'French and Germans, Germans and French' by Richard Cobb

Richard Cobb (1917 - 1996) was an extraordinary historian who still awaits a full biography. He was Professor of Modern History at Oxford during the 1970's and hugely respected, but only started writing and teaching quite late in life and tends to be remembered now as much for his eccentricities (and love of alcohol) as for his writing.

I have always admired his writing, not least because of his stubborn refusal to give any attention (or one suspects, credence) to the main historiographic fashions of his time. He had no interest in theory or interpretation at all and spent his life proudly writing reconstructivist history by simply trying to set out in writing what happened in the past. His books do not dwell on the 'why' in the slightest degree.

He lived in France just before the Second World War and fell completely under its spell, returning after the war after serving in the army to live in Paris for a further decade, during which he beavered away in national archives, made many friendships and got to know the city extremely well.

He the returned to the UK to marry and pursue a pretty spectacularly successful academic career writing mainly about social life in France during the revolutionary period; in French as much as English. He was not so interested in high politics and the lives of elites, being a practitioner of 'history from below', looking simply to explore how life was lived by ordinary people in the past and to write about them engagingly.

Later in life, having retired from his Professorship, he wrote books aimed at a wider audience, including three volumes of autobiography and this little book which is essentially about collaboration in France during the two German occupations on 1914-1918 and 1940-44. He takes the view that the majority of French people - though they would often later see things differently - were passive collaborators and that there were plenty who actively collaborated too.

He writes with great style and enthusiasm for his subject, looking I think primarily to dispel myths and show how it is wrong to come to simplistic conclusions about who collaborated, how and why. He makes it crystal clear that he has no sympathy whatever for the collaborators, but tries to see the situation they found themselves in from their point of view, repeatedly reminding his readers that in 1941 or 1942 it did not look at all likely that the war would turn out the way that it did.

The book is highly thought-provoking and interesting to read, as well as being superbly written. He draws on some interviews with people, but mainly on memoirs, diaries and novels.

This is though no text-book treatment of the subject. He ranges very widely, moving from topic to topic without giving the reader the benefit of sub-headings or concluding paragraphs before he sets off with enthusiasm and aplomb in a completely new direction.

Cobb is happy to speculate where there is no historic record, but does so compellingly and with reasoned justification. He also assumes a huge amount of familiarity with Paris, its occupation, the major figures of the time and of the French language. The book is written in English, but is filled with quotations that are not translated (although in this Penguin Modern Classics there is a helpful short section at the end which provides some translations).

I took all kinds of ideas and insights from reading this, and will certainly look to read much more on the subject in the future. The most interesting and I think alarming insight concerns persistent anglophobia in France and the ease with which active collaborators deployed hatred of us English when constructing their propaganda messages during the occupation of 1940-44.

This is, of course, something that one cannot help even today to find both baffling and somewhat offensive. Why do the French, given their recent history and our generally pretty positive role in it, appear to have such a preference for dancing to German tunes while dismissing us and ours with such ready contempt? President Macron seems very happy - presumably because it works politically - to hit out at the British whenever he is in a tight spot, as of all people so did General de Gaulle. Richard Cobb, while deploring the tendency, seeks coolly to explain it at least in respect of World War 2:

"But perhaps a more important reason for anglophobia in 1940 was that the British had had the presumption not to have heeded the admiral's no doubt well-meaning advice and had gone on fighting after the French had opted for an armistice, a decision on our part that was an implicit condemnation of Vichy. This was Britain's real crime, yet at the same time one that could not be openly stated. T was one that could unite in hostility such disparate elements as the French admirals and the officer corps of La Royale, nurtured in anglophobia from generation to generation, Paris ultracollaborationalists, former pacifists, ambitious professional 'Europeans', Catholic admirers of Franco, anti-semites and anti-Protestants and members of the Communist Party. The very existence of Vichy and all Paris forms of collaboration based their most convincing arguments on the assumption, shared by the majority of the French, and indeed by world opinion, that the war was all but over in the summer of 1940, and that it only remained now for Germany to get on with the constructive work of laying down the details of the New European Order, an Order in which France, by a display of willingness and good behaviour, could aspire at least to a subsidiary role."

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose - sadly, one can only conclude.