And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris [Paperback]

On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a silent and deserted Paris. Eight days later, a humbled France accepted defeat along with foreign occupation. While the swastika now flew over Paris, the City of Light was undamaged, and soon a peculiar kind of normalcy returned as theaters, opera houses, movie theaters, and nightclubs reopened for business. Shedding light on this critical moment of twentieth-century European cultural history, And the Show Went On focuses anew on whether artists and writers have a special duty to show moral leadership in moments of national trauma.

“Gripping. . . . We’ll always have Paris, but we may not feel quite the same about it after reading And the Show Went On.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Riding paints a riveting portrait of how Paris’s glittering, politically diverse cultural elite . . . worked and played during the dark days of the Nazis’ occupation.”
—Vanity Fair

“Meticulously researched. . . . Riding’s book is an impressively comprehensive survey of the occupation years.”
—The Economist
 
“An arresting and detailed account. . . . A big story and insidiously troubling.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Evocative. . . . A carefully constructed and sympathetic account. . . . Riding is very good at pointing to the complexities and ambiguities of the situation.”
—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Fascinating.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Certainly one ls¹