Latest news with #Vichy
Spectator
5 days ago
- Spectator
What history doesn't tell us
The trouble with history is that it is topiary. History is what's left after the unwanted foliage has been clipped and cleared away. The topiary birds, pigs and pyramids are just yew bushes minus the clippings, these forms having emerged from the topiarist's shears. Your yew-based pig is a product of selective disposal, even down to its curly tail. Likewise with a historian's shears. The raw material may be facts (in the words of the 19th-century German historiographer Leopold von Ranke, 'what actually happened') but the history book's account, the shape and meaning we give to an era, relies as much on the happenings we choose to discard as on those we decide to notice. In like manner, Ancient Greek astronomers conjured up fantastical constellations by topiarising the stars. Such thoughts teased me as we walked around the Centre d'histoire de la Résistance in Lyon last week. I do recommend a visit both to this chilling museum dedicated to the Free French resistance during the Vichy years, and to Lyon itself. If your only brush with the city is (as mine had been) a complex motorway bypass to avoid it, then Lyon will come as a revelation. Situated on and to each side of the peninsula formed by the confluence of two great navigable rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, Lyon surpasses Paris (in my view) in its ambience, squares, promenades, boulevards and architecture from every era since the city was established by the Romans as one of their hubs of empire. The climate is mild and the atmosphere warm: classy restaurants and cool bars spill out on to tree-lined pavements.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-winning film-maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, dies aged 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning French film-maker whose documentary The Sorrow and the Pity uncovered the truth of the Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany during the second world war, has died aged 97. Ophuls 'died peacefully' on Saturday, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert confirmed on Monday. Ophuls was born in Frankfurt in 1927, to the German actor Hilde Wall and the renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls. The family fled Germany for France after the Nazi party came to power in 1933, then fled the Nazis again as they invaded France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and travelling on to the US, arriving in 1941. Ophuls finished high school and college in Los Angeles, and served in a US army theatrical unit in Japan in 1946. The family migrated to France in 1950, where Ophuls worked as an assistant to film-makers Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak. Through François Truffaut, Ophuls directed part of the 1962 film Love at Twenty, then the 1964 detective film Banana Peel starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1867 he made his first documentary, a 32-hour series on the Munich crisis. Ophuls was then commissioned by a French government-run TV station to make a documentary about France under Nazi occupation. But in 1969, when he submitted The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary that exposed the extent of French collaboration with the Nazis, the station refused to screen it and it was banned; a network head later told a government committee that the film 'destroys myths that the people of France still need'. Ophuls rejected any criticism that he had unfairly singled out France, telling the Guardian in 2004: 'For 40 years I've had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French. Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' The Sorrow and the Pity was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for best documentary feature; it was immortalised in Annie Hall as the film Woody Allen's character invites Diane Keaton to see on a date. It was not screened on French television until 1981. Ophuls returned again and again to conflict in documentaries, including A Sense of Loss, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland; The Memory of Justice, about wartime atrocities; The Troubles We've Seen, about war reporting and filmed in Sarajevo during the siege; and November Days, interviewing East Germans about the fall of communism and reunification. His 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, about the Nazi war criminal, won Ophuls an Academy Award for best documentary feature. Ophuls spent his final years in southern France. He was working on a documentary about Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, under the working title Unpleasant Truths, for some years before his death.
