The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother

Abstract

idea of everydayness as mundane, ordinary and quotidian” (8). Through their examination of ordinary French people, families, service committees, prostitutes, railway workers, and especially French children, they valorize “the qualitative experiences of ordinary people”; emphasize “the contributions made by these unimportant, ordinary and historically anonymous people to historical and social processes”; and show how people “do not live in day-to-day passivity; they act, think, change what they are able to act upon, think about and change” (8–9). The collection eschews grand political narratives and, instead, provides thick description of local characters and rich analysis of heretofore unexplored primary sources, and it upends deterministic top-down narratives of the wartime that ignore individual agency. How, though, do you tie the particular and quotidian into bigger questions? The collection as a whole works through thinking about the everyday thematically. The first half of the book takes on the questions of coping and helping. In this part, contributors examine how workers, families, and school children learned to make do in the context of scarcity. Here, we see the full measure of French suffering, particularly hunger, although it would have been interesting had the work in this part engaged more with Gildea’s observation that, for many people, these dark years were not quite so dark. In the second half of the book, “Confrontations and Challenges,” the authors’ work moves beyond the resistance-collaboration binary to understand the collusion between surprising combinations of French and foreign actors. The authors significantly expand our understanding of ordinary and notso-ordinary French men and women during the Vichy era and illuminate the lived experiences of people typically elided in political or economic histories. Camille Mah e and Matthieu Devinge’s two chapters show the challenges faced by children as they navigated school curriculums and shortages of food. Lindsey Dodd’s work investigates the social and psychological lives of children evacuated from cities to the countryside. Sarah Frank examines the experiences of colonial soldiers captured by the Germans to show the complex ways French racial politics responded to questions of imperial grandeur. Byron Schirbock delves into French and German archives to see the political in intimate moments between German soldiers and French prostitutes. Many of the chapters offer innovative methodological approaches, ask novel questions, or plumb new source bases. Sylv ere Aït Amour introduces an oral history project on rail workers. Shannon Fogg investigates middleclass aid recipients to understand the ways comity and shame changed charity during the war. Wendy Michallat uses the methods of the emotional turn to better understand women’s responses to wartime traumas. In some cases, the authors’ work provides new ways of thinking about the everyday beyond the Vichy era. David Lees’s piece “Defining Everyday Frenchness under Vichy” studies the everyday as a discursive trope mobilized by Vichy propagandists to great effect. Isabelle von Buelzingsloewen mixes in family histories and family photographs to better understand the daily life of a Lyonnaise family. These everyday histories push us to think about different ways of producing knowledge about the past. As the authors note, echoing Gildea, there is a risk to discussing wartime France outside of collaboration and resistance. Nonetheless, much remains to be said about the Vichy era: how did the state’s relations with ordinary French people change on the local and regional level, how did different categories of French people manage both privation and excess, and how did marginalized people respond to the pressures of the dual authoritarian regimes of the German Occupation and the Vichy state? Dodd, Lees, et al. provide many avenues forward.