Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939-1945

This wide-ranging volume brings together a blend of experienced and emerging scholars to examine the texture of everyday life for different parts of the wartime French population. It explores the systems of coping, means of helping one another other, confrontations with people or events and the challenges posed to and by Vichy’s National Revolution during a difficult period in France and indeed Europe’s history.

The book focuses on human interactions at the micro level, highlighting lived experience within the complex social networks of this era, as French civilians negotiated the violence of war, the restrictions of Occupation, the shortages of daily necessities and the fear of persecution in their everyday lives. Using approaches drawn from history, oral history, film, gender studies and sociology, the text peers into the lives of ordinary men, women and children and opens new perspectives on questions of resistance, collaboration, war and memory; it tells the story of the anonymous millions who suffered, coped, laughed, played and worked, either together at home or far apart in towns and villages across Occupied and Vichy France.