Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949: Revised Edition [Paperback]

Antony Beevor (Author), Artemis Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2004

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists? including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso?contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Early postwar France saw the trials of collaborationist leaders, de Gaulle's reestablishment of the republic and his abrupt resignation in 1946, widespread panic at the prospect of a Communist or right-wing coup and the arrival of Marshall Plan aid, which rescued the country from economic collapse. This engaging chronicle set in Paris--a magnet for Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Wright, Orwell, Hemingway, Breton, Koestler, Philby--captures the desperation and exhilaration of those years through a blend of history, eyewitness accounts, interviews, telling incident and gossip. Beevor ( The Spanish Civil War ) and Cooper ( Cairo in the War: 1939-1945 ) illuminate the blind Stalinism of France's "progressive" intelligentsia, protracted enmity between resisters and collaborators, early years of the Cold War and France's love-hate relationship with the U.S.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Husband-and-wife team of Beevor and Cooper have produced a thorough, fascinating account of postwar Paris. The authors focus on three themes: the bitter struggle of Resistance supporters against the collaborators of the Vichy government; the city's emergence as the intellectual and cultural mecca of the world; and the development of a love-hate relationship between France and the country that did the most to liberate it-the United States. Beevor and Cooper benefited from access to private manuscripts, including the papers of Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France immediately after the war and grandfather of Artemis. The book is filled with sound, balanced insights and witty observations. It should prove enjoyable and valuable both for specialists and general readers. Readers will also value it because it was one of the last projects on which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis worked as an editor at Doubleday.
T.J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Revised edition (August 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142437921
• ISBN-13: 978-0142437926
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #309,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A regular in the 11th Hussars, Antony Beevor served in Germany and England. He has had a number of books published and his book Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. Among the many prestigious posts he holds, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good read, a book that deserved better focus, September 4, 2005

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949: Revised Edition (Paperback)

I love Anthony Beevor's writing. I looked forward to this book and rushed through things to get to it. I then read it and read it, when I should have done other things. I finished it in a day where I did very little else. This testifies how Paris After the Liberation is a great and interesting read.

Yet, I think this book is unfocused. Beevor and Cooper really needed to decide whether they were writing a book about the City of Paris in the Liberation and life and events in it, or a history of France from 1944 until 1968. The focus shifts in too many places from goings on and life in the city to the national political alignment in France, international events affecting France, and relations between other countries dealing with France, political events in France outside the city, etc.

Likewise Beevor and Cooper's view of the city of Paris tends to be unbalanced. They focus on the city of tourism and myth rather than the city most Pariseans live in. They give us only a few pages of description of the misery, poverty, disease, starvation, and neglect in the outer working class suburbs. They provie a paragraph about the prison-like experience of workers at Billancourt where Renault is. They have not one word about the working class and poverty-stricken faubourgs inside the city. Instead, Beevor and Cooper concentrate on the life of major intellectuals, upper class socialities, and above all the English-speaking diplomatic circles and returning exiles

If you want to know the details of the life of British Ambassador Duff Cooper, his various extra-maritial affairs, taste in decoration, friendship, advice to French politicians, advice to the British government, this is the book for you. If you want to know what it was like to live in Paris from 1944 until 1952 as an average working class or lower middle class citizen who is not a writer or a painter and who does not socialize at embassies, world class restaurants, or hotels, you need another book. This is about the Paris of public myth,the Paris of politicans and millionares, and not about the Paris that the great bulk of its people lived in and continue to live in.

I think this book would be very hard to understand for someone who does not understand French, is not familiar with the city of Paris, and is not familiar with the array of political, cultural, socialite, and artistic figures that Beevor and Cooper present without explanation.

I speak French, have spent time in Paris not as tourist, and have studied and written about French History and politics for decades. Yet, I found this book both exhilarating and hard to keep up with as names and places whirled past me and had to stop and remember the city's geography. I don't know what someone who can't read French would make of the many statements in French produced with no translation?

One of the interesting aspects of this book is Beevor's use of documents unearthed since the fall of Soviet Union about the French Communist party. In doing so, he provides a good picture of the utter contempt Stalin and his bureacrats had for the working people of France and the world, and Stalin's continued determination to use the PCF not as a tool for social change in France, but as a puppet to secure diplomatic advantages with the imperialist leaders of Europe and the United States.

