Few chapters in World War II history are as contentious as Vichy France. After the 1940 defeat, Marshal Philippe Pétain’s regime ruled the unoccupied south while cooperating with Nazi ...

Almost 50 years ago, Robert Paxton published his influential “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944.” The book awakened readers to the shock of how close France came to becoming an ...

From June 1940 to January 1944, with Nazi forces occupying France, the Jewish novelist Léon Werth — an unclassifiable writer who had published books of art criticism, political essays, journalism and ...

All films relate to their place and time, but some are nearly incomprehensible out of context. That’s the case with Marcel Ophuls’s great 1969 documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” even though its ...

In 1994, the French historians Henry Rousso and Éric Conan published “Vichy, un Passé Qui ne Passe pas.” While titled “Vichy: The Ever-Present Past” in the excellent American translation, the phrase ...