The history of the wartime Occupation has recently become a French national obsession, although relatively little has been published about the period in England. For 30 years following the second world war very little was published about it in France either. Nobody wished to challenge the convenient consensus that the military defeat in 1940 was followed by four years of collaboration imposed by Marshal PZtain until France, represented by the Free French and the Resistance and led by General de Gaulle, joined in its own liberation and the eventual defeat of the Nazi regime. Today these statements are no longer accepted as an accurate picture. The silence has given way to a noisy struggle between French historians and the surviving eyewitnesses, and new books on the period are now published almost every week. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 is billed by its publishers as 'the first comprehensive study of the Occupation for 25 years'. Even though it relies almost entirely on secondary sources this is an ambitious project for one volume that sets out to cover not only the Occupation, but the Resistance and the politics of the Free French outside France, as well as providing a five-chapter introduction on the political history of the previous 50 years.

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