ABSTRACT
The years of the Second World War remain a strangely neglected period of the political history of twentieth-century Europe. Amidst the attention lavished by historians on the battles, diplomacy and social history of the war years, there has been a tendency to overlook the politics of the period or, at best, to regard it as of only secondary importance. But politics did not stop when the war began in September 1939 in order to begin again when the guns finally fell silent in May 1945. Although the war was an inescapable presence in the lives of Europeans during these years, it also remained for much of the period strangely distant. In this global conflict, the war took place in the skies over their heads, in the icy waters of the North Atlantic or, for a number of years, on the fringes of Europe on the battlefields of North Africa or Russia. Europeans were intimately engaged both physically and emotionally in all of these conflicts; the sound of battle was, however, largely absent from their lives. From 1943 onwards the development of guerrilla warfare by Resistance movements and the successive Allied invasions of southern, eastern and western Europe remorselessly brought the war, with its manifold choices and dangers, to the heart of Europe. But, for much of the period, a tenuous normality reigned in the lives of many Europeans. The consequences of the war were all around them, but so too were the familiar structures of daily life. Political life also continued. If there were no elections and few parliaments, politics nevertheless continued by other means. Censored and clandestine newspapers sustained public debate” and local government acquired a heightened importance in people’s lives, while major political events, such as the creation of the Vichy regime in France in 1940 or the overthrow of Mussolini in Italy in 1943, animated private and public conversations.
