NOUVELLE HISTOIRE DE L'OCCUPATION

The Occupation of France as lived daily on the German side, an unprecedented overview certain to become a definitive reference.

June 1940. In the course of a few days, millions of French people find themselves under the German yoke. In two-thirds of the country, towns and villages are occupied, submerged by the forces and symbols of Nazism. The rest of France remains “free”, supposedly. The occupants, however, are the masters of the country: they sleep and eat in the homes of the occupied and move freely around France. In this new history of the Occupation, Eric Alary focuses on the neglected aspect of the daily life of the Germans. How did they plan, conceive and experience the French occupation? What were the ideological, historical, cultural and economic projections the Germans cast on France, following the defeat of 1918? How did the troops of the Third Reich arrive and settle in France? How did the Germans conceive of the occupation in 1940, and then over the years? How was this political and military occupation exercised in its police, judicial, economic and cultural dimensions? By focusing on the everyday life of the occupant, interwoven with that of the French population, Eric Alary casts new light on the events of the period and, as usual, brings history to life by embodying it in individual biographies.

ÉRIC ALARY has a doctorate from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris and teaches at the Lycée Descartes of Tours and at Sciences-Po. He was assistant to René Rémond of the Académie française, taught at Sciences-Po-Paris from 1996 to 2010 and was an associate researcher at the Sciences-Po Center of History from 1996 to 2015. The books he has published with Perrin, all of them well-received, include La Ligne de démarcation (The Demarcation Line), Les Français au quotidien (The French in everyday life), L'Exode (The Exodus), La Grande Guerre des civils (The Civilians' Great War), and L'Histoire des paysans français (The History of French Peasants).