The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables and Strangers

Abstract

Shannon Fogg’s valuable tome is an amended version of a doctoral thesis undertaken under the expert guidance of Sarah Farmer. Fogg offers a ‘bottom up’ approach, exploring how everyday life in the period 1939–1944 affected social attitudes towards groups of outsiders in the Limousin region, in other words the Corrèze, Creuse and Haute-Vienne départements of central France. The author emphasises how the value of specific regions changed as a result of the war and occupation. The Limousin had been an area of little strategic value and very limited political clout. During the Occupation, the region became something of a haven: it sheltered numerous groups of rural resisters, known as Maquisards, but also various categories of refugees: Alsatians, Spaniards, Roma/Gypsies and Jews. Central to the everyday concerns of locals and refugees alike were the difficulties of finding enough to eat. By 1944, 24 per cent of the letters intercepted by Vichy’s postal censors made reference to food shortages and by that stage official ration cards were offering perhaps as little as 900 calories per day, when recommended daily category intakes are of between 2400 and 2800. Fogg describes how city dwellers transformed themselves from passive shoppers into active hunter-gatherers with excursions into the countryside to find provisions. Faced with the difficult circumstances of the occupation, she argues that communities saw refugees not only as strangers but also as potential threats, or indeed sometimes benefits, to their local economy and culture.