Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
    Unavailable
    Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
    Unavailable
    Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
    Ebook723 pages10 hours

    Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44

    By Charles Glass

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    An elegantly written and highly informative account of a group of Americans living in Paris when the city fell to the Nazis in June 1940.

    When the German army occupied Paris in the early hours of 14 June 1940, a large American community awaited them. Although the US Ambassador had advised those without vital business to leave when war broke out in 1939, almost five thousand remained. Many had professional and family ties to Paris, and most had a peculiarly American love for the city that was rooted in the bravery of the thousands of Frenchmen who volunteered to help win American independence after 1776. As citizens of a neutral nation, they believed they had little to fear. They were wrong. For four hard years, from the summer of 1940 until US troops occupied Paris in August 1944, Americans were intimately caught up in the city's fate.

    Those who stayed behind were an eccentric, original and disparate group. Charles Bedaux, a Frenchborn, naturalized American millionaire, had played host to the Duke of Windsor's wedding in 1937 and went on throwing lavish parties for European royalty and high-ranking Nazi officials. Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, who accepted the legitimacy of the Vichy regime, dealt with anyone, including the Nazis, to keep her beloved American Library of Paris open. Sylvia Beach attempted to run her famous English-language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, whilst providing help to her Jewish friends and her colleagues in the Resistance. Dr Sumner Jackson, wartime chief surgeon of the American Hospital in Paris, risked his life aiding Allied soldiers to escape to Britain and resisting the occupier from the first day.

    Charles Glass has written an exciting, fast-paced and elegant account of the moral contradictions faced by Americans in Paris during France's most dangerous years. His discovery of letters, diaries, war documents and police files reveals as never before how American expatriates were trapped in a web of intrigue, collaboration and courage. This is an unforgettable tale of treachery by some, cowardice by others and unparalleled bravery by a few.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMar 19, 2009
    ISBN9780007321032
    Unavailable
    Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
    Author

    Charles Glass

    Charles Glass is the author of ‘Americans in Paris’, ‘Tribes with Flags’, ‘The Tribes Triumphant’, ‘Money for Old Rope’ and ‘The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary’. A world-famous journalist and broadcaster, he was Chief Middle East Correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993, and has covered wars and political upheaval throughout the world. His writing appears in the Independent and the Spectator. He divides his time between Paris, Tuscany and London.Visit his website at www.charlesglass.net

    Read more from Charles Glass

    Related to Americans in Paris

    Related ebooks

    Holocaust For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      In 'France Is A Feast,' Paul Child Steps Out From Julia's Shadow

      Dec 6, 2017

      Now it is Paul Child's turn. The man best known today for his marriage to Julia Child (and his portrayal by Stanley Tucci in the 2009 hit move "Julie & Julia"), brought his bride to Paris in 1948 when he took a job as cultural attache for the U.S. In

      4 min read

    • Article

      Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun

      Feb 26, 2018

      Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun
      10 min read

    • Article

      FACT or FICTION

      Jun 12, 2020

      FACT or FICTION
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Rise Of The Third Reich

      Jan 24, 2019

      The Rise Of The Third Reich
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Circle Of Iron And Fire

      Jun 8, 2021

      The Circle Of Iron And Fire
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Ghosts of D-Day

      Jun 6, 2019

      The Ghosts of D-Day
      6 min read

    • Article

      France In The Dock

      Aug 3, 2023

      France In The Dock
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Time Of Miracles

      Oct 16, 2023

      A Time Of Miracles
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Roots Of German Militarism

      Sep 29, 2022

      The Roots Of German Militarism
      5 min read

    • Article

      Coming To America

      Oct 12, 2018

      Coming To America
      14 min read

    • Article

      Resisting Nazism

      Dec 24, 2019

      Resisting Nazism
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times

      Sep 28, 2023

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Nation of Enemies

      Feb 1, 2018

      A Nation of Enemies
      19 min read

    • Article

      Josephine Baker, Music Hall Star And Civil Rights Activist, Enters Panthéon

      Nov 30, 2021

      Josephine Baker, the French-American civil rights activist, music hall superstar and second world war resistance hero, has become the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon mausoleum of revered historical figures – taking the nation’s highest h

      4 min read

    • Article

      The other Napoleon

      Jan 12, 2024

      The other Napoleon
      2 min read

    • Article

      WWII in Iran & Iraq

      Jul 2, 2019

      WWII in Iran & Iraq
      11 min read

    • Article

      Australia’s War With France

      Nov 30, 2018

      It was the era of ‘Vichy France’, a murky and mostly forgotten period following the French surrender. When the Germans occupied Paris, a conservative – borderline fascist – French puppet government sympathetic to the Nazis was installed at the spa to

