The first one is "synchronic description": the historian identifies a certain period and treats it as a whole, but then proceeds from topic to topic rather than from moment to moment. In other words, that historian does not recount "what happened" during the time-span selected, but depicts "what things were like," considering specific aspects of the period without making them parts of a story. Philippe Burrin's France under the Germans, for example, examines three sectors of French society and the way they accommodated themselves to the Occupation: the government, which in spite of its powers pursued a politics of collaboration; civil society (the church, the university, the industry, the arts), which conveniently adjusted to the new circumstances; and the small but active circle of politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens who flaunted collaborationist opinions, going at times as far as enrolling in the German army. Andre Kaspi's Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation [The Jews during the Occupation] is org anized in the same way, but it focuses on a more limited group. Moving in space rather than in time, Kaspi first examines the situation of the Jews in the occupied zone, in the free zone, and in North Africa. He then describes the repression against the Jews, from the police roundups to the deportations and killings. He ends with an account of the role of the Jewish organizations that strove to save people (especially children), joining at times the Resistance. As for Dominique Veillon's La Mode sous l'Occupation [Fashion under the Occupation], it takes up a subject-fashion--that is not as frivolous as it looks given the fact that France went through several years of shortages. Veillon first studies everyday fashion, explaining how the French had to adapt because large quantities of materials such as cotton, wool, fur, and leather were to be handed over to the Germans. She then investigates high fashion, which managed to survive, serving a privileged elite. Finally, she discusses the policies of the Vichy gov ernment toward fashion, for instance, Vichy's campaign against make-up and its promotion of regional clothing.

While Burrin's, Kaspi's, and Veillon's studies do not tell stories, they are not entirely devoid of a narrative dimension. Kaspi and Veillon, for example, seem to have hesitated between topology and chronology as the principle for ordering their data. The first chapter in Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation describes the Jewish community in France before the War, and the last one assesses the situation of that community after the conflict. Similarly, La Mode sous l'Occupation begins with an account of the "last fine days" of 1939, and it ends with a brief survey of the uplifting changes (Dior's "new look") that immediately followed the War. In these studies, beginning and end in the topical arrangement are also beginning and end in a chronology, and this correspondence is like the trace of an alternative disposition: one that would record the successive steps in a development, instead of describing the different parts in a synchronic overview. For that matter, two other books about the Jews in France during World War II, Asher Cohen's Persecutions et sauvetages [Persecution and Rescue] and Renee Poznanski' s Les Juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale [The Jews in France during World War II], organize their data diachronically, in the form of "linear histories."

Furthermore, Burrin, Kaspi, and Veillon sometimes rely on brief, interpolated narratives as examples of the activities and attitudes that they want to characterize. Thus Burrin, to explain the government's politics in late 1942, recounts the visit of Vichy's Police Chief Rene Bousquet to the jailed former Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, a visit during which Bousquet states his belief in a German victory and his acceptance of an "authoritarian regime" (154). Similarly, Veillon reports the discussion between French and German representatives about the German plan to move fashion design to Berlin and Vienna (manufacturing would have remained in France), because of the "troubled" nature in Paris of "judgments related to what is really beautiful, good, and proper" (152-53). As for Kaspi, who is more concerned with collective than with individual experiences, he describes the mechanisms of the police round-ups of December 1941 in the form of an iterative narrative, which unfolds in the present of repeated actions: "The arrest takes place at dawn at home. The arrestee has fifteen minutes to prepare a suitcase of clothes and food. Those rounded up are first gathered at the municipal building of their precinct[...]" (216). These interpolated narratives, however, remain subordinated to the description that frames them. When singulative, they serve as examples. When iterative, they merge with the descriptive passages, from which they are sometimes indistinguishable because they use the same verb tenses (present or imperfect). In brief, their function is not to recount the singular events that occurred in the lives of unique individuals; it is to tell what used to happen, what things were like for certain people at certain moments. This is even true of Burrin's study, which--although it mentions many names--always treats individuals as the emblems of specific attitudes or policies. Thus, Burrin does not deal with Bousquet's personal trajectory, for instance, with the question of determining whether Bousquet really helped th e Resistance; he is interested only in the character's representativeness, Bousquet "illustrating" for him the way many upper-level State bureaucrats "merely switched allegiance to Vichy," as well as Vichy's "obsession with sovereignty, its stubborn determination to last and to reinforce itself" (153; translation modified).

Arguments

The second category of histories that eschew narrative is "argument": works that almost exclusively discuss prior works, which they debate in such domains as the relevance of the inquiry, the selection of the evidence, and the meaning conferred upon the data. True, most histories include an argumentative component, their authors engaging with colleagues whom they need to endorse or oppose in order to build their own cases. Kaspi, for example, begins his chapter about the role of the "Union generale des israelites de France" (a kind of Judenrat that Vichy and the Germans had imposed upon the Jewish community) by warning against Maurice Rajsfus's book on the same topic, which according to him must be treated with "caution" because it is excessively "polemical" (325). Similarly, Dreyfus justifies his undertaking a new work about the Resistance by the fact that the available studies fall too much under the genres "essay" and "chronicle" and are too "politically slanted" (13). Yet Kaspi's and Dreyfus's chief goal remains to contribute new information about the subjects that they have taken up; it is not, as in the works I am calling "arguments," to revisit prior research and comment upon it.

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