Customer Reviews

The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation

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Culture matters. It mattered centrally to the Germans as they sought to establish a New Europe under German-Nazi hegemony. It mattered to the Vichy government as it sought to rid France of any vestiges of the Third Republic, to create a nationalistic, conservative society, and to ingratiate itself with the occupier with a policy of deliberate collaboration. It mattered because Paris was the center of Western Culture until 1940. Culture matters because it is what brings all the strands of society together and, in one way or another, reveals society to itself.

The overwhelming majority of works dealing with the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime, deal with the political and military aspects of that difficult period, though some do focus on how ordinary citizens behaved during those years. What has been missing has been a thorough analysis of the "culture" community as it related to the Germans. This void is what Mr. Spotts' "Shameful Peace" seeks to fill and mostly succeeds. This is not an exhaustive listing of who did what to whom during those years; not everybody who was anybody then is worth the memory. Spotts takes each of the elements of what we usually regard as "culture": literature, painting, sculpture, music, popular entertainement, publishing, theatre, film and, selecting representative figures, analyses their behavior, i.e., answers the question did they collaborate or not, what form did collaboration, resistance, abstention, or flight take, what were the ramifications of their actions, how they fit within the German and Vichy schemes, and what was their respective aftermath with the Liberation. This is well structured analysis and narrative, a pleasure to read that becomes something of a page turner. The moral terrain is challenging as it dwells on choices people made, people with whose work one is familiar and of unquestionable merit to this day. The surprises come in the details as, in general, one is already aware, in many of the cases, about who collaborated and who did not. When discussing painters (Picasso, Matisse, etc.), it is interesting to also see dealers discussed, and how several (even "protected" Jewish ones) were more than willing to procure for Goering, Goebbels and Hitler the "old masters" they so craved. The Paris art market flourished during the occupation.

In the summing up of the period, when discussing trials during the "depuration", after the liberation, Spotts frames the underlying questions clearly: "In a country where ideas have always been more important than facts, the question was whether the accused should be judged for their opinions as well as their deeds. That led to further question whether opinions could become deeds when they called for action - such as arrest, assassination, or deportation. And behind this lay the still broader issue of the responsibility of artists and intellectuals to society." Indeed, these are the questions that underly the text. Indeed such were the times that accepting a dinner invitation from the occupier could be construed as a demoralizing factor to the resister. Had not the Spanish established a strong, universal operating principle during the Napoleonic invasion that the primary and most legitimate responsibility during an "occupation" is to resist it?

I recommend in tandem a more specific analysis of the film industry during the occupation, Evelyn Ehrlich's Cinema of Paradox: French Filmaking under the German Occupation and Alice Kaplan's work about Brasillach, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.

The book contains interesting illustrations. It is not footnoted. However, sources for each chapter are detailed in a separate section at the end.

This is a well-researched, well-written account of French intellectuals' behavior during the Occupation and its immediate aftermath. I was familiar with the topic before I read the book, and I can wholeheartedly say the author is accurate in what he depicts. I don't understand the poor ratings the book has received on this website - maybe they're due to the fact that collaboration remains a touchy topic in some circles.

There wasn't any big revelation for me in the book - yes, Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach were "collabos", Beauvoir stayed in Paris but tried to keep her hands clean, Guehenno was a Resistant, etc. What I think is the strength of the book is that it gathers vignettes of all the major French intellectuals' behavior in one place. In addition, it introduces shades of gray in their behavior and makes the reader about what constitutes collaboration. Some cases were obviously clear-cut, but others not as much. It raises interesting moral issues.

The book also arouses outrage regarding collabos' attitude and the wide differences in treatment they received after the war. This is no small achievement from the author, given that the facts described occurred almost 70 years ago. He makes us feel the injustice of it all anew (especially when collabos got off almost scot-free).

Certainly, the "epuration" was severe immediately after the Liberation, but sentences were often drastically reduced after a few years when some French decided they preferred to move on - often but not always, as is clear with the case of Germaine Lubin, whose behavior was not nearly as reprehensible as others who got punished much more lightly. Also, some newspapers were shut down, but "collabo" publishers like Gallimard were allowed to continue their business unimpeded.

Again, many of the facts described in the book are well-known, and there's a bibliography for each chapter at the end of the book. I don't understand the negative reviews. The book is thorough and well-documented. There are a couple of annoying typos but not many. The biggest flaw of the book is to sometimes quote expressions in French without providing translations, but it only happened a handful of times.

The first few chapters of the book are quite general, describing Germans' efforts to control French culture after they occupied Paris. Later, each chapter of the book covers a different category of intellectuals; for instance, "Artful Dodgers" is about painters and "Enigma Variations" about musicians.

This book has many of the characteristics of "Artists in Exile" by Joseph Horowitz, with its vignettes on a broad spectrum of people. It should become a reference for anyone interested in this period in French history.

