I was reading the hard news, aka the Zara website. Something caught my eye in the “trend” section: Vichy. Specifically, #vichy. Um. Why, I wondered, is Vichy trending? Does this have anything to do with Marine le Pen and the resurgence of the French far-right? If you go to the “vichy” trend page, what appears…
A glance at the current best-seller list in France reminds us that not only will we always have Paris, we will also always have Vichy. Eric Zemmour’s “Le France Suicide” has just elbowed aside Valérie Trierweiler’s memoir of her (short) time as the partner of President François Hollande, “Merci Pour Ce Moment,” as the country’s…
The 1940, Nazi invasion of France turned that country’s musical scene into a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Music in Paris During the Occupation,”) a book recently released in France, allows readers to draw conclusions about how music world celebrities behaved in difficult times. Edited by Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon,…
Hunting Down the Jews: Vichy, the Nazis and Mafia Collaborators in Provence 1942–1944 By Isaac Levendel and Bernard Weisz Enigma Books, 340 pages, $24 In the wine region of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in Provence, Château de la Gardine is an esteemed name, as is that of the proprietor who brought it to prominence, Gaston Brunel. Even today,…
The last great résistant standing in France, Raymond Aubrac, died on April 10. He was 97. With his passing, France has lost a political and moral figure who helped redeem the nation’s past and stood witness to its present. At the same time, France’s Jews have lost one of their own who courageously, though not…
It can take 70 years for some French trains to run on time. And even then, you can’t rely on them. In February, French author Alain Lipietz reacted with scorn to the announcement that the SNCF, the French national railroad, intends to open its archives for the period of 1939–1945. He declared that the SNCF…
“Public Enemies,” far from being the “duel” suggested by the book’s subtitle, is in fact an act of mutual masturbation by two of France’s leading luminaries, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck). In the book-length series of letters, the friends encourage each other to indulge in self-reflection. They talk about their fathers. They spar…
Little had been known about French collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain’s influence on anti-Semitic policies in Vichy France, where he governed from 1940 to 1944. But according to The Guardian, a draft of a memo, recently revealed to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, shows Pétain went to great efforts to extend the brutal treatment of French…
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