Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939-1945

Description

This wide-ranging volume brings together a blend of experienced and emerging scholars to examine the texture of everyday life for different parts of the wartime French population. It explores systems of coping, means of helping one another, confrontations with people or events and the challenges posed to and by Vichy's National Revolution during this difficult period in French and European history. The book focuses on human interactions at the micro level, highlighting lived experience within the complex social networks of this era, as French civilians negotiated the violence of war, the restrictions of Occupation, the shortages of daily necessities and the fear of persecution in their everyday lives. Using approaches drawn mostly from history, but also including oral history, film, gender studies and sociology, the text peers into the lives of ordinary men, women and children and opens new perspectives on questions of resistance, collaboration, war and memory; it tells some of the stories of the anonymous millions who suffered, coped, laughed, played and worked, either together at home or far apart in towns and villages across Occupied and Vichy France. Vichy France and Everyday Life is a crucial study for anyone interested in the social history of the Second World War or the history of France during the twentieth century.

Lindsey Dodd is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is the author of French Children under the Allied Bombs (2016). David Lees is Senior Teaching Fellow in French Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is one of the co-editors of The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture (2018).

[A] welcome addition to a growing literature about everyday life in wartime France and, as the editors point out, should be read alongside those works ... [The] editors should be praised for their dedication to bringing together scholars who work in both English and French and for ensuring the French scholarship was translated into English. This feature makes the collection particularly valuable for people who teach in English, but want to include contemporary French scholarship. * H-France * The authors significantly expand our understanding of ordinary and not-so-ordinary French men and women during the Vichy era and illuminate the lived experiences of people typically elided in political or economic histories ... Many of the chapters offer innovative methodological approaches, ask novel questions, or plumb new source bases. * History: Reviews of New Books * This book opens fresh perspectives on Vichy France, reversing the standard focus on elites by approaching the regime 'from below'. It explores ordinary, everyday life under the Occupation with its challenges, privations and daily preoccupations, offering insights into lived experience stretching from the banal and humdrum to the extraordinary and heroic. * James Shields, Professor of French Politics and Modern History, Aston University, UK *