(2006), Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (2001) and Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (1990).
Roshwald applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945, and reported the following:
From page 99:I'm pleased to report that, in the case of Occupied, the merits of the Page 99 Test are fully borne out. This page is the very first one of Chapter 3, entitled "The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible." It introduces the theme of competing patriotisms under occupation with a discussion of Vichy French leader Philippe Pétain's notorious August 1941 radio address in which he claimed an "evil wind" was blowing across France. What he was referring to was the public's mounting disaffection from his regime and the growing activity of the Resistance movement. While casting blame on some of the usual scapegoats (such as the Freemasons and die-hard holdovers from the defunct republic), Pétain went on to claim that he would use his authority to save the French people from their own fickleness and lack of resolve.Learn more about Occupied at the Cambridge University Press website.
This particular speech clearly reflected the Vichy regime's awareness of how badly its public support was eroding as the occupation dragged on. A French public which had largely supported the negotiation of an armistice the previous year was growing increasingly wary of the regime's embrace of active collaboration with Nazi Germany. Vichy's ability to function as an effective buffer against the oppressive features of German occupation was also increasingly called into question. This shift in public opinion has parallels in the cases of other countries under Axis occupation during the Second World War. Some have argued that the concept of patriotism became essentially meaningless under the extreme duress of wartime occupations, pointing out that a value invoked by the likes of the Free French and Vichy alike could hardly have any substantive content.
My argument in this section of the book is that one can after all think in terms of a shifting set of parameters for what would plausibly be recognized as patriotic conduct in the eyes of the public. Under the circumstances of catastrophic defeat in 1940, many French people accepted the negotiation of an armistice as the most patriotic thing for a government to do on behalf of the nation it led. As the experience of occupation became more difficult and the expectations about who would win the world war changed, the parameters of patriotic plausibility shifted in favor of de Gaulle and the Resistance.
This chapter falls under one, thematically defined part of this book. The book as a whole consists of two additional parts--one focused on the comparative study of civil wars under occupation and the other exploring anti-colonial nationalisms in the context of German and Japanese wartime rule. Each section includes three-to-four country case studies, always including at least one example from Asia. The eleven countries encompassed in the study are France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Thailand, Yugoslavia, Greece, northern Italy (1943-45), China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Ukraine. This is, as far as I know, the first single-authored book to undertake on such a scale the comparative study of European and Asian responses to German and Japanese occupations during the Second World War.
--Marshal Zeringue
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