The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience.
—Marc Bloch, 1940
The fall of France to Hitler’s army in the summer of 1940, besides marking a fateful turn in the military history of the Second World War, was an event of immense importance in the cultural life of the West. For as long as anyone could then remember, Paris had been the unrivaled art capital of the world. It was also its fashion capital, and for cultivated people in many countries it was the literary and intellectual capital as well. Wherever the spirit of modernist thought had cast its powerful spell, Paris loomed as a leader and a legend. Its ignominious surrender to the Nazi war machine was therefore received as something more than a political shock. It was taken to signify the end of a distinct and marvelous chapter in the history of our civilization.
In France itself, however, the response to this catastrophe was a good deal more complicated. It had always been a paradox that the most radical and far-reaching innovations of the modern movement had been produced in a country and a culture that were in so many respects hidebound by tradition and divided by deep and irreconcilable loyalties. Whereas the Paris avant-garde was famously internationalist in composition and cosmopolitan in outlook, France as a nation was largely neither. Its politics were xenophobic, its ecclesiastical institutions were reactionary, its educational system was rigidly conservative, and its official cultural life—as
