France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire. By Chris Millington

Abstract

Éric Zemmour, the rabble-rousing extreme-right candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, deliberately sparked controversy by claiming that Pétain had not killed off the Third Republic, but had secretly prepared a French revenge against Germany and had protected French Jews. Zemmour’s interventions were the latest reminder that the painful memory of France’s années noires is still a live issue some eighty years after the Liberation. Books on the Occupation may focus on a particular city or region, or may analyse a specific institution or a particular stratum of society. Or they may, as with Chris Millington’s latest book, offer an overview of the period as a whole. Millington has wisely chosen not to write yet another chronological history of Vichy; he has opted instead to organize his material under a number of themed headings. Throughout the book he fully incorporates notions of gender, colonialism, and ethnicity as he highlights the impact of events in France on the people and institutions of the French empire. In the first chapter, on the trauma of May–June 1940, Millington debunks a number of persistent myths about why France was defeated. Subsequent chapters are devoted to ‘Vichy’, ‘Collaboration’, ‘Resistance’, ‘Persecution’, and ‘Liberation’. Millington raises issues both within and between these, questioning, for example, the usefulness of the notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ within metropolitan and imperial contexts. Influenced by Philippe Burrin (La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995)), he prefers ‘defiance’ and ‘accommodation’ except when designating the tiny minority who were indisputably collaborators or resisters. In a final chapter, ‘History and Memory’, which precedes a short conclusion, Millington offers an excellent historiographical survey of the period from ‘Mythologizing the Resistance’ (1945–69), through a time of ‘Inconvenient Truths’ (1971–95), and concluding with ‘Diversification and Revisionism’ (2000 onwards). In making sense of Vichy, Millington rightly emphasizes the need to ‘grasp its diversity in space, time and composition’ (p. 52), which he qualifies by underscoring three important constants: Pétain remaining head of government throughout the Occupation; Vichy’s permanent quest for a peace treaty; and the exclusion and persecution of perceived enemies from the very beginning of Vichy’s existence. While few would contest that ‘The regime fully directed its energies into undoing the “damage” inflicted on France during the country’s years of democracy’, the assertion that follows — ‘Persecution was therefore Vichy’s raison d’être’ (p. 179) — is debatable. Persecution was certainly a means to an end for Vichy but not necessarily its raison d’être. Millington is to be praised for having covered the events and issues of this extremely complex historical moment in under two hundred pages without falling into the trap of oversimplification. This lively, stimulating new addition to the study of the années noires will be welcomed by the general reader, while old hands will find much to mull over in the text and are likely to discover new references in the extensive notes.