52 pages • 1 hour read
Kristin HarmelThe Paris Daughter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Socio-Historical Context: The Nazi Occupation of Paris
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the Nazi occupation of Paris during WWII, the Holocaust, war, concentration camps, extermination camps, antisemitism, intense racism, and genocide.
The Second World War (WWII) was the largest and deadliest global conflict of the 20th century, lasting from 1939 to 1945. One of the major causes of WWII was the fascist, aggressive expansionist foreign policy of Nazi Germany, which saw many European countries invaded and brought under the control of the Third Reich through the late 1930s and early 1940s.
France declared war on Germany following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was itself invaded by German troops eight months later. The German Wehrmacht far outmatched the French army, bypassing their Maginot Line of defense with ease and forcing the French government to surrender after mere weeks of fighting. The armistice saw Paris along with much of the North and West of Metropolitan France brought under German occupation, while the rest of the country and its colonial territories remained nominally independent. Vichy France, named for its new seat of government, remained beholden to its German allies until it too was invaded and fully incorporated into the Third Reich in 1942.
Occupied France was stripped of any resources that could aid the German war effort, and its citizens were subject to oppressive German rule. There were severe food and fuel shortages, particularly in Paris and other metropolitan areas, and many able-bodied French citizens were conscripted and deported to work in German industries. Opposition to the Nazi regime was brutally suppressed, and Jewish people were subject to genocide, intense racism, and harsh persecution, with approximately 75,000 Jewish people from France deported to Nazi death camps by the end of the war. Although many individuals and organizations in occupied France followed the example of the Vichy government in collaborating, either actively or passively, with German rule, many others heeded the call to resistance from the government in exile led by Charles de Gaulle. Particularly in the latter years of the war, French Resistance networks sabotaged German industries and infrastructure, smuggled Jews and other fugitives out of Nazi hands, and contributed heavily to the 1944 Liberation of Paris.
Literary Context: Historical Fiction and the WWII Novel
Historical fiction is a genre that tells fictional stories set in the past. Historical novels are based on actual events and are written to reflect the world of the chosen time period with as much accuracy as possible. Fictional narratives unfold within the context of real world events, and fictional characters often coexist alongside real historical figures. The Paris Daughter is a piece of historical fiction that is primarily set in France during WWII (1939-1945). The narrative explores the Nazi occupation of Paris, and although Part 3 mainly takes place in New York during the 1960s, its focus remains on WWII and the long term effects of the war on its survivors.
The WWII novel is a popular sub-genre of historical fiction that is set in and around the years of WWII, focusing on the events leading up to the war, on experiences of the war itself, and on the war’s aftermath. Popular WWII novels include Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006), Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), and Levi’s Se Non Ora, Quando “If Not Now, When?” (1982). Although a prodigious genre boasting thousands of examples, the WWII novel remains somewhat controversial. While not necessarily inaccurate, novels such as The Paris Daughter reframe the narrative around historical events to place focus on elements that are more palatable to readers. Collaboration and antisemitism tend to be presented as the exception rather than the norm, and tales of military valor are prized over accounts of banal hardship. Fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust/Shoah (the mass extermination of approximately six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime) in particular are frequently subject to criticism for supplanting first hand accounts and sanitizing the traumatic realities of the genocide (Katz, Gwen, and A. R. Vishny. “Banning Books Like ‘Maus’ Is Part of Sanitizing History.” Teen Vogue, 9 Feb. 2022).
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By Kristin Harmel
