Paperback choice

On the ground with the Nazis

Nicholas Lezard is intrigued by Richard Vinen's account of life during the Nazi occupation of France, The Unfree French
The Unfree French by Richard Vinen

The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Penguin, £9.99)

You may wonder, unless you are a historian professionally connected with the era, whether it is worth your while reading up to 400 pages about life in France under Nazi rule. At which kind of dinner party, for instance, could you conceivably wow guests with your new-found mastery of the subject? One in which you are made strangely uncomfortable by someone quoting that line about "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"?

Well, I have a method when reviewing books that involves making a pencilled note on the flyleaf whenever the author makes an interesting point. Just a page number and a short memory-jogging quote. Within about an hour of reading, I had run out of space.

I thought whatever curiosity I had about occupied France had been sated by Carmen Callil's Bad Faith, her study of the collaborator Louis Darquier. That concentrated on one evil man; this book gives an overall picture - but, as Vinen stresses in his introduction, his primary sources are those accounts of the occupation left by the occupied people themselves. It is a social rather than political history.

Which means we get to see what it was really like, on the ground, as it were. There are innumerable anecdotes, all of which raise as well as answer any number of questions about the time. From the start, you will learn that things are more complicated than they seem. The Vichy government, for one thing, was not entirely composed of Nazi sympathisers. For example, Paul Morand, "a famous libertine" and novelist, having secured himself a job as president of the Commission for Film Censorship, found himself in the unusual position of having to ban a film whose script he had written.

As for the French outside of Vichy, one can only wring one's hands in sympathy at what they went through: the image of a column of Jews being led through the Place des Vosges by a policeman whose own face was streaming with tears; a "terrified" concierge at the Opéra refusing a tip from Albert Speer (while in the company of Hitler); the Parisian priest who pinned a yellow star to the figure of a baby Jesus at Christmas 1942. These vignettes tell us an enormous amount about a nation and its character (although I concede that all the above instances are from Paris).

The book, understandably, contains little humour, but I did laugh at the poacher, one of Sartre's fellow-prisoners during his period of captivity as a PoW, who said that the only four German words he needed to know in order to understand their society were those for "potato", "beer", "money" and "forbidden". No, not much laughter; even coughing during a pro-Vichy newsreel was suspect - "two men, aged fifty-five and eighty-six [!], had to produce doctor's certificates to prove that their throat conditions were real before the police released them." Powdering your nose during the newsreel could also lead to a threat of arrest.

There is, surprisingly, not too much about the Resistance. Then again, a sentence such as "during the occupation, relations between De Gaulle and the Resistance had been facilitated by the general's absence" tells us a lot about both De Gaulle and the Resistance very quickly and elegantly. Nor is there much reflection about theatre of the time - I was surprised to see no mention of Clouzot's film Le Corbeau, whose allegory of collaboration sailed very close to the wind, and the controversy that saw it banned after the liberation.

Perhaps it is because Vinen feels these stories have been told elsewhere; and certainly, there is a fresh feel to The Unfree French that makes it very easy to read. One element of the fascination this subject has is that it makes us wonder what we would have done in this country had we been occupied ourselves. As Vinen says: "This is an understandable but futile question . . . real sympathy in these circumstances must begin with a recognition that circumstances are different."

What he gives us here is a very plausible explanation of those contexts, of the French social conditions of the time. So what the book doesn't do is tell us how we might have fared under the Nazis; it tells us, instead, what the French are like - whether they're being occupied or not. And that has to be valuable.

Today's best video

Today in pictures