Wow that's a surprise - an English paper dissing the French. Never happened before.

However, the Daily Mail writer might show a little humility about what was considered normal behavior back then. From the Wikipedia entry on the Daily Mail:

-- In early 1934, Rothermere and the Mail were sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Rothermere wrote an article, "Hurrah for the Blackshirts", in January 1934, in which he praised Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine"[6], though after the violence of the 1934 Olympia meeting involving the BUF, the Mail withdrew its support for Mosley.

-- Rothermere was a friend and supporter of both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which influenced the Mail's political stance towards them up to 1939. During this period, it was the only British newspaper consistently to support the German Nazi Party.[7][8] Rothermere visited and corresponded with Hitler on many occasions. On 1 October 1938, Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain.

-- In 1937, the Mail's chief war correspondent, George Ward Price, to whom Mussolini once personally wrote in support of him and the newspaper, published a book, I Know These Dictators, in defence of Hitler and Mussolini.

-- Rothermere and the Mail supported Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, particularly during the events leading up to the Munich Agreement. However, after the Nazi invasion of Prague in 1939, the Mail changed position and urged Chamberlain to prepare for war, not least, perhaps, because on account of its stance it had been threatened with closure by the British Government.[citation needed]

-- The paper continues to be referred to on occasion by critics as the Daily Heil, referring to its conservative stance and its past support for Mosley.[9]

en.wikipedia.org/.../Daily_Mail

"Wow that's a surprise - an English paper dissing the French. Never happened before."

Of course the creep keeps quoting the same papers when they attack Israel.

All you need to know about the Nazi occupation of France is in Marcel Ophuls'

documentary film, "The Sorrow and the Pity."

Aside from being one of the great film directors of the 20c Ophuls is also one of the most honest film makers ever:

www.imdb.com/.../tt0066904

That the French collobarted with the Nazis throughout the war shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone honest student of history by now.  Of course antisemites like mackenzie will prefer to blame it all on the Jews.

I've seen those photos.  People in a city going on about their lives with children, etc.

Wartime has many pockets of normality.  In fact, even at the height of war, only a tiny portion of the earth is actually at battle.

What are people supposed to do?  Make sure they always look suitably depressed in case a photographer happens by?  Have you ever been to a wake?  People talk, gossip, greet old friends, eat ice cream and cake, tell jokes and laugh.  

The only exception I could think of would be where a young child or young father or mother had died tragically.

Life goes on.  People make the best of their lives.  Paris was in straits, but it wasn't Stalingrad.  So, people looked more or less normal.

ChanRobt, you are missing the point. Lot's of people in occupied France supported the Vichy government. They also bought into the Nazi propaganda. Read about it or at least take a look at Ophuls/ documentary film about the period.

It shocked France when it was first released in 69 and it encouraged people to ask questions about what really happened in their country between 1940-1945.

jacksondyer, you miss my point, probably because I didn't make it properly.

First of all, I saw the Sorrow and the Pity.  And I am persuaded that most of the French were not in the Resistance.  I am even persuaded that many, many  French collaborated or did not bring credit to France.

But, the photos in question in the exhibit did not prove much, one way or the other.  They showed forties vintage French people walking around being French.  

The only photo I recall showing any particular frivolity, were the three young women wearing the white framed sun glasses.

The photos themselves were hardly a "sorrow/pity" level indictment.  

The main complaint seems to be that the captions on the photos didn't give much Occupation context.  

But, what could they have said, "Look at these shameful people looking normal when France is under the Nazi boot."?

Is your complaint with the way the Parisians appear in these photos, or the attitude of the contemporary curators of the exhibit?

By the way, the Germans and the Japanese post-1945 have "collaborated" pretty thoroughly with the U.S. and the rest of the Allies.  Few in Germany are known to have protested that, although there are some in Japan who have been pretty vocal about consumerist Japanese being traitors to the true Japanese spirit.

Meanwhile, Jacksondyer, the original "collaboration" which made the less pretty much inevitable is how poorly the French army resisted the 1940 German invasion.  

