A Woman's Paris ~ Joie de Vivre

Subscribers, When Paris When Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom, who is the Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and a professor of French and European Studies at Amherst College. Free book giveaway to two subscribers ends August 28, 2014. A $28 U.S. value.

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June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and deserted Paris and The City of Light was occupied by the Third Reich for the next four years. This August marks the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris, perfect timing for Ronald C. Rosbottom’s riveting history of the period: When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (August, 2014; Little, Brown and Company). (Purchase)

Rosbottom illuminated the unforgettable history of both the important and minor challenges of day-to-day life under Nazi occupation, and of the myriad forms of resistance that took shape during that period. Slowly, as the Occupation became increasingly onerous, underground resistance efforts became more and more muscular. Groups and individuals of all stripes—French and immigrant Jews, adolescents, communists, Gaullists, police officers, teachers, concierges, and landlords—endeavored to remind the German authorities that Parisians would never accept their presence. Cultural icons such as Josephine Baker, Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Colette, and Camus developed their own strategies to resist being overpowered by an invidious ideology.

A decade in the making and unprecedented in its range, When Paris Went Dark is both a thrilling work of history and a subtle, profoundly moral meditation on guilt, innocence, courage, cowardice, and the force of memory.

“When Paris Went Dark recounts, through countless compelling stories, how Nazi occupation drained the light from Paris and how many of its residents resisted in ways large and small. This is a rich work of history, a brilliant recounting of how hope can still flourish in the rituals of daily life.” — Scott Turow, author of Identical

“Ronald Rosbottom has re-created the Parisian world during the dark days of the German occupation like no previous writer I know. His secret is twofold: first, exhaustive research that allows him to recover what we might call the importance of the ordinary; and second, a shrewd grasp of how memory works, often in strange ways.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College, author of Founding Brothers, American Sphinx, and Revolutionary Summer

Excerpt from When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom. Copyright © 2014 by Ronald C. Rosbottom. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company (Part One)(Part Two).

Ronald C. Rosbottom is the Winifred Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and a professor of French and European Studies at Amherst College. Previously he was the dean of the faculty at Amherst and the chair of the Romance Languages Department at Ohio State University. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. (A Woman’s Paris interview with Ronald C. Rosbottom)

Photo credit: Kane Haffey

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Barbara Redmond
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