France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise.

Consider the French. They march through history saddled with this huge reputation for collective self-esteem - for nationalism. "France, a Nation of Patriots" was not only the title of a famous study by the great (Catholic) historian, Carlton J.H. Hayes; it is also a universally accepted description of the French state of mind. Then along come books like Philippe Burrin's to make hash of things. Or to make us think about what "nationalism" really is.

La France a l'heure allemande - the book's more dramatic French title - first appeared four years ago and established itself as the best general one-volume synthesis on a topic as delicate as it is complex: France and the French, 1940-44. With an eye for cogent detail and an ear for sound generalization, Burrin embraces all aspects of his topic. From high state policy to low business machinations, he offers a comprehensive look at state and society in the four years that France stood "for herself alone," as Charles Maurras put it. Only the Resistance escapes the author's dragnet. That lacuna - no small one, admittedly - plus the fact that the author has been mediocrely served by his translator, are the only things to regret in an otherwise splendid study.

The true excellence of this book is not confined to its panoramic vision. If Burrin is unhesitating in his tough judgments, he escapes the procurator's voice of indictment - as Robert Paxton did not, in his classic Vichy France - thanks to his taste for distinctions and a writerly feel for detail that is human, humane, and humorous.

First, the distinctions. Aptly, for a Swiss scholar, the author displays a singular talent for nuance. Nowhere else have I read so convincing an examination of the differences between accommodation and collaboration, or among inevitable, opportunistic, and active collaboration. Burrin concludes with a sentence that I suspect more French historians than just this reviewer will be envious of for its elegant economy: "To be a hero is honorable; not to be one is not necessarily dishonorable."

Burrin shows that the defeat of 1940 allowed French rightwingers to construct in the Nazi shadow a regime far nearer their hearts' design than the hated Third Republic. It was this political project, not the "salvation of the nation," he says, that remained their priority "right up until the moment when it collapsed in infamy." "L'Etat francais," as it was called, conferred a legitimacy upon nefarious policies, such as turning over French Jews to the Germans, that was not readily available elsewhere. "Although the other occupied societies of Western Europe produced more supporters and recruits for collaborationism," Burrin writes, "they at the same time provide examples of civil resistance the likes of which are not to be found in France...."

But the hardest part of Burrin's book for a French audience, I would imagine, is his deployment of might-have-beens. French public opinion, he shows, was never pro-German, never enthusiastically favored Vichy's "national revolution," never ceased hoping for an English victory. The average Frenchman "manifested toward collaboration sentiments that ranged from scepticism to hostility."

For this reason, the France of 1940, on Burrin's telling, might have restored the national unity she had lost in the 1930s by refraining from cooperation beyond the necessary with the Germans. Resisting Hitler "would have provided a rallying point for the germanophobia of the national right, the liberalism of the center, the antifascism of the left, and the antiracism and antipaganism of the Catholic world." Vichy, in short, might have "opted for an armistice government that remained republican, and sought to protect its trump cards - the free zone, the fleet, and the empire deciding that the last word would not have been said so long as England continued to resist."

In August 1944, Petain told his compatriots: "Even if I have not been able to be your sword, I have tried to be your shield." Philippe Burrin makes the truly devastating reply: "He might have addressed that remark more truthfully to Hitler."

Books such as Burrin's can make us reconsider how we think about "nationalism." Is it best described as over-ardent country-love - but is that a suprapolitical or apolitical sentiment? Nationalists themselves would have us believe their motivations are a profound feeling of devotion to the common good. Burrin cites copious evidence indicating that the men of Vichy, and even the arch-collaborationist Frenchmen living in occupied Paris, claimed an outsized love of France as their raisons d'agir. Burrin, for his part, finds them guilty of pursuing other politico-ideological projects, not "the salvation of the nation." Now I happen to agree with this judgment as far as it goes, but I also find it a bit naive and old-fashioned, tendentiously relative to a particular (Gaullist, postwar) point of view.

If, instead, historians were to construe nation-talk as the quintessentially political language it is, then they would be denied their cheap surprise and delicious ironical cluckings at how "patriots" and "nationalists" so often sell out their countries, but they would gain a savvier estimate of nation-talk for what it is - politics by other, "apolitical" means. Specifically, in the French case, to say the French are "highly nationalistic" is to say they are highly political. Which, in turn, is less a statement about how united, than about how divided they actually are. "Nationalism," or nation-talk, is simply one way (and a rather effective way) politics gets done in France.

I save the best for last. I noted above Burrin's wonderful touch for the human and the humorous. At the height of the occupation, playwright Paul Claudel, a deeply conservative Catholic hardly known for his phobia to the Nazis, nevertheless felt obliged to speak out. The impulse to do so was a splendid requiem Mass, to which the Germans sent appreciative wreaths, that the church accorded Cardinal Baudrillardt, rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris and a prelate who feared communism far more than he feared the Nazis. The obsequies were held at the same time as the Germans shot twenty-seven French hostages in Nantes, an act greeted by silence from "l'Eglise de France." Wrote Claudel to Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon and France's nominal primate: "When the cardinal reaches the other side, the twenty-seven dead hostages, at the head of an army that is growing daily, will slope arms and act as his guard of honor. For that emulator of Cauchon [bishop and president of the ecclesiastical tribunal that convicted Joan of Arc], the French church could not lay its hands on enough incense. For those sacrificed Frenchmen, there was not a prayer, not a single gesture of charity or indignation. A day will come, Eminence...."

Steven Englund is completing a study of the political significance of the idea of "la Nation" in French history.