I'm not meaning to be an apologist for the French.  But, Americans are yet to be tested.  Perhaps down the road with the Chinese?

Alex Massie, an occasional writer at The New Republic, enters the fray:

-- It's a simple thing really, but life under occupation must, one way or another or somehow, go on. Most people have little alternative but to make the best of a dismally bad lot. What else is to be done? Those of us who never experienced the humiliation and shame and ghastliness of occupied europe are not actually best-placed to sit in absolute judgement upon the collective failings or weaknesses of people whose lands were occupied by tyranny.

www.debatableland.com/.../when-colour-is.html

-- Despite their rough manner, they had retained their femininity and human kindness. Probably they too had their lovers, and probably they too stole margarine and tins of food in order to pay for blankets and dresses ...

... but I remember Mirka, a short, stocky 'pink' girl. Her shack was all done up in pink too, with pink ruffled curtains across the window that faced the block. The pink light inside the shack set a pink glow over the girl's face, making her look as if she were wrapped in a delicate misty veil.

Not the Paris of the Daily Mail story - but the Birkenau of Tadeusz Borowski's short story "The People Who Walked On."

Another point, the German Wehrmacht conquered France under a Nazi regime.  But, most of the soldiers and even the officers were not, themselves, Nazis.  

Nor, did they go out of their way to be cruel or unpleasant or ill-mannered.  

The Germans were known to be ruthless in responding to what they saw as terrorism-- i.e. when a German soldier was shot or blown up the would sometime retaliate with indiscriminate punishment.  But, given that resistance was not common, neither were these retaliations.

So, these photographs don't show a ubiquitiously sullen and depressed population.  It would be more surprising if they did.

Two or three years later, German girls were sleeping with Americans for a sack of flower, carton of cigarettes, or a pair of nylons.  

Humanity does not produce many heroes.  That's why they don't hand out hatfuls of Congressional Medals of Honor.

Lest my post above be misunderstood, yes I full understand that atrocities of the highest order were carried out by Germans, made possible by the presence of the Wehrmacht in France.

Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shipped off to the camps to their deaths.  My point is, those people walking about Paris mid-war shopping or fishing in the Seine were likely not aware of this.  

And, even if they were, what could most of them do differently then they were doing on any given day?  Most of them were probably struggling just as most of us do now, just to pay the rent and feed their families.  

Not only would a man have to be especially heroic to resist, he would also have to abandon his family or subject them to great hardship or death themselves, in order to do so.

There are atrocities committed every weekend in the blighted portions of most major American cities.  Chicago is having a murder wave as we speak on the South Side.  Are people just going on about there business up on the North Side?

Yes.

ChanRobt said:  "Meanwhile, Jacksondyer, the original "collaboration" which made the less pretty much inevitable is how poorly the French army resisted the 1940 German invasion. "

This is a different issue. Paul Berman's book Liberalism and Terror addresses the issue of the French left's inability to face up to the Nazi threat in the 30's.  He sees a parallel between their reaction then and the left's reaction to Islamicist terror today.

The right of course then and now welcomed the Nazis as they saw in them a kindred ideology.  

"I'm not meaning to be an apologist for the French."

Unlike mackenzie, I don't think you are.

" But, Americans are yet to be tested.  Perhaps down the road with the Chinese?"

This is a side issue. Americans were tested historically during the 19c and while not perfect we didn't do so badly. Fighting a civil war to end slavery is something we can be proud of.

Can you imagine France fighting a civil war to keep their countrymen from turning over Jews to the Gestapo?

“Lest my post above be misunderstood, yes I full understand that atrocities of the highest order were carried out by Germans, made possible by the presence of the Wehrmacht in France.

Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shipped off to the camps to their deaths.  My point is, those people walking about Paris mid-war shopping or fishing in the Seine were likely not aware of this.”

This only accounts for part of the history.

Let me fill you in some other details:

France was the only country whose police force delivered Jews to the Gestapo in handcuffs.

