“This thoughtful and engaging study is neither a diatribe nor a prolonged lament. Rather, it’s a series of straightforward, loosely linked essays exploring the complex relations between the Vichy government and the world of art and design - and their repercussions today. Cone’s non sensationalist tone makes her observations seem all the more startling, as we see not only venality in action, but also naivete, self-interest, and survival as motivations.”

“A must read for those working on the Vichy period and its aftermath.”

“Having started her history with Hitler and Vichy, Cone fittingly ends it with de Gaulle and May ‘68 - not to draw parallels between these authoritarian regimes, but to point out how minimal information on the Nazi Occupation, together with little memory of the Holocaust can engender what she calls “a dangerous confusion.” Without exposure to the new histories to which she herself has so substantially contributed, different forms of authoritarianism risk being conflated as Fascism. While the May ‘68 posters of Hitler disguised as de Gaulle signaled students’ equation of the Resistance leader General de Gaulle with Hitler, French students ignored the Fascist reality of Vichy and Pétain - even though, as Cone incisively points out, its was Pétain, not de Gaulle, who was an accomplice to Hitler’s atrocities.”

“The starkness of Cone’s categories leads her to a dark view of artists whose political commitments have been more ambivalent than vicious, resulting in a more hostile assessment of French abstraction than is warranted. The point, however, does not invalidate her larger claim — that the French art world was crisscrossed by powerful, conservative currents that attempted a synthesis of national tradition and modernist technique. It is an argument that deserves further research.”

“Her book is good to think with, about the continuities and discontinuities of the Third Republic, Vichy, and the postwar era in the politics of French culture.”