Sunday Times review of Matthew Cobb’s Eleven Days In August

Matthew Cobb’s Eleven Days In August

As Max Hastings writes in his Sunday Times review of Matthew Cobb’s Eleven Days In August[1]  “France is almost the only main participant of the Second World War that has never published an official history of its national experience, and probably never will because there is no possibility of achieving a consensus about what happened.” [2]

For many years the French had their own highly regarded and best selling unofficial history of the war based largely on eye witness accounts - Henri Amouroux’s La Vie Des Francais Sous L’Occupation [3] (Life of the French Under the Occupation). By 1993 this work had grown to 10 volumes. Hastings’ point about consensus might be borne out by the fact that the Resistance fighting, Croix de guerre owner Amouroux, was accused of being an apologist for Papon and the Vichy Government in 1997 - and if not discredited certainly became an ‘ambiguous authority’.

Hastings continues “Almost all important modern research on the period is the work of British or American historians. The French do not want to go there.” The irony here is that Amouroux’s testimony was used in the Papon case to counter the American historian Robert O. Paxton's version of Vichy France. Amouroux’s case, and rightly, was that  Paxton could not know or understand the highly complex internal tensions and relationships the French underwent during the war- his life’s work was testament to that. It is hard to know what Amouroux’s work was if not ‘going there’ and in a very painful way. Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la Pitie (The Sorrow and the Pity) film is absolutely about ‘going there’. Hasting would have done well to have looked at Cobb’s sources and previous works[4] to see that there are many French academics working away at their doctorates and publishing on the subject.

Hastings is perhaps frustrated and perplexed by the nature and complexity of a different type of warfare for him, a war where unpredictable unaccountable civilians are one side and a ruthless, seasoned and organized army is the other. “My regret is that he [Cobb] is less convincing about the big picture. He seems unsympathetic to the cautious spirits in the French camp, and a trifle naïve about the colossal military difficulties and dilemmas.”

Cobb did not set out to write a general history of the Second World War, he chose specifically to write about eleven days – one battle. He is of course required to contextualize the battle, but not more. Hastings would know, had he read Cobb’s other work that he is far from ‘naïve’ or ‘unsympathetic to the cautious spirits in the French camp’; he is merely trying to remain objective and avoid the trap of being partisan. If there were ten Resistance fighters in a cellar there were ten ideologies and ten views of how the battle should be fought. Hastings pointed out this problem of consensus himself.

In short, it is a pity that Hastings has shown a gap in his knowledge and could not be more generous in his praise. Matthew Cobb along with Richard Vinen are the leading English authorities of the Resistance and occupation of France.

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[1] Cobb. Matthew Eleven Days In August The Liberation of Paris in 1944  Simon & Schuster  2013

[2] Sunday Times Culture 21/4/13 p37

[3] Amouroux. Henri La Vie Des Francais Sous L’Occupation Artheme Fayard 1961

[4] Cobb. Matthew The Resistance The French Fight Against The Nazis Pocket Books 2009