Times
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Odile de Vasselot obituary: French Resistance heroine
In June 1940 Odile de Vasselot, a spirited 18-year-old from a French military family, tuned in to a homemade radio in her bedroom as she tried to follow the horrifying progress of the German conquest of her country. She had become increasingly depressed seeing columns of disconsolate refugees escaping the swift Nazi advance and felt deep shame at the collaborationist Vichy government's claim to be her country's new legitimate authority. Suddenly, as she searched the airwaves, de Vasselot heard a familiar voice: that of the French army officer Charles de Gaulle. Living mostly on military bases after her birth at a cavalry headquarters in Saumur in 1922, de Vasselot had at one point played regularly with de Gaulle's son. Her father, a military instructor, and
Telegraph
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The French Right will survive the banning of Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen, hitherto the favourite to succeed Emmanuel Macron as French President, has been barred from standing for public office for five years with immediate effect after being found guilty of embezzlement to fund her party. For French politics, this is an earthquake. Her angry reaction – storming out of court before the end of the two-hour judgement – indicates that the sentence is a devastating blow to the leader of the National Rally, who has been leading the polls for the 2027 presidential election. Although she will appeal, her candidacy is effectively over. There will be a widespread sense of injustice across France – not only on the Right, but also on the far-Left, which is equally hostile to unelected judges meddling in politics. Jordan Bardella, her deputy in the National Rally, declared that, while Le Pen had been 'unjustly condemned, it is French democracy that has been executed'. Many will dismiss the trial and verdict as an establishment stitch-up – although two former presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been convicted of corruption, which is endemic in French politics. Yet the gravity of the offence and what the judges called the 'cynicism' of Le Pen, who masterminded the systematic embezzlement of €4 million of EU taxpayers' money, left the court little choice but to impose the harshest penalty available. Her two-year jail sentence has been suspended pending appeal, but the lengthy judgement, solidly grounded in legal argument, will be difficult to overturn. Marine Le Pen has worked hard to detoxify the movement she inherited from her father Jean Marie – an anti-Semite who championed Pétain and the Vichy tradition. She has been winning the battle of ideas, too: her hardline policies on migration and Islam are now government policy. After the family psychodrama of Marine Le Pen kicking her father out of the party, while seeing off a challenge from her own niece, this trial may be the dénouement. Is this the end of the Le Pen clan's grip on the French Right, which has endured for over half a century? Still, Le Pen is nothing if not a fighter. At 56, she is certainly not ready to abandon what she sees as her destiny to lead France. She will draw strength from the example of the septuagenarian Donald Trump, who used his courtroom convictions to present himself as a victim of the 'deep state'. Waiting in the wings to replace Le Pen is Bardella, the 29-year-old dauphin of the National Rally. He has been slavishly loyal to her so far, but she admits that he is ready to step into her shoes. Bardella recently published a bestselling memoir of growing up in an urban slum. Given his youth, there are bound to be doubts about his ability to win the presidential election, but unless the verdict can be overturned the National Rally has little choice but to elevate the dauphin to the throne. The party's platform for 2027 envisaged Le Pen standing as President and appointing Bardella as her Prime Minister. The irony is that her long march through the institutions may now end in curtains for Marine Le Pen – but with the son of immigrants installed in the Élysée Palace.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
People Are Sharing The Most Underrated Books They've Ever Read, And I'm Adding Each And Every One Of These To My Reading List
While it's fun to read the latest Booktok smash hit, there's something especially satisfying in reading and enjoying a book that isn't splashed all over social media. So when I found this Reddit thread started by user My_Life_is_a_Farce asking for underrated book recommendations, I naturally took notes. Here are some that I've already added to my TBR list, which you might like as well... Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land by Julia Blackburn "Time Song by Julia Blackburn is one of the most remarkable nonfiction books I've ever read... It is nominally a history of the now-submerged land between England and continental Europe, but it is also a memoir about loving and losing and loving again, and it is also a meditation on what it means to exist and be remembered, and it is also literal poetry and a masterclass in sentence to sentence writing. I love this book so much." —assholeinwonderland Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton "Cool storytelling by proxy. I was really into studies of material culture at the time but I think this holds up regardless." —koko_kachoo Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears "I read it in a college course, but beyond that I've never seen in mentioned anywhere. It's