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Too Much Gide subscriber-only content

Douglas Johnson

  • La Guerre des écrivains 1940-53 by Gisèle Sapiro
  • Correspondance: Marcel Arland-Jean Paulhan 1936-45 edited by Jean-Jacques Didier
  • Dialogue des ‘vaincus’: Prison de Clairvaux, janvier-décembre 1950 by Lucien Rebatet and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, edited by Robert Belot
  • The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan

The historians who have argued that the continuities of French history count for more than its ruptures and revolutions have tended to avoid examining the disastrous year of 1940, when the Third Republic came to a bad end and the German Occupation began. These four books suggest that even this cataclysm can be fitted into the pattern of continuity.

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Douglas Johnson is Emeritus Professor of French History at University College London and a senior member of the Franco-British Council.

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