Beevor and Cooper explain that the PCF began to lose its support in 1944 when it became clear to French workers that the party was not going to lead French workers and farmers to power. Once connections with Moscow were restored and exiled leader Maurice Thorez returned, the PCF organized itself to increase production, "stop strikes," as Thorez was wont to stay, and allowed the peaceful return of French capitalism.

To be sure the PCF remained a major political party, but as Beevor indirectly explained, this was due to middle class intellectuals flocking to the party as workers left. Later in the late 1940s when the PCF aimed at spoiling actions whose purpose was to disrupt the Marshall plan and stiffen France's opposition to the West's plan to build a strong West Germany as a military bulwark against the USSR, the PCF brought about disaster.

What I found the most interesting was Beevor and Cooper's pictures of the lives and intellectual development of Jean Paul Sartre and Simon De Beauvoir, Camus and other Paris intellectuals during these years. Though I think Beevor and Cooper tend to have a bias against De Beauvoir, I would loved to hear more about them and less about the sexual affairs of various English socialities and diplomats.

The final chapters takes the reader through the 1950s and 1960s very quickly. The focus on the city of Paris is really lost, so we don't know anything about the big changes in life and lifestyle, the explosion of new art, film, literature, and politics that happened. As the book goes on and loses focus, inaccuracies unworthy of Beevor and Cooper start to appear. Rather than describing life in Paris, Beevor and Cooper seem to end this book by trying to settle political scores with a generation of the French who were barely born in 1944-1950.

I would have loved a book focused on real life in Paris during these years with the necessary background in French and global politics, a picture of the real city and not just the tourist city. On the other hand, a political history of France from 1944 to 1950 by Beevor and Cooper would have been a wonderful work. Perhaps, a book on the social world of the upper classes, the intellectual elite, and foreign dignataries and diplomats might also be interesting. However, this is the best we've got from Beevor and Cooper on this topic, and it can be enjoyed.

See Paris like a native, not a tourist!

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost as good as Stalingrad or Berlin, April 23, 2004

By 

Antonio (Bogotá, Colombia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paris After the Liberation (Hardcover)

Paris after the Liberation has captured the imagination like no other Nazi-liberated city (sure, there's "Roma, Citta Aperta", but can any non-Italian mention any intellectual or politician living in Rome in 1944?). Maybe it's because the French are better at self-promotion. Maybe it's because their history is more dramatic than others (4 major revolutions- 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871-in less than a century), or because Paris is a better setting for a good story (remember Les Miserables, or a Tale of Two Cities), but the happenings in Paris in 1944-1949 are compulsively readable.

The scene is dramatic: it moves from avant-guard theatres to banquet halls, from smelly bistros to worker tenements, from Les Champs Elysees to Saint-Germain-Des-Pres. The cast is outstanding: doddering Petain, haughty De Gaulle, decent Mauriac, ambitious Malraux, brilliang Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, Picasso, Celine, Brassillach, Drieu, plus a large cast of fanatical communists and anti-semites, ignorant American senators, well-connected British spies and hairy proto-Kerouacs. Everything comes together: military and political matters, social and artistic trends, intellectual developments. Paris, in 1944-1949, was shabby and run-down, its people hungry and ill-scrubbed (although that's perhaps a recurring theme), but it was the mecca of the world. Anyone who was anyone was there.

Beevor and Cooper tell the story well. They are able to add much flavour to the well-known facts by judicious use of diaries and private papers. One feels like one was there. I wouldn't have minded it myself.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but you'll need an French-English dictionary, April 6, 2006

By 

Jason (Gainesville, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949: Revised Edition (Paperback)

I like all of Beevor's books I've read so far, and this one is no exception. My only real criticism is that he has a nasty habit of quoting people in their native tongue (French in this case) without translation, which I found very annoying. Besides that, I thought the subject was brilliant and presented well. What I took away from this book is that the French, perhaps more so that other European nations, were a series of paradoxes both during and after the German occupation; simultaneously collaborators and resistants, arch-conservatives and communists, openly hostile to and embracing the influx of American culture. No one term can be used to pigeonhole them.