"Vichy will not go away. As I write, France is in the throes of
the Paul Touvier affair. . . . The Touvier affair is just the most
recent expression of what Henry Rousso has called the Vichy
syndrome." So begins Robert Zaretsky's timely study of everyday
life in France during the "dark years" of Vichy. While many studies
of Vichy France have either focused on specific lives or ideas or
covered the period in broad and synthetic terms, local studies such
as this promise to nuance our understanding of wartime France. By
concentrating on the city of Nimes and the department of the Gard,
Zaretsky moves beyond generalizations concerning resistance and
collaboration to consider issues of historical continuity and
change within a specific local context. In the words and acts of
local French men and women, he finds the character of "mentalities"
in the heart of our own century.
The Gard is well chosen as the focus of this study. From the
sixteenth century onward, the region had been a flash point between
warring Catholics and Protestants. By the early twentieth century,
that tension had eased but not disappeared. Zaretsky examines the
dynamics between local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish
communities, arguing that with the advent of Vichy--a regime that,
if not clerical, was deeply deferential to the Catholic
Church--tension and conflict resurfaced in the Gard. Nimes at War
is based on a wealth of archival materials--police and prefectoral
reports, official departmental documents, local secular and
religious newspapers, and letters intercepted by the regime's
security apparatus--much of which has only recently been opened to
researchers. Zaretsky's detailed narrative will undoubtedly provoke
further reconsideration of the complex and ambiguous world of
Vichy.
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