Bablu posted:

i'm reading robert o. paxton's book on vichy france which is about roughly the same thing

Nice, which one? To me the great thing about Paxton, aside from the obvious, is that the people who disagreed with the "de facto complicity" he presents were really only able to do so on an isolated case-by-case or region-by-region basis. Even John Sweets, who paints a much more uplifting picture of french quotidian resistance (and is one of his few critics that Paxton acknowledged for his research's merits, although they differ greatly as to the importance of this resistance), confined his research to Auvergne.

I guess the interesting thing to me is that the historians who talk about the multiplicities of resistance and of collaboration in daily life, of "differently embodied communisms," of the wide array of sentiments within a person's actions under yoke (sweets, kedward) are coincidentally historians who comparatively downplay the atrocities of those in power. They aren't even those who would rehabilitate Petain or anything like that, but it seems like a lot of coincidence that Paxton is the one who decisively broke the earlier narrative of Petain and French Jewry, not anyone else. It makes me wonder whether trying to view a life under domination through this lens of multiplicity is even a worthwhile endeavor. Is the unspoken, amorphous daily resistance that James Scott depicts worth anything at all in the face of this? It makes me uncomfortable to think about