France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 - Tapa dura

Jackson devotes a significant part of his study to the period before 1940, and he is particularly strong on the importance of the intellectual climate in France in the 1930s; his discussion of the years of occupation is sufficiently detailed to do justice to varieties of both individual and collective experience, and to enhance our understanding of the choices made as a result of that experience. If, as will surely be the case, this book becomes the standard secondary work for undergraduate courses on France during the second world war, then we can look forward confidently to the way the period will be addressed by the historians of the future. (Journal of Contemporary History)

Jackson's study is a monumental achievement and anybody who wants to get to grips with the period should start here. (History Today)

Jackson has written an excellent book. (Douglas Johnson, Times Literary Supplement)

Jackson has recounted a national anti-epic, and thereby placed himself in the front rank of historians. (Daniel Johnson, The Sunday Telegraph)

This book bears impressive testimony to the depth of France's postwar conversation with itself about what it endured during the war. (New York Times Review of Books)

This is a fascinating study marked by balance and insight. (Contemporary Review)

There will probably never be a more thorough and detailed account of what happened to France and the French during the Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944 ... By its end the reader has the clearest possible picture not just of those dark years, but of the forces at work in French society and politics in the years leading up to them, and of the aftermath once liberation was achieved ... This is a brilliant book, but for anyone cherishing ideals of French heroism, it will prove a painful one. (Simon Heffer, Country Life)

Jackson traces the history of these shifting views and puts them into their postwar context with admirable patience and clarity. (Ian Ousby, Weekend Financial Times)

In this monumental new account of the Vichy years, Julian Jackson examines French experiences of Occupation during the 'Black Years' of 1940-4. Pulling together previously separate 'histories' of occupation, resistance, and collaboration he presents a definitive history of the period. This is a more complex history than the traditional dichotomy between 'collaboration' and 'resistance', one in which the ideological frontiers between Vichy and the Resistance were often blurred. This study ranges from the politics of Marshal Pétain's regime to the experiences of the ordinary French people, from surrender in 1940 to the purges of liberation. The author restores the organized Resistance to a more central role than has been customary in recent years and presents a new social history of the resistance which takes in the roles of foreigners, women, Jews, and peasants. He uncovers the long term roots of the Vichy regime in political and social conflict and cultural crisis stretching back to the Great War and concludes by tracing the lasting legacy and memory of Occupation since 1945.