Skip to product information
1 of 1

Oxford University Press, USA

Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris

Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris

Regular price €33,95 EUR
Regular price Sale price €33,95 EUR
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Format
On Mother's Day, 31 May 1942, a group of women stormed a small grocery store at the intersection of two Parisian market streets, the rue de Buci and the rue de Seine, to protest the food shortages that had become a chronic feature of daily life. The then-outlawed French Communist party aimed
to channel the frustrations of hungry Parisians by organizing such actions throughout the capital and beyond. The so-called women's demonstration on the rue de Buci was one such protest, part of a larger, overarching resistance movement against the collaborationist Vichy regime and the German
occupiers. The Buci affair became a cause célèbre, in no small part owing to its tragic consequences: the imprisonment, deportation, and execution of some of the protagonists. This book takes an in-depth look at this singular event, its dramatic repercussions, and its rich postwar afterlife. An
extraordinary documentary record, together with the oral testimony of surviving resisters, reveal the minute intricacies of an underground partisan operation; the lives and deaths of the protesters, both women and men; the deployment of gender difference as a weapon of war, and the ways in which the
incident has been remembered, commemorated, or forgotten. This book is also a meditation on the writing of history itself. Just as the author turns the event inside out to reveal the internal workings of a clandestine action that were hidden from public view, she turns her own project inside out,
exposing the story behind the story that readers rarely see.


Author: Paula Schwartz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/07/2020
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780190681548

Review Citation(s):
Foreword 02/26/2020

About the Author

Paula Schwartz, Lois B. Watson Professor of French Studies, Middlebury College

Paula Schwartz is the Lois B. Watson Professor of French Studies at Middlebury College, where she teaches courses on 20th-century France, food studies, and European studies. Her scholarship focuses on women and gender in the French Resistance, the French Communist underground, and daily life during
the Second World War. She has lived and worked extensively in France.

View full details