Abstract
Reviewed by: Alex Dowdall, College of Europe, Warsaw, Poland
For many years after the First World War, French civilian experiences of military occupation were neglected in both popular memories and the historiography of the conflict. Experiences of subjugation did not conform to the national victory narrative, while civilian suffering was overshadowed by the soldiers’ experiences. Until the 1990s, Georges Gromaire’s L’Occupation allemande en France, originally published in 1925 and based on interviews conducted in the former occupied territories, remained the sole scholarly text on the occupation. When McPhail’s book first appeared in 1999, it helped to end what certainly had been a long silence.
The history of the German occupation of France, and military occupations in general, has developed significantly since then, and emerged as a key component of the new cultural history of the First World War. McPhail’s rich and insightful account, alongside Annette Becker’s Oubliés de la Grande Guerre, which appeared a year earlier, did much to generate this renewed interest. Yet one wonders whether this re-edition, coinciding with the centenary of the First World War, will have the same impact as the original. This book is a re-edition, rather than an updated second edition. As such, it lacks a preface or a revised introduction, which could conceivably have been used to summarize recent developments in the historiography of the occupation, or analyse its position within France’s centenary activities. In fact, the only change comes in the subtitle: originally ‘Civilian Life under German Occupation’, it is now ‘The Tragedy of Occupied France’.
Nevertheless, despite these missed opportunities, this re-edition does demonstrate the longevity and continued importance of aspects of McPhail’s account. The chapter on food supply and the Commission for Relief in Belgium remains one of the most substantial treatments of the subject, while the chapters on the clandestine press and resistance networks provide detailed overviews of the scope of these dangerous, yet marginal, activities. Readers will, however, remain frustrated by the book’s handling of its source material. Indeed, McPhail signals in her acknowledgements that the book arose from ‘a personal search’ aimed at gathering material for a public talk or short article, and that this original goal resulted in the book’s limited notes. Quotations from sources, primarily contemporary diaries and post-war memoirs, are consistently unreferenced, and pose a problem to researchers.
McPhail’s treatment of her source material raises further questions for how the history of the German occupation of France should be written. The book’s originality is that it was one of the first successful attempts to produce an updated, comprehensive picture of the occupation. Yet at times this picture risks becoming too one-dimensional. As McPhail states in her introduction, ‘almost every episode quoted here for one location could be repeated for others, and whatever is shown in relation to one individual or community should be regarded as typical of many others’ (2). This perspective serves to elide many of the complexities and ambiguities of military occupation. There is little awareness, for instance, of how occupation scenarios differed between urban and rural environments, or between localities near the front-lines, suffering from heavy allied attack, and those further back. Gender rarely features as a distinct category of analysis, neither does class. Detailed attention is given to the harshness of the occupation regime, from restrictions on movement to requisitions, deportations and forced labour. Yet we do not discover whether individual German commanders could lighten or increase the burdens of occupation for communities at particular times. It could be argued that McPhail’s reliance on post-war memoirs by middle-class writers gives a skewed picture, as they sought to present a patriotic vision of their occupation experiences that could be incorporated into national post-war narratives (a possibility which McPhail herself acknowledges (158)). Two chapters are dedicated to intelligence gathering, escape networks and the clandestine press, hardly ‘typical’ activities, while there is little detailed treatment of countervailing trends, from accommodation with the occupation regime, to outright collaboration.
Subsequent histories of the occupation, notably by Annette Becker and Philippe Nivet, have maintained and developed this focus on German repression and patriotic French resistance. Others have foregrounded the ambiguities that occupation engendered, notably Jean Yves Le Naour, who has explored the sexual politics of occupation, and James E. Connolly, who has analysed the class dynamics of complicity and resistance in occupied Lille. In the light of this research, which has provided a more detailed and nuanced history of the German occupation, and ensured that it has become even less of a ‘silence’, McPhail’s book feels somewhat dated. But for those seeking a concise and readable account of how primarily urban, middle-class French civilians experienced occupation and wrote about it afterwards, it remains indispensable.