Marc Olivier Baruch, Servir l'Etat français: L'administration en France de 1940 à 1944, preface by Jean-Pierre Azéma (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 737 pp., FF 180, ISBN 2–213–59930–0.

François Bloch-Lainé and Claude Gruson, Hauts Fonctionnaires sous l'Occupation (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1996), 283 pp., FF 130, ISBN 2–738–10419–3.

Claude Singer, L'Université libérée, l'université épurée (1943–1947) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), 430 pp., FF 185, ISBN 2–251–38037–x.

Bureaucracies are so famously capable of destroying the best-laid plans of reformers that historians often take their power to resist or collaborate for granted. In the burgeoning field of Vichy France, for example, we have studies of the ideologies of the well-known collaborators and of Vichy's ’National Revolution‘ as well as studies of the havoc those ideologies wreaked on the country and the growing opposition to both the ideas and the consequences. What we do not have is a very clear picture of how those ideas became consequences. The question is important because, unlike eastern European countries where Nazi occupation was naked and brutal, the French ended up amply serving the German cause almost despite themselves and at remarkably low cost to the Germans in terms of personnel. The French were not terrorised into turning over their Jews, their young people, or their crops at gunpoint in the way that, say, the Poles were. And yet they turned them over. Were the French, then, Nazis willing to give their all for the cause? Certainly not: far too many heroic men and women preferred to die as resistants rather than help the Germans.