Customer Reviews

Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944

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OCCUPATION is one of the best historical non-fiction books I've read. You can tell that its author, Ian Ousby, is not a historian by profession. The book reads like a literary critque, and Ousby occasionally ventures into such topics as symbolism during the Occupation, and the emotions behind living in France during WWII. The book is ladden with stories and qoutes originating from source material of Vichy and Occupied France, giving the book a human quality that you will often fail to find in most historical texts. The book is often frightening, with true stories of Gestapo cruelty, and triumphant as the reader follows the events of France's history from the day the Germans marched on Paris, till the day Paris was liberated and beyond. I closed the book, and came to the conclusion that it was one of the best books I've ever read since I gained a solid platform of knowledge that would be hard to acquire through an expensive history course. The only gripe I had with the book was that it sometimes takes up three pages in what could be said in a paragraph. However, this occurred rarely and the majority of the book flowed beautifully and kept my interest. In summary, if you are in the least bit interested in French history during WWII, this is a book that you MUST find its way into your bookshelf. I highly recommend it.

Ousby illustrates well how early French hopes that the German treatment would be fair and correct collapsed over time. It soon transpired that the only function of France was to be a source of booty and exploitation. Particularly insightful on the Vichy regime, Ousby is thorough on showing up the tensions in the ranks of the collaborators and the resistance alike.

if you are only going to read one book about france under the occupation, read this one. it's fair, showing without moralizing how numerous french either went down the path of collaboration or resistance. it's one of the few books that doesn't try to generalize about france during the war, and shows just how splintered the country was. just as importantly, it does a good job explaining to a reader who wasn't alive then and never suffered the horror of an occupation what it does to people mentally, pushing them into acts of unbelievable courage, or into evil that years later seems impossible to understand but at the time may have appeared the only thing to do.

The French experience of 1940-44 was primarily a cultural happening, rather than a political or military one. This is an obvious fact, but also an inconvenient one. Histories habitually focus on militaria and political squabbling. How do you get a grasp on an era when there were no battles or politics? Ian Ousby's solution is to make a cultural survey of the time, focusing primarily on the minutiae of everyday living under the Occupation, rather than on the self-aggrandizing postwar fables of ideologues and fanatics.

Ousby notes fashion and literary trends--and tells us, inevitably but with a dash of humor, what Sartre was doing. Less frivolously, he tosses us statistical nuggets like the following:

'By 1942 the mortality rate in Paris was 40 percent higher than it had been in the years 1932-8; deaths from tuberculosis among the elderly and young had doubled. In the poorer districts of the city adolescent girls growing up between 1935 and 1944 were 11 centimetres shorter, and boys 7 centimetres shorter, than their predecessors. A generation developed bad teeth. Adults lost anything between 4 and 8 kilos.'

You wouldn't want to read a book of paragraphs like that, but it works very well where Ousby's put it. It's in a fascinating middle chapter, "Are You in Order," which discusses smuggling, rationing, 'Le Systeme D', and how Sartre and de Beauvoir's joint of pork had white maggots in it, though they ate it anyway.

Ousby is a journalist and literary critic rather than an academic or so-called "professional historian." This gives him an enormous advantage over most writers on the period. He does not bring a suitcase of prejudices to the party, or buttonhole us in a corner while explaining how wonderful and innocent the Communists were, or how feckless was De Gaulle, or how corrupt was the small-town postmaster who looked the other way when the Gestapo came to town. Instead he tells what appears to be a fair and balanced and well-researched story.

If you've read a variety of other stuff on the period, you may find Ousby's outlook charmingly naive, even eccentric. For example, most historians regard Paul Reynaud, the last French PM in 1940, as a weak number--a bombastic, egotistical flake, in thrall to his bossy mistress, a little man who talked big and accomplished nothing. Ousby doesn't seem to be aware of this body of opinion. He paints Reynaud as an energetic and able statesman, France's last hope, who came on the scene just a moment too late. But who knows...maybe Ousby's right!

A previous reviewer stated that "if you are going to read one book on the occupation, this is it." I respectfully disagree. While the book is interesting and well-written, it is less of a historical work and more of a running commentary on how articles by resistance authors and miscellaneous symbolic events exemplified the mood of France during the occupation.

In short, many parts of the book seem to float on assumptions drawn by the author rather than being anchored to cold, hard facts (like Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). Of course, the author probably didn't want something as dense as the 1000-page Rise and Fall. If that's true, however, I think it's hard to say that this is THE one book to read about the occupation.

Moreover, some subjects are given sparse treatment. The liberation seems almost an afterthought--I expected more than an obligatory few pages on the liberation of Paris, for example. In addition, the English author inserts too many French phrases into the text--as if he's trying to impress readers with his command of both languages.

I don't want to knock the book too hard (I did enjoy it and would recommend it), but it's definitely not the one book to read on the occupation.

A well done, thorough, and sometimes very readable history of the France onf the 1940s, which names the names, reviews the actions, and places the clear onus of the era where it belongs.

The occupation of France during the Second World War has to be viewed from a distance to be brought into focus at all. It is done brilliantly by the Englich historian Ian Ousby. He searched original sources to capture the attitudes and reactions of the times, as well as specific events. France suffered swift military defeat and then the humiliation of a collaborationist government. Petain's Vichy government hoped to negotiate better terms for French citizens, and it seemed to be working until Germany's need for food and workers became too urgent. As deprivation became more severe, clusters of resisters, "Maquis", rural guerillas, sprung up, some Communist. They were good at sabotage, and to attempt to control them, an opposing French militia, "Millice", was developed. The internal war became faction against faction, Frenchmen against Frenchmen. By the end of the war, retribution became the order of the day, again, Frenchman against Frenchman, often for no clear reason. Anti-semitism was near-universal. All this sad story is told in flowing prose. The author offers the level of documentation for any questionable assertion or for popular assertions with which he must disagree. The book is an attempt to portray that dismal era as accurately as possible. This is what a history should be: a readable book, well-researched, as neutral as possible, and enlightening.

Ousby is obviously not a historian. His narrative was disconnected and the content lacked insight. There was no consistent thread through the book to bind it together as one story with context and direction. What did the Resistance accomplish? What about the major role played by French Communists in anti-fascist activities? Why was resistance to the Nazis and their Vichyite collaborators so tardy? How were the Gaullists able to forge the myth of a gallant and united resistance movement? Ousby presented the case, but failed to explore the why and how. "Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944" isn't bad, it's just unimpressive.
Julien Jackson is a historian. Try his "France: The Dark Years."

This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. If Ousby is criticized by some for not treating the subject like a proper "historian" would do, he's better off for it. Ousby uses fascinating little details like popular French jokes to give readers not only a factual account of the Occupation but also their own little "in" into life at the time.

This work by the author of the recent Road to Verdun is in someways a natural continuation of that account, as is Alex Horne's To Lose a Battle next to The Price of Glory, also about Verdun. It is one tale, German and French, from the Franco-Prussian War to the period of the Occupation. The book details the ironic reversals of strategic expectation, the impact of the new mobile technology, the swift defeat of France and the onset of the somber hellishness of the German occupation with its unexpectedly barbarous Hitlerian cast that perverted even further the tragedy of defeat.