Vichy Speci®cities: Repositioning the French Past K. H. ADLER MicheÁle and Jean-Paul Cointet, eds., Dictionnaire historique de la France sous l'Occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 2000), 732pp., FF 290, ISBN 2±235±02234±0. Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France 1939±1948: Choices and Constraints (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 231pp., £45.00 (hb), £14.99 (pb), ISBN 0±582±29909±8. Sarah Fishman, Laura Lee Downs, Ioannis Sinanoglou, Leonard V. Smith, Robert Zaretsky, eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), 336pp., £45.00, ISBN 1±859±73299±2. Bertram M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance, 1938±1946 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 433pp., £73.95, ISBN 0±313±29421±6. Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 285pp., £31.50 (hb), £14.00 (pb), ISBN 0±226±67349±9 and 0±226±67350±2. Lynne Taylor, Between Resistance and Collaboration: Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940±45 (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 195pp., £40.00, ISBN 0±333±73640±0. Historical interest in Vichy France shows little sign of abating. As authors continue to make clear, they remain indebted to Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France sent the ®eld into turmoil a quarter of a century ago.1 Since then, exploration of Vichy's impact has deepened in three main areas ± resistance, collaboration and memory. All the works reviewed here offer new treatments of these themes. In accordance with concerns to examine Vichy from the perspective of the time, Lynne Taylor sets out to reconstrue the nature of local response to the Occupation. She focuses on a single region, and one that felt the force of Nazi authority with particular harshness: the Nord±Pas-de-Calais. Stanley Hoffmann once described the new picture of Vichy France that emerged from Robert Paxton's work as one painted in `dirty greys' rather than the black and white of previous efforts, and yet I would like to thank Rod Kedward and Kevin Passmore for their helpful comments on this review article. 1 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940±1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), pp. 475±488 # 2000 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdom 476 Contemporary European History historians are still trying to escape the stark dichotomies that read popular response as either resistance or collaboration. Taylor's study dives into the dirtiest greys between these two extremes. Framed in economic terms, it admirably establishes the enormous changes to the local economy wrought by the invasion, and as the Occupation continued. The region she scrutinises is where the German forces, and refugees from the Low Countries before them, ®rst arrived, and whose own population ¯ed south in summer 1940 ahead of the invading troops. Up to eight million people were on the move in France at that time, and Taylor details the impact of the exodus on the local economy and population. The provision of tables showing changes in the cost of living, ration allowances and in¯ation on basic items is extremely useful. The economy might have been regulated, but its operation was haphazard and forced people into immediate and enduring shortages. Reactions to these conditions are explored in chapters on resistance, strikes and work stoppages, food protest, pillaging, the black market and theft. The black market was widespread and people's dependence on and vili®cation of it seem to have been about equal. Here, Taylor draws out the limits to German reliance on the local police, who were more lenient on the local population than the occupiers would have wished. Likewise, the French courts seem to have been fairly sympathetic in cases of pillaging, given the preponderance of housewives, factory workers and young people in carrying out these acts. These aspects of the systeÁme D formed a prominent part of everyday life under the Occupation, and Taylor's examination of a neglected area is timely. The empirical evidence here is important, but the work's analytical potential is somewhat let down by its organisation. Focusing on the various tactics that residents of the Nord±Pas-de-Calais presented in response to the German Occupation, instead of on the political context within which they were taking place, lends them a discreteness they may not warrant. Readers will appreciate the ®ne detail in which varieties of local action are depicted. To typologise these actions as though they bore little relation to each other, however, is probably misleading. The women who gathered at the pit head to picket and prevent from working those miners reluctant to support a strike were quite possibly the same as, or neighbours of, those who demanded larger rations and dared to confront the authorities on their own turf at the mairie. During 1942 and 1943, which Taylor notes was a period of little strike activity, German and French authorities made considerable efforts to destroy communist networks; by late 1943, only the MeÂnageÁre network of housewives remained intact.2 If the same women were responding to the Occupation by changing their tactics, this not only gives the lie to the regime's countenance of women as apolitical, but also to Taylor's designation of these tactics as non-resister. It is here, and elsewhere in the study, that interviews with the participants could have added tremendous depth. Not all projects or indeed historians lend themselves to oral investigations for practical as well as conceptual reasons. This one, however, 2 Etienne Dejonghe, `Les deÂpartements du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais', in Jean-Pierre AzeÂma and FrancËois BeÂdarida, eds., De la deÂfaite aÁ Vichy, II, La France des anneÂes noires (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 503. Vichy Speci®cities: Repositioning the French Past 477 positively cries out for witness evidence to ¯esh out the archival sources which, prepared by a repressive regime, necessarily present the view from the top and are consequently partisan vis-aÁ-vis the way they, and we, might construe resistance. Resistance here is interpreted in a surprisingly limited way, setting up the dismissal of the other activities from the resistance category. Only those actions which consciously and consistently aimed to rid France of German authority are incorporated into the de®nition, whereas we know from the work of numerous historians just how little this constrained vision of resistance bears scrutiny.3 Given the anti-authoritarian, outlaw nature of much resistance, it now seems obvious that it be conceived of in terms beyond the of®cial. Moreover, were there not internal affairs to be protested against too? These historians' sensitive investigations have revealed that we should indeed interpret many of Taylor's categories of protest as political and resister, and not just spontaneous but ultimately ignorant and self- serving actions provoked by the exigencies of the occupation. To take protest around food shortages as an example, the clandestine press aimed at women in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, issues of which survive from 1941, 1943 and 1944, called speci®cally for action to protect and increase supplies of food and coal.4 At the time, the publication of such papers was seen by all concerned ± producers, authorities and readers ± as dangerous resistance activity. Taylor acknowledges that publishing newspapers was one of the most important resistance activities; by the same token, she notes that the press called on readers to engage in a wide variety of activity in pursuit of their `single and unique' aim, getting rid of the Germans. But, suggests Taylor, women engaged in food `riots' `never called for the dismantling of the system of consumer controls', only `tinkering'. La MeÂnageÁre of August 1941 demanded that women `work together to destroy the bloody fascist war machine'. How? By demanding, in the name of motherhood, more than their allotted rations. The fact that more women were not arrested during these protests is less an indication that they `practised the art of the possible, which meant that they carefully con®ned their protest in such a way as to minimize their risk while still achieving some immediate bene®t' (p. 104), than a demonstration of how far Vichy's and the Third Reich's gender politics permeated the former's view of political protest. It is entirely feasible that these protesters, like the strikers, could have been decimated; that they were not is surely due in part to the fact that this would have lent their 3 H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Jacqueline Sainclivier and Christian Bougeard, eds., Le ReÂsistance et les FrancËais: enjeux strateÂgiques et environnement social (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1995); Jean-Marie Guillon and Pierre Laborie, eds., MeÂmoire et histoire, la ReÂsistance (Toulouse: Privat, 1995); La ReÂsistance et les EuropeÂens du Nord (Brussels: Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, 1994); F. Marcot, ed., La ReÂsistance et les FrancËais: lutte armeÂe et Maquis (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1996); L. Douzou, R. Frank, D. Peschanski and D. Veillon, eds., La ReÂsistance et les FrancËais: villes, centres et logiques de deÂcision (Cachan: IHTP, 1995). 4 La MeÂnageÁre (ComiteÂs populaires feÂminins du Pas-de-Calais), August 1941; La MeÂnageÁre (ComiteÂs feÂminins du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais), November 1943±February 1944. 478 Contemporary European History protests more gravitas than the authorities would have wished, and because motherhood and political protest were regarded as inimical.