army of occupation. In the process, he sheds light on such subjects as forced labor, the role of the Catholic Church, the "horizontal collaboration" between French women and German soldiers, and, most surprisingly, the ambivalent attitude of ordinary people toward the Resistance, which was often dismissed as a bunch if bandits who were militarily irrelevant.
A brilliant work of reconstruction, a crucial work of scholarship, and at once thorough, challenging, and readable, "Marianne in Chains" provides a clear view--all these years later, and unobscured by romance or polemics--of the painful ambiguities of living under tyranny.
"Stunning . . . Gildea, a professor of modern European history at Oxford, attempts to move 'beyond praise and blame' to explore the ever-shifting lines between accommodation and defiance, cynicism and loyalty, and prudence and altruism that the French negotiated through their ordeal. He succeeds brilliantly . . . In this] nuanced and intricate work of historical reconstruction, Gildea has grappled heroically with the ambiguity at the heart of history and in the heart of man."--Benjamin Schwarz, "The Atlantic Monthly"
"Stunning . . . Gildea, a professor of modern European history at Oxford, attempts to move 'beyond praise and blame' to explore the ever-shifting lines between accommodation and defiance, cynicism and loyalty, and prudence and altruism that the French negotiated through their ordeal. He succeeds brilliantly . . . In this] nuanced and intricate work of historical reconstruction, Gildea has grappled heroically with the ambiguity at the heart of history and in the heart of man."--Benjamin Schwarz, "The Atlantic Monthly"
" A] carefully researched and richly nuanced study."--Michael Kenney, "The Boston Globe"
"To those trapped in the perennial resistance-versus-collaboration debate, Robert Gildea has done a great service in his new book."--Alan Riding, "The New York Times"
"After the liberation of France, the Resistance was glorified and the collaborators punished, but these convenient categories obscured the varied and equivocal experience of the ordinary populace. To capture this experience, Gildea concentrates on one region, the Loire, going deep into its archives and interviewing survivors. He describes the blurry line between civility and collaboration--drinking with Germans in a cafe was acceptable; inviting them home was not--and citizens' confusion about where their patriotic duty lay. Typically, people defined themselves by their loyalty within their immediate community, which explains their willingness to betray Communists and Jews, but also there was] lasting bitterness toward the Resistance for the reprisals its attacks on Germans provoked. In terms that would doubtless seem familiar to the inhabitants of other occupied countries, this subtle and humane book shows that the French experience of occupation was one of comfort, deprivation, heroism, pettiness, terror, excitement, pride, and shame."--"The New Yorker"
"Gildea's remarkable book is based on massive archival research and probing interviews. The result is the most humane and nuanced account of wartime France to date. If there is one book on the subject which people should read then this is surely it."--Michael Burleigh, author of "The Third Reich"
"A daring and completely original account of the German occupation of France between 1940 and 1945, based on hitherto closed archival records and oral testimony from a wide range of witnesses. Full of the telling anecdote, written at a fast pace, "Marianne in Chains" is both readable and scholarly, provocative and convincing."--Ruth Harris, author of "Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age"
""Marianne in Chains" has a powerful immediacy and a powerful sense of place. Robert Gildea's readers come to grips with the awful choices facing the people of the Loire Valley, especially those in authority, after 1940."--Robert O. Paxton, author of "Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order"
"Gildea's book is a powerful, original, and richly textured study of daily life in Occupied France. His beautifully written narrative, which reads as compellingly as a novel, rejects both the heroic myth that the French were a nation