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The Other Side: Investigating the Collaborationists in World War II France

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Ego-histories of France and the Second World War

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

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Abstract

Bertram Gordon’s ego-history discusses his research on the power of ideology in history, which was influenced by political radicalism during the 1960s in both France and America. After a doctoral dissertation on the Catholic Social movement in nineteenth-century Austria, Gordon turned his attention to Collaboration and the ‘collaborationists’ in World War II France. With French state archives for the war years closed during the writing of his book, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, this chapter discusses his use of German documentation and interviews with former collaborationists, including French Waffen-SS. It also highlights how his more recent interests on the history of food and tourism intersect with the history of France and the Second World War.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See ‘Our History’, Brooklyn College, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/about/history/ourhistory.php (accessed 5 January 2015).

  2. 2.

    An outstanding example of the Annales approach to history is the work of Georges Duby, which he discusses in his contribution to Nora’s Essais d’ego-histoire (Duby 1987, 132–133).

  3. 3.

    I discussed this distinction in my book, Collaborationism in France During the Second World War (1980, 17–18). See also Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (2001, 140–141), who differentiated between collaborators who supported the Vichy government and its stance of ‘la France seule’, or France alone in the spirit of Charles Maurras, and collaborationists who sought to go further in aligning France with Germany’s New Order.

  4. 4.

    See also Philippe Burrin , France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (1996, 384), who noted that ‘collaborationism incorporated every pre-war political family, with the notable exceptions of the radicals and Christian Democrats, and each produced a team, however small, to elaborate a discourse based on its own heritage’.

  5. 5.

    This chapter was subsequently republished in Loyd E. Lee (ed.), World War II: Crucible of the Contemporary World: Commentary and Readings (1991, 87–105).

  6. 6.

    Author’s interview with Pierre Bousquet and Madame Bousquet, Paris, 22 July 1974. It may be significant that unfortunately I was not told Madame Bousquet’s first name.

  7. 7.

    Author’s interview with Odette Paineau, Paris, 25 July 1974.

  8. 8.

    Author’s interview with Marc Augier, Paris, 4 July 1974. I expanded upon Augier’s political philosophy in an unpublished paper (“The Dream That Was a Disaster? Marc Augier’s Vision of Nazi Europe”, presented at the Western Society for French History, Banff, Alberta, 12 October 2012).

  9. 9.

    Author’s interview with Roland Silly, 4 July 1974.

  10. 10.

    Some of the interview material appeared later without mention of names in my article, ‘The Morphology of the Collaborator: The French Case’, Journal of European Studies 23 (1993).

  11. 11.

    For a more recent similar counterfactual argument about the potential role of Spain and Gibraltar in World War II, see Mark Grimsley (2015).

  12. 12.

    For Dengler, see also Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani (2009, 100–101).

  13. 13.

    Some of the Wegleiter guidebooks have recently been translated into French in Où sortir à Paris? Le Guide du soldat allemand (Lemire 2013). See also Emmanuel Hecht (2013).

  14. 14.

    The concept of banality or ordinariness associated with the war and its related persecution is reflected in the concept of the ‘banality of evil’, a term popularised by Hannah Arendt. Similarly, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) deals with the banality or ordinariness of those who carried out mass murders during the war.

  15. 15.

    Previously, my wife Suzanne Perkins, an artist and art historian, and I were invited to contribute chapters on French chocolate to an anthology on chocolate history (Perkins 2009; Gordon 2009).

  16. 16.

    My thanks to Manuel Bragança for emails, dated 16 January 2015 and 21 June 2015, respectively, citing Martine Jacot (2014) and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (2014). See also Furman et al. (2010) and Semple (2014).

  17. 17.

    Also, in 2015, a call for abstracts for an international conference in Australia on ‘global France’ notes that continental France, once the centre of the world in the eyes of many, has given way to ‘multiple centres, to conflicting and complementary sites of physical, economic and cultural exchange’. See http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/global-france-global-french-2015 (accessed 24 March 2015).

  18. 18.

    I addressed the developing academic field of the cultural studies of tourism in ‘Touring the Field: The Infrastructure of Tourism History Scholarship’, Journal of Tourism History (2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA

    Bertram M. Gordon

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  1. Bertram M. Gordon
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Correspondence to Bertram M. Gordon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Manuel Bragança

  2. University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Fransiska Louwagie

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Gordon, B.M. (2018). The Other Side: Investigating the Collaborationists in World War II France. In: Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (eds) Ego-histories of France and the Second World War. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_13

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