Laurent Joly has assembled a star-studded cast to shine a new light on the Vichy regime. The book is not a history, in the sense of a continuous narrative, but a collection of essays on aspects of Vichy, presented in rough chronological order and written by experts in their fields. It reflects the latest historiography of the subject, according to Joly. The prolific Joly, a leading historian of France and the Shoah, contributes the book’s introduction and conclusion, as well as chapters on Vichy’s pre-war antecedents (Chapter 1), the birth of the new regime in July 1940 (Chapter 2) and its responsibility for handing over Jews to the Germans (Chapter 9). Joly argues that the conventional description of Vichy as an authoritarian regime is an understatement. It was, rather, a dictatorship, an assessment accepted by the historian Olivier Wieviorka. For Joly, therefore, the purpose of the book is to concentrate largely on Vichy’s repressive policies as part of its quest for collaboration with the former enemy. Several chapters focus on ‘the principal actors’ of the État français. The history of Vichy, Joly writes, is ‘fundamentally the product of the improbable alliance’ between Marshal Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval.
Richard Carswell (Tue,) studied this question.