A Frenchman flees his small mountain village to avoid service in World War I in a thoughtful, witty novel about the conflict of patriotism and conscience. Deep in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, a man called Roux refuses to heed the call to duty at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, returning only occasionally to the farm where he left his mother and sisters. The people of the valley condemn his desertion and hope the police will find his hideout and force him into the army. Then, as the months and the years go by, and the horrors of the trenches become known, the locals begin to understand Roux’s actions—but it is only at the end of the war that his fate will be decided. In an atmospheric and often witty novel of life during wartime in a rural French community, André Chamson explores the questions of perception and morality, as well as the roles we play in the great historical events of our times.

Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue provides a reference tool for the study of one of the great watershed moments in history on both sides of the Atlantic serving historians, researchers, and collectors.

This story begins in the Paris of the 1930s, when artists and writers stood at the center of the world stage. In the decade that saw the rise of the Nazis, much of the thinking world sought guidance from this extraordinary group of intellectuals. Herbert Lottman's chronicle follows the influential players—Gide, Malraux, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Koestler, Camus, and their pro-Fascist counterparts—through the German occupation, Liberation, and into the Cold War, when the struggle between superpowers all but drowned out their voices. "Surprisingly fresh and intense. . . . A retrospective travelogue of the Left Bank in the days when it was the setting for almost all French intellectual activity. . . . Absorbing."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker "As an introduction to a period in French history already legendary, The Left Bank is superb."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "An intellectual history. A history of the interaction between politics and letters. And a rumination on the limitless credulity of intellectuals."—Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.