Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 103
BOOK REVIEWS
THE BLOOD OF FREE MEN:
The Liberation of Paris, 1944
Michael Neiberg, Basic Books, New York, 2012, 368
pages, $28.99
M
any of the accounts of the liberation of
Paris are a part of an agreed-upon myth
about the Nazi occupation of France, the
conduct of the Vichy government, and the French people. It took a generation for historians to unravel the
legend. The fall of France destroyed the French Third
Republic and exposed a long-standing sociopolitical
divide which Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government aspired to fill. It unleashed a civil war between
resisters and collaborators. Michael Neiberg’s book
must be read knowing this context.
Neiberg’s work shows the struggle between French
resistance factions, collaborators, the Anglo-American
Allies, and the Free French movement (the Wehrmacht
was also involved). According to Neiberg’s research, the
heroes are the people of Paris who played a large part
in their own liberation and Charles de Gaulle, whose
opponents included the Anglo-American Allies, the
French Communists, and the Nazis.
Neiberg begins with a theme that has become
commonplace in the historiography of World War II—
the Nazi victory in 1940 destroying the old European
bourgeois social and political structure. The defeat
led to an undeclared and a barely acknowledged civil
war in France. French society was divided between
collaborators and resisters. The former included those
who preferred Hitler to Leon Blum (a French politician)—reactionaries and opportunists who wished to
accommodate themselves to the new realities of power.
The latter included French citizens from all segments
of the political spectrum who thought subjugation to
Germany was inconceivable. The resistance was very
small until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and
the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad. Even then it was still a
small portion of the population.
While we may see collaborators solely as opportunists, we should understand that most in western
Europe were prepared to collaborate with the Nazis
because they were now dominant. In the summer of
1940, it appeared they would rule for a ve