The Shameful Peace

By Frederic Spotts

Yale, 283 pages, $35

The history of France under German rule during World War II is a depressing tale of collaboration, corruption and subsequent denial that taxes the will of even the most determined Francophile. Perhaps not surprisingly it was not a French scholar but an American one, Robert Paxton, who produced the first serious examination of the period (1940-44), followed by the Swiss historian Philippe Burrinand a group of young French historians working out of the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. Now comes Frederic Spotts, a British writer known for his studies of German history. With "The Shameful Peace" he lifts the lid on one of the least known -- and most shameful episodes -- of the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied France.

After the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940, armistice agreements signed at Compiègne parceled France into two halves more or less along an east-west axis. A supposedly independent (but collaborationist) French government headed by the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain was based in the spa town of Vichy, while Paris and its northern hinterland were placed under direct German military rule.

The first effect of the armistice was to convert the French capital into a kind of vacation paradise for the German occupier. Nazi flags draped Garnier's opera house; German officers went on shopping sprees; some of the capital's leading hostesses vied for the privilege of entertaining the new authorities. Representatives of leading Nazi figures, notably Hermann Goering, sacked the homes of wealthy Jews for masterpieces of art -- an expedition in which some of the city's grandest art dealers were pleased to assist. Even low-ranking German functionaries partook of the feast. "I never lived so well anywhere," a secretary-typist later recalled. "We could buy what we wanted. . . . [It was] the most wonderful and unforgettable time of my youth."

In defeated France, Hitler pursued two quite different objectives. One was to extract resources and manpower to wage war against Britain and later the Soviet Union; the other was to integrate France into a subordinate role within a European confederation ruled from Berlin. This was a complicated task that the Germans did not always pursue coherently, since the two objectives were often antagonistic -- it is difficult to pretend, while pillaging a country, that it has even the slightest autonomy. One area where the Germans completely understood what they were about, however, was in the co-opting of the French cultural establishment.