Basing his work on French and German archives as well as on interviews and private correspondence, Sweets examines the French response to the Vichy government and Nazi occupation by studying Vichy's application of their experiment to the city of Clermont-Ferrand.
Films like The Sorrow and the Pity and Lacombe Lucien, as well as recent scholarship, have replaced the old Gaullist myth of Nazi-occupied France and ""a nation of resisters"" with a new myth of ""a nation of collaborators."" John Sweets's provocative assessment challenges both …
Basing his work on French and German archives as well as on interviews and private correspondence, Sweets examines the French response to the Vichy government and Nazi occupation by studying Vichy's application of their experiment to the city of Clermont-Ferrand.