ISABELLE VON BUELTZINGSLOEWEN, editor. "Morts d'inanition": Famine et exclusions en France sous l'Oc-cupation. (Histoire.) Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 2005. Pp. 305. 20.00

Abstract

This well-documented collection of essays, edited by Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, who also contributed to it, focuses on the food shortages and dietary privations of those who were among the weakest and most marginalized groups during the German occupation of France in World War II. These included patients in psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and hospices; inmates in prisons and internment camps; and, in general, those among the most vulnerable sectors of the urban French population. Eighteen contributors depict a modern society and its political and medical establishments confronting problems of hunger not seen in France in a century. Even the memory of hunger, a priority for hospitals through the mid-nineteenth century, had disappeared by 1940 (Olivier Faure, p. 131). When the Germans occupied France in 1940, they established an artificial exchange rate of one mark to twenty francs, making French goods available for cheap purchase. German policy was to use the agricultural, industrial, and labor resources of France for the benefit of their war effort. By March 1943, a member of the French Academy of Medicine estimated that ten million French were suffering from “slow famine” and that two million of them risked death as a consequence of malnutrition (quoted by von Bueltzingsloewen, p. 297). This book asks to what extent the Vichy government was complicit in the suffering.