French Politics, Culture & Society

This article examines the French government's mass internment at the start of the Second World War of all adult male nationals of Greater Germany, which included Austrians, Saarlanders, and Czechs, who were now designated as enemy aliens. It focuses on the largest of the assembly centers, Stade Colombes, twelve kilometers northwest of Paris, where the roughly twenty thousand of those who lived in the Paris region were ordered to report. This article makes use of military documents, newspaper reports, diaries, and memoirs to highlight the experience of the men from the first news of the war, through the conditions they encountered in Stade Colombes to their subsequent transfers to other camps. Following the trajectory of the German-born Catholic painter Hans Reichel (1892–1958) from his reaction to the news of the war to his release five months later will enable the reader to grasp more vividly what the men endured.

François Maspero is best known as the owner of the radical Latin Quarter bookstore La joie de lire and the founder and editor of Éditions Maspero, but he was also a writer, a translator, and a journalist. Maspero published several novels and wrote for media outlets like Le Monde and France Culture. He wrote about his travels throughout Eastern Europe, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the Caribbean, and published literature reviews, obituaries, and even his testimony of the events of 17 October 1961. This article is the first comprehensive analysis of his work as a print journalist for Le Monde, notably as a travel writer. While Maspero critiqued journalism in both of his novel-travelogues, Les passagers du Roissy-Express (1990) and Balkans-Transit (1997), this article argues that his journalism was a breeding ground for his novel-writing and vice versa. The intersection between journalism, novel writing, and militancy also allowed him to create a multidirectional activism, which reanimated past militancy to understand contemporary political crises.

Do militants expelled from the Communist Party ever leave it behind? Jorge Semprún was a Communist resister captured and sent to Buchenwald, where he worked in the sui generis Communist organization there. He spent almost two decades in the party, half of those years organizing the Communist underground in Franco's Spain. Expelled in 1964, he became an anti-Communist who held on to what he valued as a Communist at Buchenwald and in the underground. In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Semprún came to see in what he had learned at Buchenwald a harbinger of the European project he was making his own.

This article examines the collaboration trials of French photographers André Zucca (1944–1945) and Robert Delhay (1947–1949) within the context of the postwar French state's attempts to punish collaboration and rehabilitate the French press. Paying attention to the interpretation of photographs as evidence, I argue that within the post–Liberation French courtroom, photographic evidence became crucial to narrating collaboration and resistance as a means of gaining re-acceptance into the profession and escaping legal charges. However, photographs proved too complicated to clearly prove either collaboration. Photographers disputed the charges against them by offering new interpretations of their photographs. These new readings were rooted in a postwar visual culture that had been saturated with photographs as historical evidence of Nazi atrocities, French victimization, and resistance. This article details how the collection and display of photographic evidence in these court proceedings informed the emergence of a postwar photographic press steeped in résistancialisme.

In a self-reflective introduction to what was, sadly, his last publication, an essay collection, John Merriman lamented that the nineteenth century has been forgotten among historians of France. Noting the absence of books on this period in the Fnac bookstore at Les Halles in Paris, he wrote the following:

In thinking about French history from 1815 to the present, one thing now seems perfectly clear to me. As time moves relentlessly along, the century between 1815 and World War I is in some ways far less visible than it was when I became a historian.…For years the shelves [of such bookstores] had been organized chronologically: the French Revolution and Napoleon, then the nineteenth century, subdivided, and then the Great War. But the sections now jumped from Napoleon to the Great War! What had happened to the long nineteenth century? (What happened to my books?)…The revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which had so engaged folks like me for quite some time, seemed to have had their day.