Vergez-Chaignon

Bonnier’s biography reads like an absorbing novel, with its twists and turns, reconstructed dialogue and author’s acute observations. As well as being a tragic human story, It is an illuminating study of the convoluted political context of the affair, which will be unfamiliar to some Anglophone readers.

Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon is one of France’s most distinguished historians of the Second World War, Vichy and the Resistance. A graduate of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and a doctor of history, she has written numerous award-winning books, including biographies of Jean Moulin and Marshal Pétain.

The translator, Richard Carswell, is the author of The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory (2019).