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Book Review: Susan E. Gustafson: Goethe’s Families of the Heart

retribution continued long after liberation, with food rationing lasting until December 1949 and mass purges of alleged collaborators until 1948. As these examples perhaps suggest, there are some fundamental structural problems with this book. The relentless compiling of events means the tragic and the trivial are awkwardly juxtaposed, with little space for the analytically deeper discussion of underlying historical and ethical issues. Were the French betrayed by their leaders in 1940? Were terrorist acts committed by communist resisters tactically or morally justified? Such questions are posed but left suspended. Inevitably, the vast range of incidents and topics surveyed includes misleading interpretations and errors. Thus we are told that on 3 July 1940 British planes sank part of the French fleet at the port of Mersel-Kebir in Algeria, but a few pages later that the British ‘scuttled’ the fleet. (In fact, most of the destruction was caused by a British naval bombardment lasting ten minutes, while Franco-British relations were irrevocably damaged.) Sartre and Beauvoir are frequently cited as reliable witnesses, but there is no reference to their self-serving, opportunistic behaviour during and after the occupation. Other witnesses get an even more summary presentation: Paul Léautaud is characterized as ‘an eccentric writer and literary critic’ (p. 20), while we are reminded that Ribbentrop was ‘a former champagne salesman’ (p. 21). Such lapses into journalistic shorthand are not simply irritating infelicities but also expose the limitations of the author’s research, which could have drawn much more on literary and cultural historians. All in all, this book has much to offer an uninformed reader interested in wartime Paris, but is likely to disappoint anyone already familiar with the period.