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 Onfocuses 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 readingAnd 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 of the finest works of serious popular history since the heyday of Barbara Tuchman. . . . Riding’s triumph lies in refusing to affirm any simplistic answers. Instead, he plunges the reader into the French cultural scene of the 1930s and ‘40s and shows us how real men and real women dealt with the devil.”
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