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Americans in Paris

    3.5/5

    8 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      5631. Americans in Paris Life and Death under Nazi Occupation, by Charles Glass (read 7 Jun 2019) This book, first published in 2009, kind of jerkkily tells of some Americans who stayed in Paris after the Nazis took over France in June 1940. The lives of persons connected with the American Library and the famed book shop Shakespeare and Co. and with the American Hospital are followed through the trials and tribulations they endured while the Nazis were in control of France. Some of the account is of much interest but there are also things related which seemed of less significance at least to me. Some of the things the Ameicans endured were difficult but of course they pale into insignificance compared to what French Jews and persons actively seeking to resist the Nazis underwent. One rejoices when the invasion of the continent finally occurs and the account of the liberation of Paris is good to read. A relative of FDR's was a son-in-law of Pierre Laval, so there is quite a bit about Laval and his behavior, though the fact he was tried and executed after France was liberated is not dwelt on.
    • 4/5
      Valuable insights on life in occupied Paris during Word war II.Huge, immense cast of characters makes for some difficult reading at times, but well worth the effortAs is often the case, those who are the real heroes are those you might have heard of.
    • 3/5
      I found this book a mixed bag of good and not-so-good. There was a lot of information presented that was new to me. I found myself engrossed into the lives of Americans in Nazi-Occupied France and in all the varying degrees of their collaboration, help to the Resistance, or just trying to survive intact. It's very evident that the author put a lot of time into research and into writing a valid non-fictional, scholarly book. He was also able to balance it out with an enjoyable reading style that brought the characters alive and made them relevant to the reader.However, it seemed like the author was trying too hard at times to be scholarly and included information into the narrative that sometimes didn't seem to need to be there. Intricate details about place names and life histories of very minor individuals in the narrative bogged down the reading considerably. There was also a focus on certain individuals to the detriment of other storylines. The balance between the different stories the author was trying to tell was very skewed. I'll admit that I skimmed some sections of the narrative that dealt with character owning too big a presence in the book. When it comes down to it, this is a fairly good book on this subject, one of the few I know of. It is definitely well researched and reads, for the most part, smoothly. There are some pacing issues and instances where the author puts way too much information into the book. Yet, I found myself enjoying the reading experience and learning something too.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the hell out of this. Beautifully researched. Parts of it brought me to tears because OMG what horrible things were done by human beings to other human beings. Other parts were just made of awesome. STRONG female component: lots of awesome women, several of whom were queer. Note that this is exactly what it says on the tin. The stories are of people holding American passports who stayed in Paris during the German occupation and what happened to them after the US declared war on Germany. A fair bit of suspense but no gratuitous horror or gore, although keep in mind that this is a book about one of the most horrific periods in recent history, so a certain amount of horribleness is inevitable. Quite a lot of the book focuses on Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore.
    • 3/5
      Interesting topic, I wanted to find out more about Rene de Chambrun, ok treatment, but disjointed and limited. I wish the author had used more multilingual research assistants to scour sources, and had a talented editor to rearrange sections for coherence, and then had time to pull the threads together about the significance of expat Paris for Americans and French....
    • 1/5
      Amazing that the author could make such an interesting episode in history so BORING. He only followsa handful of people whos memoirs he was able to check out of the library. Unfortunately, not much happened to them during the occupation. No stories of dramatic resistance, nothing at all about the Jews of Paris, and very little about what the city was actually like under occupation.Tres disappointing!
    • 4/5
      The title is imprecise: The geographical scope is wider than Paris, and the featured Americans had stronger ties to France than to the U.S. That is why they stayed there after the French army's collapse and the division of the country between a German-occupied zone and the territory of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Leaving would have entailed the sacrifice of extensive business interests or close personal friendships or humanitarian enterprises.Americans in Paris follows the fortunes of about half a dozen of these Franco-Americans. They are not a representative sample. Except for a few who show up only in vignettes, all have been the subjects of other books. They include industrialist and efficiency expert Charles Bedaux, the aristocratic de Chambrun family (père an American citizen in his own mind, mère and fils in reality), Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Paris, and Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the original Shakespeare and Company, Paris's leading English language bookstore. I suspect that octogenarian Charles Anderson, a minor business functionary married to a French woman, is more typical. He gets only a passage near the end of the book, and that passage aims to score points against American racism rather than illuminate the experience of living in wartime Paris.The advantage of the atypical main characters is that they have fascinating, and very different, stories. On one side is Dr. Jackson, who used his hospital position to help downed Allied airmen escape from the Germans. More ambivalent are the Chambruns, who worked to keep the American Hospital and American Library out of Nazi hands but showed no sympathy for the Resistance and were on good terms with Pierre Laval, whose daughter Chambrun fils had married. M. Bedaux alternately fought with and sought to profit from both Vichy and Berlin. At the end of his life, he was facing treason charges in the United States; the post-war French government awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Legion of Honor. Sylvia Beach, fiercely anti-Nazi but intent on keeping her bookstore running, kept her head down.Because the author's sources are, for the most part, his subjects themselves or their family and friends, all look at least a little bit heroic. Because all but Miss Beach were comparatively affluent, their sufferings were doubtless less than those of a Charles Anderson. There is room for a more comprehensive study of expatriate Americans' "life and death under Nazi occupation". This one, nevertheless, fills part of the niche quite admirably.