In France denunciations of fellow Frenchmen as “Jews” was so common that it disgusted even the Germans.  French people routinely denounced a neighbor whose apartment they coveted to the Germans as “Jews.”

France enforced racial laws even in areas not occupied by the Germans. They took away the citizenship of French Jews living in French Algeria, for example.

I could go on. Many French people after 68 try to come to terms with this. Interesting that bigots like mackenzie are still defending action that not even most French people today would defend.

Finally, do see Ophuls’ documentary. It should out on video.

There is also this:

From der spiegel:

“UPROAR OVER WWII EXHIBITION

Occupied Paris Shown in Full Color”

www.spiegel.de/.../0,1518,550218,00.html

Chan:  "There are atrocities committed every weekend in the blighted portions of most major American cities.  Chicago is having a murder wave as we speak on the South Side.  Are people just going on about there business up on the North Side?"

This is just a stupid comparison, Chan. You are too intelligent to post this kind of tripe.

jacksondyer, you and I are both guilty of bringing up multiple issues, and they tumble over each other.

I am aware, but not as acutely as you, that the French collaborated to a greater degree than many other Europeans in the sending Jews to their deaths.

French anti-semitism may have been more widespread and virulent than German anti-Semitism. (Just considerably less methodical.)   After all, the Jews felt very much at home in Germany and were very successful there.  

In their German heyday, I believe (and you tell me) that Jews felt as "German" and as assimilated as American Jews feel American.  Did Jews not serve the Kaiser faithfully and well in the trenches of WWI?

It was the Austrian, Hitler, who tapped German resentment and outrage at losing WWI and channeled it through the virus of anti-Semitism when necessary for his aims.  But, I don't believe that anti-Semitism had a lot to do with his winning his election to the Chancellory.

I just don't see these photographs of Paris c. 1942 picturing anything more than the human impulse to make the best of whatever situation they are in.  The heedless, fashionable girls at raceday-- would Paris Hilton and her like be any different than they, if say, the Russians had occupied us in 1989?

I don't think those photos show streets filled with people denouncing who had just denounced Jews to get their apartments.  Though I don't doubt your account at all-- I've read it elsewhere.  

But, I just read a biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman.  Even in the midst of the Blitz those in London who defied German bombs who had the means and connections to get hold of Champagne and caviar in rationed London, did so.  And partied rather heartily between the blasts.

I have long been fascinated how people managed to establish a kind of normality wherever possible during WW2.

My point is, I don't think the photos prove anything about French decency or morality.  They just prove that French myths about their deprivation under the Occupation was not true for all, even if true for some.

Your accounts of widespread French evil and turpitude in betraying the Jews is also true.  But, it is to be found in court archives and police documentation.  But, probably not in those photographs.

As to my example of contemporary Chicago, I don't believe it is as fatuous as you make out.  I am simply saying, we do not all of us personally intervene in sorrowful and pitiful situations even just miles from where we live.  Most don't anyway.  I don't.

I like most am content to vote for those who seem to have a credible plan to deal with these things, and be glad the cops and paramedics and firemen have the courage and decency to deal with most such unpleasantness so I don't have to.

I find much not to admire in the French, though I've always enjoyed France.  Most particularly their heedlessness leading up to WW2, and their poor performance at arms in 1940.  

I read "Liberalism and Terror.  I also commend to you Ernest May's "Strange Victory," which details the months during which the French lost the Battle of France.

And, as I said, but maybe you missed, I saw The Sorrow and the Pity in the theater when it debuted.  I haven't forgotten it.

Finally, jacksondyer, I am as proud as you that our nation fought a bloody civil war to end slavery.  And have often pointed this out when people blithely denounce our country for the sin of slavery.

But, in fairness, the circumstances were far different.  Starting with the fact that civil war was possible here because the nation split asunder, each side had freedom of action, controlled it own territory, its own resources, and had  access to plenty of arms.

