
Verdict on Vichy
Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regim
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Narrated by:
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James Patrick Cronin
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By:
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Michael Curtis
About this listen
This masterful audiobook is the first comprehensive reappraisal of the Vichy France regime for over 20 years. France was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, and the exact nature of France's role in the Vichy years is only now beginning to come to light. One of the main reasons that the Vichy history is difficult to tell is that some of France's most prominent politicians, including President Mitterand, have been implicated in the regime. This has meant that public access to key documents has been denied and it is only now that an objective analysis is possible.
The fate of France as an occupied country could easily have been shared by Britain, and it is this background element, which enhances our fascination with Vichy France. How would we have acted under similar circumstances? The divisions and repercussions of the Vichy years still resonate in France today, and whether you view the regime as a fascist dictatorship, an authoritarian offshoot of the Third Reich or an embodiment of heightened French nationalism, Curtis's rounded, incisive book will be seen as the standard work on its subject for many years.
©2003, 2014 Michael Curtis (P)2014 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Vichy’s Crimes
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What did you like best about Verdict on Vichy? What did you like least?
The reader made it unbearable to listen.Would you be willing to try another book from Michael Curtis? Why or why not?
Yes.How did the narrator detract from the book?
Awful. Simply awful. Made it impossible to finish.Was Verdict on Vichy worth the listening time?
No.Performance Ruined It
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Unknown History
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The reader was generally very good, but his strenuous, but very poor pronunciation of French was a serious distraction. It is better to pronounce foreign words as an American than to try to sound French.
Very Informative
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Great update on current scholarship, however...
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My thoughts
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Note that you’ll find lots of dates, statistics, the details of racial laws, the names of organizations (Jewish and non-Jewish) and political parties, a careful chronicle of France’s long tradition of antisemitism, and nuanced discussions of moral responsibilities. You’ll find mini-biographies of the people in charge, from Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval on down. But don’t expect something lively and colorful, a narrative history filled with anecdotes, because it’s not that sort of book.
The author's “verdict” is that Vichy was, for the most part, overwhelmingly guilty. Just as in the portion of France occupied by the Nazis, tens of thousands of Jews – men, women, children, the elderly, healthy and sick, influential and poor, even some decorated or wounded veterans of the previous war — were rounded up, registered, and sent to German extermination camps. According to the author, 11,000 Jewish children were deported by Vichy authorities – often suffering brutal ill treatment after having been cruelly separated from their families – and only a few hundred survived. And the book makes clear that despite denials, almost everyone in authority knew or suspected that deportees of all ages were being sent to their deaths.
The book also makes clear that in doing so, the Vichy government was not merely following orders or yielding to German pressure; the regime, though self-governing, was an eager collaborator with France’s Nazi conquerors and was sometimes even more zealous than they were. Each wartime nation was different, of course, but the book compares the treatment of Jews in French-run Vichy with that in Nazi-occupied Denmark (where most Jews managed to survive or escape), Nazi-sympathizing Bulgaria (which saved some Jews, especially as the tide of war shifted), and fascist Italy (which was surprisingly protective of Italian Jews, some of the time, and on occasion actually defied German demands for Jews’ deportation). The Vichy regime, acting on its own, was harsher and more fanatical than each of these – though not as harsh as Holland, in terms of percentages of Jews killed or surviving.
Every phase of French society, every field and profession, actively participated, collaborated, or at least – in a word the book uses — accommodated itself to the Nazis. Jews were expelled from the law, from academia, from medicine, from the press, from the arts. The French police were especially zealous in hunting down Jews. Attitudes varied among individuals: Some Vichy officials were not personally antisemitic but motivated more by personal ambition, extreme French nationalism, or fascist ideology; others were so extreme that they’d rather send Jewish children to their deaths than allow even those with the necessary papers to escape overseas.
The record is complicated, though, and actually somewhat nuanced, in that — as distinct from Nazi-occupied France — the most severe treatment in Vichy was generally aimed at foreign-born Jews, at least in principle, at least most of the time. French-born Jews, while separated by a series of laws from normal society, were not necessarily supposed to be eliminated, though in fact thousands were. Naturalized Jews found themselves somewhere in the middle, and various laws, at different stages in the regime, apparently designated different years as to when a Jew would be categorized as French or foreign.
I’m left with the impression that virtually everyone in wartime France, whether in the occupied zone or in Vichy, was to some extent morally compromised – although as the book reminds us, U.S. government officials, especially those in the State Department, bear considerable blame as well for blocking desperate Jews from immigrating.
The last few chapters interested me less. One is on the deceitful opportunist Francois Mitterrand, one on the morally compromised Vatican, others on the — for the most part — disgracefully feeble punishments meted out. Again and again, Nazi collaborators with blood on their hands, and who sometimes had actually been sentenced to death, were pardoned, amnestied, or served only a small portion of their sentences. It’s a dispiriting view of mankind, as if we needed another one right now.
Thorough, detailed, and nuanced study
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Wow!
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Shameful Past, Ominous Future?
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The narrator is dreadfully slow and non-fluent. His over-pronounced French names come after portentous pauses and sound like parody. It's a genuinely awful reading, which makes the fact-intensive writing that much more difficult to assimilate while cleaning up the kitchen or doing side lunges. Oh, and he pronounces "banal" to rhyme with "anal." Vraiment le coup de grâce.
Good book, marginal reading
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