La France allemande et ses journaux (1940-1944)

by Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat

Book cover: La France allemande et ses journaux (1940-1944)

Extent: 800 pages

Publisher: Les Belles Lettres

Subjects: French Studies, Twentieth- & Twenty-First- Century History

Language: French

Paperback (Published)

(September 2025)

ISBN: 9782251457734

6.3 x 9.45 inches

Price: $57.00

In stock

On June 14, 1940, the Wehrmacht entered Paris. For four years, the capital became the capital of German France and the scene of rivalries between the powers that established themselves there in the name of the victor: military administration, propaganda services, police and SS, embassy. Germany’s plan was to exploit the defeated country to the best of its war aims and to colonize it, with anti-Semitic persecution asserting itself, over the months, as a major concern. Abundant before the war, the press was a power that the occupiers targeted with relish. The trust they built with sometimes surprising assistance, headed by a Nazi official, Gerhard Hibbelen, included more than twenty companies under French law: linked by cross-shareholdings and managed by a staff of trusted French men, they offered a wide range of publications, the tangle of which Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat meticulously unraveled. His detailed analysis of the world of the press and its characters with contrasting destinies opens the discussion to the overall history of the 20th century in France. It shows that the period of the Occupation is not a parenthesis in the history of France but is part of its continuum. It allows us to paint a colorful picture of the interwar period, where Pierre Laval already positioned himself as the man of all possibilities, and which experienced a bustling press where the Franco-American millionaire Raymond Patenotre played a unique role with mysterious stakes, where a society changed profoundly through the modernization of technologies, the transformation of lifestyles, the movement of ideas and their confrontation. Reinserting the history of the dark years into the long term, Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat reminds us that, in occupied France, the autonomy of the indigenous powers was shrinking like shagreen leather: it was the occupier who set the rules, even if the supreme authority he held was fragmented between competing decision-making centers.

  • By (author) Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat