Product Description

The German occupation of France from 1940 to 1945 presented wrenching challenges for the nation's artists and intellectuals. Some were able to flee the country; those who remained, responded in various ways. This book provides a full account of how France's artistic leaders coped under the crushing German presence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128362 in Books
• Published on: 2010-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
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Review
'A fascinating account of how famous writers, artists, and intellectuals living in France during the war survived the Nazi occupation; a whole spectrum from heroes to collaborators.' Marcel Berlins, Guardian G2. 'In this elegantly written, coolly intelligent book Spotts refrains from judgment.' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Telegraph. 'Admirably forensic and entertaining... What Spotts brings to the story is a set of refreshing opinions on familiar figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the rest of the crowd clustered around the cafes of Saint-Germaindes Pres... Spotts has written an excellent book.' Andrew Hussey, New Statesman. --'The Guardian G2', 'Sunday Telegraph', 'New Statesman'

Review
"'What should you do?' asks Frederic Spotts ... In this elegantly written, coolly intelligent book [Spotts] refrains from judgment."

Review
"This book ... makes compelling reading for anyone who is even vaguely interested in France and things French."

Customer Reviews

France's Darkest Hour
Spotts is right to call his book The Shameful Peace. The four years of German occupation remain the darkest years in modern French history. Spotts stresses that France's `greatest psychological need in the wake of the ignominious debacle was to regain a measure of self-respect - the very honneur and gloire that de Gaulle invoked in his broadcasts from London - and that the French cultural heritage was all there was to provide it.' Hitler, the artist manqué, understood that maintaining an active French cultural life was a good a way to drug France while bleeding her dry. So the Germans encouraged a rich artistic life in France, boasting `that no victor had ever treated a defeated nation so leniently.'
Hitler also wanted to make France acknowledge German cultural, as well as military, superiority. The result was a profusion of German institutes, lectures, concerts and exhibitions, culminating in the grotesque show by Arno Breker, Hitler's favourite sculptor, in May 1942 in the Louvre Orangerie. French people visited such shows for many reasons - curiosity, opportunism, simply to keep warm. But in doing so they laid themselves open to the charge of collaborating.
What made someone a collaborator? Spotts examines this crucial question carefully and sympathetically. Obviously artists like Vlaminck and Depiau, who visited Germany as the Nazis' guests in 1941, were collaborators, and both suffered for it after the war. But what of the publishers of books and magazines, or of playwrights like Sartre, who needed to `collaborate' to work at all? What of people running businesses of any kind?
Spotts provides a very good synoptic overview of occupied France, glancing at life in Marseilles and Lyons if focusing, inevitably, on Paris. Considering the overall gloominess of the subject, he can be remarkably amusing. An omission is any real mention of the actions of French intellectuals - writers such as Albert Camus and Vercors - who resisted from the start. Their heroism counters the shamefulness of the collaborators. More on the extreme hardships facing ordinary Frenchmen might have been useful too. Even Picasso nearly froze to death due to the fuel shortages. (Spotts underestimates Picasso's precariousness in occupied Paris. Only with hindsight can we see how fame protected the painter. Already noted as an anti-fascist and dubbed a `degenerate artist' by the Nazis in their 1937 exhibition, Picasso was a Spanish national when the government of Spain was Francoist.)
Spotts at the end shows how Paris, earlier the 'talisman that could transform artists' dreams into reality', never fully recovered its prewar fame and prestige. A final plus: the illustrations (b/w photos) are well-chosen, often novel. Amazing to see Picasso painting in hat and coat (against the cold). Hard to recognise the grand conductor Karajan from the 1942 photograph of a young, rather nervous-looking Nazi visiting Paris.

Well written and an eye opener
for the artists writers and poets of France collaboration in WWII was a fine line and a constant battle this book details the daily struggle that many who collaborated and those that did not faced, well written and informative its well worth the money and a very good read.