***Translation sample available***

In this audacious study of French sexual life during World War II, Patrick Buisson paints an atmosphere of sexual frenzy that gripped Vichy France and unveils some inconvenient truths about the occupation.

Buisson proposes the theory, that after the Armistice of June 1940, the Germans’ military superiority left the humiliated French in a state of “erotic shock.” Having to adjust to a life of close proximity to the old enemy, the two nations used sex both as a weapon of war and a means of survival. In Germany, French prisoners enjoyed liaisons with local women as a way of getting revenge, while back home their wives and girlfriends formed close friendships with the German officers stationed in their midst, or indeed with anyone else who could give them a handout. As Buisson explains, young French women were as likely to succumb to their bosses as they were to their neighbors or even the greengrocer if it helped them make ends meet. Cold winters, when coal was in short supply, and a curfew from 11 pm to 5 am also encouraged sexual activity, with the result that the birth rate shot up in 1942 even though 2 million French men were locked up in camps.

After “The Body, a Nazi ambassador”; “Petain, National Phallus”; and “Writers in Trance,” Buisson dedicates an entire chapter to the “new territories of pleasure.” Cinemas were cheaper than hotel rooms and more private than home, and he explains how they became hotbeds of erotic activity. Even the Metro proved a handy venue for sex during the blackout. Members of the artistic elite also drowned their sorrows in debauchery. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, “It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party.”