Introduction

Abstract

This study looks at the experience of the Nazi occupation of northern France during World War II from the perspective of the ordinary person. It is a study of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of a population confronted with adversity and hardship while living under a military dictatorship and with a radically restructured economy. It is a study of the complicated relations between the occupiers and the occupied, state and society, that existed during these years, and the startling amount of room there was for the local population both to protest at the failures of the newly imposed economic and political structures to provide for their subsistence and to evade the plethora of regulations imposed by these new structures in efforts to provide for themselves.