Further, though the morality of slavery was certainly a major issue of the war, so also was the integrity of the nation (the Union must be saved) and competing economic systems and interests in two large regions.

So, the both of us have made analogies that are partly fair, perhaps, but also pretty rough.

"I just don't see these photographs of Paris c. 1942 picturing anything more than the human impulse to make the best of whatever situation they are in.  The heedless, fashionable girls at raceday-- would Paris Hilton and her like be any different than they, if say, the Russians had occupied us in 1989?"

Maybe, but this isn't about you or about me.  (I wasn't shocked either, but not for the cynical reaosn your give.)

Many thoughtful people in Europe saw these pictures and they were shocked.  That's the point.

"But, in fairness, the circumstances were far different.  Starting with the fact that civil war was possible here because the nation split asunder, each side had freedom of action, controlled it own territory, its own resources, and had  access to plenty of arms."

This is circular reasoning.

The nation split asunder because of the issue of slavery in the first place.

In any case, I agree that you can't really compare the two historical events. However, if you can't   compare the two events much less can you compare WW2 to some hypothetical about what might have happened if.....

jacksondyer, here is the wider story I believe told by the photographs:

Paris is one of the great jewels of Europe.  It was in German hands.  Unlike Germany, and much the rest of Europe, Paris was not being bombed.  This because the Allies did not wish to destroy Paris.  And because Berlin and the rest made much more logical and strategic targets.

So, Paris, to the delight of the Germans and the luck of the Parisians, was an island of peace and apparently even a certain amount of prosperity in the midst of the Europe during the greatest war in history.

The Parisians were not starving.  The Parisians were not suffering (at least not like Britain and the rest of Europe).  The Parisians most especially were not being bombed.

So, yes, these photographs show people who look shockingly comfortable while most major cities of Europe at war.  Not to mention, in high contrast to post war French myths about themselves.

But, if they in fact, were not uncomfortable or suffering, how are the Parisians to be expected to look and act as if they were?  

If would be peculiar human behavior for an entire city to play act lest they be photographed, and in anticipation of such photos being exhibited 60 years hence.

Not to mention that in 1942, conventional wisdom expected that 60 years hence, Europe would be Greater Germany.

"But, if they in fact, were not uncomfortable or suffering,..."

It's about collaborating with the enemy, not about suffering or "looking like you are suffering."

Never mind the Jews, for a moment. If your country is being occupied and tens of thousands of your countrymen were shipped to Germany to man forced labor battalions or killed, embracing that enemy is not exactly a patriotic thing to do, don’t you think?

You have to see the exhibit in context with everything else you know about French behavior of that period.

But, jacksondyer, I didn't see one instance in that photo of French fraternizing with Germans.  

I saw one photo where a German soldier was descending down subway stairs without being assaulted, and in fact being ignored.

I saw a photo of a Frenchman cycling by a row of Nazi flags.

I saw a photo of a German band marching down a Paris street, but don't believe any French were watching it, let alone cheering it.

Essentially, if you didn't know a war was on, you wouldn't know it from these photos.  Save the ones in which German soldiers are marching down Parisian streets.  So what the French seemed guilty of in the photos is managing to put the war out of their minds.  At least seeming to.

If they assumed that German rule was to be their lot for a 1,000 year Reich, what are we to make of that?  Even the American Revolution was the work of a small minority, not the bulk of the population.  Most of whom had to go about their lives just to feed and shelter themselves.

"I saw a photo of a German band marching down a Paris street, but don't believe any French were watching it, let alone cheering it."

You'd have to see the exhibit in full Chan.

Still the  soldier decending into the metro unarmed and without fear tells you that the Germans weren't exctly afraid of the French.

Please, guys, get a little educated.  Read Michael Curtis's Verdict on Vichy...really, buy it!

The French, in many iinstances, went beyond collaboration.  They went beyond Nazi demands, for example, in the deportation of children to the death camps.  It was French not German initiative which set up National Socialism in the Middle East, as the Syrian/Iraqi Ba'athists, yes, the party of Assad and Saddam.  It's why a word like Islamofascist is by no means hyperbole.

