By mid-1942, however, as the Gestapo began replacing German military administrators, French officialdom's room for maneuver disappeared. Already in July 1942, French police in the region took part in the arrest of hundreds of Jews, who were sent to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. Gildea quotes a police report warning that "many are not hiding their sympathy for those who appear to be victims of persecution." But others, Gildea adds, moved quickly to take over property abandoned by local Jews. Soon, though, not only "Judeo-Bolshevik demons" but anyone suspected of opposition was liable to arrest and deportation.
Just as Gildea tracks how local politicians adjusted to the occupation, he again follows them preparing for the liberation. Many mayors, for example, resigned their jobs. Other officials began making discreet contact with Resistance groups in France and abroad. "Officials who wanted to survive needed to play a double game, giving the appearance of loyalty while working in the dark to protect French interests," Gildea notes. The French response to Allied bombing of industrial zones was also ambivalent: lamented, but not opposed.
Once the region was freed in August 1944, de Gaulle's envoys quickly ratified all but the most detested officials in their posts as a way of forestalling any communist grab for power. Some summary justice took place -- a few lynchings and many women's heads shaven for "horizontal collaboration" with the enemy -- but amid food shortages, day-to-day survival soon took priority. And in Gildea's view, the general response to liberation was one of disappointment. Life for returning prisoners of war and deportees (and a few Jews who had survived in hiding) proved particularly difficult.
In fact, as Marianne in Chains so powerfully demonstrates, little was quite as it was remembered five decades later. "Franco-German relations under the occupation were not always as brutal or even one-sided as they have often been portrayed," Gildea writes. Nor was the Vichy regime as authoritarian or reactionary as many recall. But a different official memory soon took shape.
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