Frederic Spotts . The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. New Haven : Yale University Press . 2008 . Pp. 283. $35.00.

Abstract

Frederic Spotts has written a lively book, full of anecdotes about the colorful personalities of the French art world under Nazi occupation. The list of characters includes, on the German side, the soldier-tourist Ernst Jünger, the sculptor Arno Breker, the German ambassador Otto Abetz, and Karl Epting, the head of the German Institute in Paris. On the French side much attention is given to the collaborationist writers Alfred Fabre-Luce, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; performers Serge Lifar, Sacha Guitry, and Germaine Lubin; and society hostesses Marie-Laure de Noailles and Florence Gould. Rounding out this list for the Resistance are André Gide, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Jean Guéhenno, as well as Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. The often sensational stories of resistance, but more frequently collaboration, opportunism, stubbornness, arrogance, and egotism, make it likely that this book will enjoy broad popular appeal. For scholars of the period, however, Spotts's approach may prove frustrating. Other than a brief discussion of cultural life in Marseille and an even more cursory look at Lyon, the book's focus is exclusively on Paris. Vichy receives short shrift. There is little context or background for the anecdotes that are the core of the study. The lack of references, citations, and bibliographic material beyond a brief note on sources is another weakness. More problematic still is the author's positioning of his work in the historiography of cultural life in wartime France. Spotts claims, for example, that “For all that has been written about the subject, for all the continuing unease and for all the importance of the issues involved, if you want to know how artists and intellectuals survived, worked and adapted, or if you want to have some idea of what cultural life was like, and what policies were followed by German and Vichy authorities, you will have difficulty finding answers.” “Culture,” he continues, “makes academic historians nervous .… most scholars study .… the seemingly more macho topic of politics and economics” (p. 2). Spotts concedes the value of Philippe Burrin and Julian Jackson's work, but otherwise, he claims, “that's it.” This is slightly disingenuous considering that the author includes, in his note on sources, Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac's masterful L'Art de la Défaite (1993, now available in English as Art of the Defeat [2009]); Michèle C. Cone's Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (1992); Jean-Pierre Rioux's La Vie Culturelle sous Vichy (1990); Stéphanie Corcy's La Vie Culturelle sous l'Occupation (2005); Gisèle Sapiro's La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (1999); and Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens, eds., Les Intellectuels et l'Occupation, 1940–1944 (2004). One might also add Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997); Christian Faure, Le Projet Culturel de Vichy: Folklore et révolution nationale, 1940–1944 (1989); Dominique Veillon, Fashion under the Occupation (2002, a translation of the second edition of La Mode sous l'Occupation [1990, 2001]); Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (1997); Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, eds., Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation (1989); Serge Added, Le théatre dans les années Vichy (1992); Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français sous Vichy: Les films français de 1940 à 1944 (1980); not to mention the work of Pascal Ory, Brett Bowles, Elizabeth Karlsgodt, and many others. Despite the author's claims, there seems to be little that is new here, much of the material having been assembled from biographies, memoirs, and academic studies.