Allan Massie
Paris Under the Swastika
Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France
By Agnes Humbert (Translated by Barbara Mellor)
Bloomsbury 370pp £14.99
This book was originally published in 1946, under the title Notre Guerre. It is an astonishing work, almost unbearable to read in places, yet ultimately inspiring. It evokes horror and compels admiration.
Agnes Humbert, born in 1894, was a painter and art critic who, when the Second World War broke out, was employed in the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires. She was politically active, on the left, and a supporter of the Popular Front; in 1939, writes Julien Blanc in his Afterword, ‘a research trip to Russia to study Soviet museums and culture confirmed her attachment to the communist cause’. In 1940 she was caught up in the Exodus, as Parisians fled the advancing Germany army. She returned to Paris as soon as she could and was almost immediately active in one of the earliest of the Resistance groups. By chance, she had been one of the few to hear General de Gaulle’s broadcast of 18 June. An army officer told her he knew de Gaulle and that he was ‘a crackpot’. ‘It is thanks to that “crackpot”,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘that this evening I decided not to put an end to everything after all. He has given me hope, and nothing in the world can extinguish that hope now’.
For ten months her ‘Musée de l’Homme’ Resistance group produced a clandestine newspaper. At this early stage of the war, when there was no organised Resistance and little prospect of any effective direct action against the occupying forces, propaganda – intended to persuade the French that the war was not
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Princess Diana was adored and scorned, idolised, canonised and chastised.
Why, asks @NshShulman, was everyone mad about Diana?
Find out in the May issue of Literary Review, out now.
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
In the Current Issue: Nicola Shulman on Princess Diana * Sophie Oliver on Gertrude Stein * Costica Bradatan on P...
literaryreview.co.uk
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk