Reviews for Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort

The average rating for Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-18 00:00:00 Pip Dirk I give this 4-stars from sheer awe at the breadth of research and in recognition of the value of this book as a resource. If you are at all interested in--as a personal pursuit or as part of scholarly research--France, French literature, art, cinema, World War II, or the presence and impact of the arts during war, this is a must-have companion. But it may be most useful when employed as an encyclopedia, rather than a sit-down-and-read-cover-to-cover book. I did, but it wasn't pretty. There is such a volume of names, institutions, occurrences that the forest went missing in all the trees. I came away with very little emotional sense of what Paris was like for an actor, writer, dancer, painter, singer '39-45, but at least I knew what most everyone involved in some aspect of the art world was doing. And not just in Paris, but in the South, where many of the artist cognoscenti fled when the Germans arrived. That being said, there were some fascinating, moving and telling sections dealing with Camus, Colette, Sartre, the American-born French socialite Florence Gould, Irène Némirovsky, among others. And Riding does an outstanding job of showing the blurred lines between collaborating, resisting, staying the course and simply doing what you can to survive. Artists are people, too.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-19 00:00:00 Artin Nazarian An excellent, highly readable account of French cultural life during the occupation and Vichy, full of interesting and vivid anecdotes. It is hard to tell how much of this is original research, but an excellent read, nonetheless, for those interested in this period.