As a Frenchman interested in the gray attitude of the French during WWII, I was eagerly anticipating the publication of this book and was somewhat disppointed when I read it. It is basically a gallery of portraits of important intellectual figures of the time, from Sartre to Galtier-Boissière, from Gide to Guéhenno, from Drieu to Céline, from Picasso to Matisse,etc. However, those portraits I found rather superficial (very light on Rebatet or Brasillach, more consistant on Drieu or Céline), the author sometimes reaching outright conclusions, condemning the opinions of some of the characters involved, when a more nuanced judgement would have been more appropriate (especially on Ernst Jünger or Colette, the latter erroneously appearing in a list of collaborationist writers on page 238). Also, the author often taps well-known sources (such as the war-time diaries by Gide, Guéhenno, Fabre-Luce or Jünger)and therefore brings forth very few revelations to an attentive student of the period. Nothing new is written about Céline, Drieu or Brasillach, as well as on Gide or Sartre, which is rather frustrating. I also expected a more in-depth account of the nefarious deeds of the notoriously influential collaborationist newspaper "Je Suis Partout" or the literary publication "Comoedia", both of which the book scantily broaches.

This book may be satisfactory to the layman as an introduction, but left me very frustrated and wanting to know more than I already knew. A book on the same topic is available in France,"Le Voyage d'Automne", which describes the attitude of such writers as Jouhandeau or Giraudoux (nearly absent here), Drieu, Brasillach, in much more precise details. If there is an English translation, I strongly recommend it, as well as the catalogue for the current exhibition held at the NY Public Library until July 25, 2009, curated by Robert A. Paxton, which tackles precisely the same subject.

Note: My version also needs some editing. Heydrich's first name, for example, was not "Reinhold" (page 50)...

While The Shameful Peace provides much information, is well written, and focuses on an important aspect of the history of 20th C. culture in a readable and accessible medium, the book's scholarship is an embarrassment to Yale Press with the absence of notes and an acceptable bibliography. He provides an essayistic account of his sources. For example he states that Jean Cocteau and Arno Breker were lovers in the 20's. However, he provides no source for this illuminating piece of information. Perhaps this can be explained by Spotts' career as an "independent scholar," but that is no excuse for Yale letting him release a book with so unaccountable a scholarly apparatus. Perhaps such "bibliographical essays" are becoming a trend. Peter Gay published one in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2007). This is a trend that should not be indulged. For Gay's part, as a scholar who has written extensively and already earned his laurels, it is a more forgivable mistake. While Spotts' book is clearly directed at a wider audience than the typical scholarly tome, this is no excuse for stating that Steegmuller's biography of Cocteau was of no help for the period, and then paraphrasing pp. 437-440 of the biography at the beginning of Spotts' ninth chapter. In short, good for a read but if your interests are beyond that and are looking for something useful for your own scholarship, it is tantalizing but frustrating.

Perhaps suffering from his lack of expertise (he is a historian of Nazi Germany and its culture, not France), Spotts confounds one fundamentally interesting point with irrelevant anecdotes and shallow analysis. The basic story goes as follows: Post-1940, with their nation defeated militarily like essentially all European democracies, French intellectuals and artists split into three groups: the largest group went into active or passive resistance (e.g. André Malraux, Jean Prévost, Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, Edith Piaf); the second larger group initially had an ambivalent relationship with German occupiers and intellectuals, providing oblique critiques while aiming to develop some genuinely French art, and sooner or later joined with the first group (e.g. Jean Renoir); the smaller if not insignificant group, conservative and anticommunist at heart, collaborated willfully albeit to varying degrees (e.g. Ferdinand Céline).

They almost all, including many the third group, had one central aim in mind: To preserve French culture, and where possible contribute to it despite the (intellectual) privations of occupation or exile.

Stopps states that point second-hand but misses its relevance, even though it is central to ANY analysis of French intellectuals and is the same reason why French policy and output is widely misunderstood, or despised by those whose interests it goes against.

Put another way: Replace the German "artistic" delegation with Hollywood studios at their peak of the 1950s or at the onset of the special effects era, or even the perceived invasion by U.S. porn in the 1970s (see the movie On aura tout vu), and the French reaction is the same (albeit evidently under much less duress, but that only makes my point stronger). Given that Stopps' hammer is Nazi culture, he can't make much of this essential point, alas, and his analysis is skewed towards the third group. This is hardly a representative picture of how the French, or other invaded cultures, dealt with the Nazi efforts to subjugate their intellectual life.

The academic level of writing was disappointing. Areas I know well were glossed over, with important issues ignored. Also factual errors: Gide did not receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus did.

This is an interesting book, even if it is rather small and focused on the "artists and intellectuals" of France who got into bed with the Nazis in many different ways while the rest of the world fought the greatest menace to Western civilization since the Islamic invasion of Europe over 13 centuies earlier and died by the millions while these cowards sipped champagne with the scum of the earth.

I hope that as more historians dig into the truth of what actually happened in France before and during WWII, that this smug country of collaborators, regardless of whom they collaborate with, will come to grips with the fact that they have no basis to judge any country about anything.

Robert Paxton's book, Vichy France was the first of its kind to show that the Hollywood propaganda that became the myth that replaced fact during the the post-war era was not real history. And of course Jean Francois Revel's magnificent book Anti-Americanism is one of the few that shows how the current wisdom of the West is nothing but fiction.

this book is more narrowly focused, but shows how many who are held in high esteem by the world today were nothing but toadies for the Nazis as brave men fought and died to rid the world of evil.

A quick read, but most revealing.