In most cases the German occupiers were indeed civilized and allowed the French to lead normal lives.  On the other hand you have Oradur-sur-Glane.

This distinction between Germans and Nazis, between Wehrmacht and SS, is rather tiresome.  In fact, we were at war with the Germans, not just the Nazis.  The French had sued for peace with the Germans and thus were not at war with them.  France was occupied in the north for purely strategic reasons, as the bulwark of Festung Europa.  If the Germans had the bigger presence in the north, it was not because of the French but because of the Channel.

The French attitude towards the Germans was of course resentment, to say the least, but on a day-to-day basis the French believed in "civilized" behavior -- after all, they think they invented it.  Also, there was widespread resentment of the British by the French, first for abandoning them, then for bombing their fleet.  One can debate the merits of this resentment (the Brits did what they had to do), but it was there and not trivial.  While it didn't drive the French into the arms of their conquerors, it did ensure that for the French, living with the Germans did not betray a friendship which, they rationalized, no longer existed.  Combine this with endemic anti-Semitism (at the turn of the century France was far more anti-Semitic than Germany) and the propinquity of two Frankish nations, plus the example of, say, Rotterdam, of what happens when you resist, and you get occupied and Vichy France and their quasi-normality.  (Not "normalcy," Peretz!)

The Resistance?  In occupied countries there are always those who think someone should do something.  In France, the Resistance makes for wonderful lore, an annoyance to be sure, but in general more a presence than a force.

Rice, you didn't say anything I didn't already know.

I lived ans studied in France and am very familiar with its sorry WW2 record of betrayal and brutality.

However,  many French people unlike many posters here are at least trying to come to terms with it. That's a good start.

Thanks for the book reference, Rice. Will look into it.

Rice, I believe your post was aimed at me far more than at jacksondyer.  I already did comprehend the main sweep of what you just described.  But not all the details, those which are new for which I thank you.

And, I am also careful when discussing the war to refer to the German invading a country, not the Nazis.  I believe that convention was introduced after the war to hasten the rehabilitation of the French.  Or maybe during the war so as not to make uncomfortable Americans of German descent.  You know, like Eisenhower.

Jacksondyer and JM, I don't disagree with any of your facts or conclusions about French behavior during the occupation.  I have read about much of it and agree that it's true.

My sole point is that I don't think these photographs prove anything except that Parisians, at least, were living pretty normally under the German occupation.

The photo of the unarmed German soldier does illustrate that a German soldier felt safer amongst the French than would an American soldier walking around alone in Bagdad.  So maybe that's a powerful point of some sort.

There is plenty with which to indict the French for their wartime behavior.  I just don't think it's in these photos.

P.S., Rice, I too will check out the book

TYPO CORRECTO:  I believe that convention was introduced after the war to hasten the rehabilitation of the Germans.

( via Alex Massie and Clive Davis) Max Hastings writes:

-- Yet [Antony Eden] the former foreign secretary made an impressive contribution to Marcel Ophüls' great film on wartime France, Le Chagrin et la Pitié. He said, in impeccable French: "It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did." Here was wisdom.

Hastings continues:

-- It is extraordinarily difficult to resist tyranny ruthlessly enforced, especially in a densely populated country with little wilderness. In order to eat and provide for one's family, it is necessary to earn money. All commerce and industry must be conducted according to the will of the occupiers. A man who owns a business will find that he has no business, his employees no work, if he does not accept dictation. Members of a family that owns a house are liable to find it burnt about their ears if they commit, or are even deemed to have acquiesced in, acts of resistance. Some people may feel brave enough to accept such consequences for themselves, but would they inflict them on their children?

www.guardian.co.uk/.../comment.bookscomment

ndmackenzie quotes, "...Some people may feel brave enough to accept such consequences for themselves, but would they inflict them on their children?"

Thank you, nd.  That was one of the points I tried to make.