Search Results

In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From 1941 to 1943, Stein translated thirty-two of Pétain's speeches, in which he outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other “foreign elements” from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with Nazi occupiers. This book pursues troubling questions: Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake this project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, Stein's apparent Vichy protector. Faÿ was director of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the Vichy regime and overseer of the repression of French freemasons. He convinced Pétain to keep Stein undisturbed during the war and, in turn, encouraged her to translate Pétain for American audiences. Yet Faÿ's protection was not coercive. Stein described the thinker as her chief intellectual companion during her final years. The text outlines the formative powers of this relationship, noting possible affinities between Stein and Faÿ's political and aesthetic ideals, especially their reflection in Stein's writing from the late 1920s to the 1940s.

From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government's declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the subject of this book, a chronicle of the Vichy regime's attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. The author informs this story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, the book does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, the book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.

This book tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Beginning with the economic context that led to the destruction of public art, the book goes on to detail the process by which monuments were removed and destroyed and the metal sent to Germany for Hitler's war machine. The most remarkable part of the story is the reaction of the French public to the loss of its artwork. People protested all over France, and many communities took extraordinary measures to save their statues. This protest, and the way the collaborationist Vichy government handled it, sheds light on the complexities of life in wartime France.