Fleeing Hitler: France 1940

by Hanna Diamond

OUP ₤16.99, 304 pages

FT bookshop price: ₤13.59

It is a truth universally acknowledged, by all except the British, that the French nation has neither addressed nor recognised its misdeeds during the Nazi occupation and the years of the collaborating Vichy government. Little attention has been paid in Britain to the wartime sufferings of the French people. Fleeing Hitler, Hanna Diamond’s account of the French exodus of May 1940, coupled with Irene Nemirovsky’s more telling account in her posthumous novel, Suite Francaise, published in the UK last year, may begin to change our stubborn views about France.

In June 1940, two million Parisians fled as German forces approached Paris. From the surrounding region another two million followed. Most were women, and children numbered something between a third and a quarter of the total. Abandoned by their Republican government, who had fled before them leaving few, if any, contingency plans, these four million refugees joined nearly two million Belgians and 150,000 Dutch and Luxembourgeois who had been in flight since the Germans’ first attack, on May 10.

Retreating allied soldiers, routed, without orders or already defeated, joined the terrified civilians. German stukas dive-bombed indiscriminately. This was the ”black syrup” of the French exodus in which some eight million citizens, using every means of transport from shanks’s pony for the poor, to their soon-to-be-without-petrol limousines for the rich, took to the roads and headed south. The scale of misery was tremendous: hunger and pillaging, death and destitution accompanied these millions, children were separated from parents, sometimes forever. Rumours circulated and the roads were strewn - and blocked - with cars, bikes, carts and abandoned possessions.

Based on original research and interviews, with exhaustive attention to sources, Diamond has an excellent eye for the striking detail: ”They left Paris with their aged aunt who died on the way. Finding nowhere to leave her body, they put it on top of the car... They finally decided to stop for a rest in a barn. The following morning, the car had disappeared, aunt and all.”

This gives Diamond’s book an unusual slant. By concentrating on the experience of civilians, and taking the exodus as the central event, she clarifies why some were stunned into initial acceptance of Petain’s collaborating Vichy government.

The plight of these millions affected almost everyone in France in 1940: the millions who fled, and the millions in the departments of southern France who tried to shelter and feed - or exploit - them. The loss of husbands, the sense of abandonment and the hunger of the French throughout the occupation, began with the exodus.

Ironically, Diamond is critical of Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise for its lack of ”ideology”, whatever that may mean. On the other hand, Nemirovsky was incapable of writing in the style to which, unfortunately, Diamond sometimes seems condemned. Words such as ”insightful”, ”terrific”, ”foundational” should find no place in the works of a good writer. But as a work of history, this book is an invaluable account of the fall of France, seen through the lens of the sufferings of its citizens.

Carmen Callil is author of ”Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland” (Vintage).