Stage narratives may first be used in general studies to chart the period "Vichy France" as a whole. Jean-Pierre Azema's s From Munich to the Liberation, published in France in the popular paperback series Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine, thus distinguishes six moments during the era 1938-1944: the "phoney peace" of Munich and the "phoney war" of September 1939-May 1940; the military defeat of May-June 1940; the beginnings of the "French State" from June 1940 to early 1941; the Occupation from early 1941 to October 1942, when the Germans took over the whole country; the Occupation from October 1942 to June 1944, with the hardening of both collaboration and resistance; and the Liberation of June-August 1944, as well as the constitution of the first post-Vichy government. Yet stage narratives may also focus on a more specific aspect of those same years, such as sports (Jean-Louis Gay-Lescot's Sport et education sous Vichy), the university (Claude Singer's L'Universite liberee, l'universite epuree [The University Liberated and Purged]), and the Resistance (Francois-Georges Dreyfus's Histoire de la Resistance). Gay-Lescot thus divides the period into two phases, considering successively the actions of the first "Commissariat general a l'education generale et sportive" (1940-1942), then the actions of the second "Commissariat" (1942-1944). Similarly, as his title indicates, Singer distinguishes two moments in the history of the university between 1943 and 1947: the "liberation" (begun in Alger in 1943), and the "purge" (i.e., the prosecution of the faculty who were compromised with the Vichy regime, carried through from 1945 to 1947). As for Dreyfus, he sees three steps in the evolution of Resistance: its "birth" in 1940-1941; its "turning point," from Autumn 1942 to Spring 1944; and its participation in "Liberation," from Winter 1943/1944 to Summer 1944. Historians can thus "find" a different number of stages in the period "Vichy France." The way they organize their materials depends on the subject matt er, on their viewpoint, but also on rhetorical considerations. Indeed, dividing time into phases is related to discursive exigencies of size and proportion: there is no such thing as a one-stage narrative, and the six-stage story that Azema tells in From Munich to the Liberation may constitute an upper limit from a rhetorical standpoint. Historians of the Occupation, in most cases, rely on narratives with two or three stages, arguably because this formula seems to best satisfy the sometimes conflicting demands of completeness and readability.

While the period "Vichy France" can be divided into different moments, it can also be regarded as a whole and become itself a stage in a longer development. It is treated in such a way in the lengthy, multi-volume studies that teams of French scholars have recently published in the areas of social history, economic history, and the history of mentalities. The last volume in A History of Women in the West, for example, devotes a chapter to "French Women under Vichy," which itself is part of a larger section about the "nationalization" of women in the USSR, Italy, Germany, and Spain during the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly, the last volume in Histoire economique et sociale de la France includes chapters about such subjects as "The Demographic Aspects of World War II," "Banking and Money in the War Economy," and "The Destructions of World War II and Trade." The fact that the War here is viewed in the long term may even lead to a reperiodization, as in the chapters titled "The Time of Shortages: 1940-1948" and "A L ong Tunnel: 1937-1944" (this chapter is about workers' movements). In other words, the period "Vichy France" (but the same thing could be said of any period) does not necessarily count as a discrete entity. If historians investigate, as they do in these essays, the economic aspects of the conflict, that period can be included in a longer phase, which includes the hardships that the French people suffered not just during but before and after the War.

As linear histories do, stage narratives proceed chronologically. Yet the stories they tell no longer follow a straight line. Because of their scope, they break down into parallel stories that recount what happened at the same time in different places. Thus Dreyfus, in his second chapter, describes the beginnings of Resistance in diverse parts of the country in late 1940-early 1941, and Azema, in his sixth part, examines what happened in different regions of France after the landing of June 6, 1944. Since simultaneous events can only be reported one after another, "discourse" and "story" do not coincide in Histoire de Ia Resistance and From Munich to the Liberation as they do in A French Tragedy and in Laval. Indeed, the unfolding of the text in Dreyfus's and Azema's studies does not (and cannot) follow the unfolding of the events as they occurred in actuality; we advance in the text, but we in fact go back in time when the historians, after telling what happened in place A, shifts to place B to tell what wa s happening there during the same time-span. Furthermore, the main actors in stage narratives are not (or not only) the flesh-and-blood people who populate a small town or a politician's cabinet. They are the entities that Ricoeur calls "quasi-characters" (200) and Danto "social individuals" (258): entities that contain human beings among their parts but include other parts as well, like "Vichy," the "Resistance," or even (in Histoire economique et sociale de la France) "trade" and the "food supply." What stage narratives show is thus that narrative, being a principle of organization, is not limited to specific subjects and actors: regimes, political movements, and economic phenomena can become the "subjects" of a narrative, as long as the information that concerns them is disposed along a temporal axis. To be sure, some subjects are lower in narrativity than others: however hard the "Commissariat general l'education generale et sportive" may have worked to improve the fitness of the French people, the histor y of its efforts probably does not offer the intense conflicts, sudden turns, and unexpected conclusions that we associate with a "good" story. But that history still must be regarded as a narrative, because it includes the most distinctive feature of the genre: its components are ordered temporally, and their succession points to a change, to a shift from a prior to a later state of affairs.

Synchronic Descriptions

While the topic "Occupation" seems to be lending itself to narrative because of the number of "events" that occurred in France between 1940 and 1944, many studies devoted to it in fact cannot be counted as narratives. Indeed, the data that comprise them are not arranged along temporal lines. They follow other models of textual disposition, two of which I will examine here.

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