In Order of Rank

Jeremy Harding

  • Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 by Hanna Diamond
    Oxford, 255 pp, £16.99, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 19 280618 5
  • Journal 1942-44 by Hélène Berr
    Tallandier, 301 pp, €20.00, January 2008, ISBN 978 2 84734 500 1

About half a million anxious people left Paris in September 1939 after the declaration of war. Then a workaday calm reclaimed the city, as French propaganda continued playing in the key of imminent victory: the government, headed by the right-leaning Radical Edouard Daladier, convinced most of France that the Allies would be more than a match for the Wehrmacht. No doubt there were still Parisians who imagined they’d have to pack their bags and head out eventually – which they did, when the Phoney War ended in May 1940. In the meantime foreboding was blunted by a fatal propensity to look on the bright sight.

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Vol. 30 No. 9 · 8 May 2008 » Jeremy Harding » In Order of Rank (print version)
Pages 16-18 | 4606 words