France on Berlin Time
$2.75
By LIPPINCOTT
THIS is certainly one of the best available pictures of France under the Nazis. It is written by an American publisher who remained in Paris until last winter and who possesses a background of long residence in France and a gift of historical interpretation. He gives a description, both absorbing and detailed, of the German method of exploiting France — by the double expedient of placing experts in all the key industries and strengthening this control by buying blocks of shares with the profits of the exorbitant occupation costs. The large, well-equipped French plants of Ford and General Motors are now being used for German war production. The author gives a diverting social register of the mistresses of the Ministers of the last days of the Third Republic. Tracing the eternal conflict of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, the radical and the conservative, in french history, he predicts that, whatever may be the future of France (and he has some interesting speculations on this subject), there will be no revival ot the Third Republic in its old form. Its moral atmosphere, as he thinks, was ‘too shabby.’ There are sketches of Petain, Darlan, and Laval, and there is the good news that the noble cathedrals of northern France escaped the Stukas unharmed. w. H. c.