a really beautiful novel about what it means to be human and what civilization means. It takes place in one town in southern France over three distinct historical moments: the fall of Rome, the Black Death, and the Vichy period. It's one of my favorite novels." —katiejim Rice Mother by Rani Manicka "If you like intergenerational stories like Homegoing and Pachinko, I recommend The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka. It tells the story of Lakshmi, a Ceylonese girl born in 1916 who is married off to a man in Malaysia at 14, and follows multiple generations of her family up to the early 21st century. The book gives an interesting insight into 20th century Malaysian history, including multiple immigrant cultures and the brutal Japanese occupation during WWII, and is a fascinating portrayal of complex characters and family relationships from multiple perspectives. The descriptions are beautiful and there is an underpinning of magical realism and themes of fate." —nashamagirl99 Women in Cages by Vilas Sarang "It's a collection of some of the strangest, weirdest, most wonderful short stories I have ever read. I know nobody else who has ever read this one, and everyone really should." —lenny_ray Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore "It is a fascinating biography that shows us how far medicine has come from basically a profession based on wives' tales and superstition to one based on science." —_my_choice_ by Jean Webster "It's my favorite book of all time, and has the most lovable heroine I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know. A mysterious nameless man sends an orphan girl to school, and she discovers the secret of happiness through all of the little wonderful things in life. The musical is also fantastic. She calls the man Daddy-Long-Legs on account of him being so tall, long-legged, and fatherly." —BruisedSkidd and the Cloneasaurus by Stephen Kozeniewski "I got it cheap on the Kobo store purely because of its name, and didn't expect much. But it turned out to be a really fun definitely recommend for a somewhat weird but entertaining dystopian book." —TigerSardonic for a Peach by David Mas Masumoto "It's about how he saves a variety of organic peaches his immigrant grandparents planted. It follows a year at the farm and his process to make the farm organic. Beautiful tribute to farming, families and the work ethic of immigrant families. Saw so much of my family in the book. Warning, you will crave peaches for years after reading it." —Wanderingirl17 Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith "Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith. It's a magical-realism/mythological novel involving a kind of curse spanning over generations, taking place in Vietnam." —Cabbage_Pizza —Mysterious_Fox_8616 in Case by Meg Rosoff "I read it years ago, bought it from a charity shop as I like the dust cover. It's all about a boy trying to escape fate. Never met anyone who has read it and I find it an interesting read to come back to." —Stephen111110 Canning Season by Polly Horvath "It's a little hard to find for some reason, but The Canning Season by Polly Horvath is a longtime favorite of mine. Equal parts hilarious and poignant. It's about a teenage girl whose overbearing/borderline abusive mother sends her to spend a summer with distant elderly relatives she's never met." —NeighborhoodMothGirl Street by Ibi Zoboi "A YA story about a Haitian girl who immigrates to Detroit. I found her perspective really interesting." —Icy-Vegetable-Pitchy Body by Laurel Doud "I picked this book up in a $2 bargain bin maybe 10± years ago and it blew me away. I don't know anyone else who has read this book... I always thought it could have been made into an amazing screenplay. From Amazon's description: 'WHAT IF YOU HAD LIFE TO LIVE OVER AGAIN? WHAT IF YOU WERE RICH? WHAT IF YOU WERE SKINNY? WHAT IF YOU HAD A SECOND CHANCE TO FIND TRUE LOVE? Katharine Ashley, in the prime of her life, is a dutiful mother of two whose heart suddenly stops beating. Thisby Bennet is a rich and skinny young woman whose dangerous taste for drugs and men leads to her equally untimely death. When Katharine's departing soul finds its way into Thisby's lifeless body, the story of This Body begins...'" —Creative-Tomatillo The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall "Wake by Dr. Rebecca Hall. It's about women-led revolts throughout the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's a graphic novel, memoir, and super interesting dive into not well-known history. I finished it last night and haven't stopped thinking about it." —spanishpeanut Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler "It's a poem book that personifies human traits (greed, pleasure, compassion, and beauty). It is a very sweet book." —margirl100twirl Fruit Bowl by Dominic Holland "He's Tom Holland's dad (yes, that Tom Holland) and is mostly known as a comedian though he's a writer as well. I love all his books but The Fruit Bowl has so much heart and it'll make you cry at the beginning and again at the end. Really loved it." —Zoe_Croman Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Mosionier "Takes place in my home city where the author grew up, and is inspired by true events of her life. Changed my perspective on life. Story partly includes residential schools of Canada." —Due_Anteater9116 Hippo by Sarah Gailey "It's hippo cowboys doing a heist. It rules." —Hms-chill Okay, now, tell us your totally underrated books! Share in the comments below, and let us all add even more to our TBR!
