Awards

• Winner of Winner of the Philippe Viannay-Défense de la France Prize 2020 Named a coup de coeur by the American Library in Paris.
• Winner of Winner of the Philippe Viannay-Defense of France Prize 2020.

Overview

On Mother's Day, 31 May 1942, a group of women stormed a small grocery store at the intersection of two Parisian market streets, the rue de Buci and the rue de Seine, to protest the food shortages that had become a chronic feature of daily life. The then-outlawed French Communist party aimed to channel the frustrations of hungry Parisians by organizing such actions throughout the capital and beyond. The so-called ""women's demonstration on the rue de Buci"" was one such protest, part of a larger, overarching resistance movement against the collaborationist Vichy regime and the German occupiers. The Buci affair became a cause célèbre, in no small part owing to its tragic consequences: the imprisonment, deportation, and execution of some of the protagonists. This book takes an in-depth look at this singular event, its dramatic repercussions, and its rich postwar afterlife. An extraordinary documentary record, together with the oral testimony of surviving resisters, reveal the minute intricacies of an underground partisan operation; the lives and deaths of the protesters, both women and men; the deployment of gender difference as a weapon of war, and the ways in which the incident has been remembered, commemorated, or forgotten. This book is also a meditation on the writing of history itself. Just as the author turns the event inside out to reveal the internal workings of a clandestine action that were hidden from public view, she turns her own project inside out, exposing the story behind the story that readers rarely see.

Full Product Details

9780190681548

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Reviews

The book emphasizes the importance of the event being led by women; the firsthand account of its lead organizer, Madeleine Marzin, informs its research ... Today Sardines Are Not for Sale draws upon one wartime protest event to tell a far bigger story. * Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews *

The book emphasizes the importance of the event being led by women; the firsthand account of its lead organizer, Madeleine Marzin, informs its research ... Today Sardines Are Not for Sale draws upon one wartime protest event to tell a far bigger story. -- Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews

Author Information

Paula Schwartz, Lois B. Watson Professor of French Studies, Middlebury College Paula Schwartz is the Lois B. Watson Professor of French Studies at Middlebury College, where she teaches courses on 20th-century France, food studies, and European studies. Her scholarship focuses on women and gender in the French Resistance, the French Communist underground, and daily life during the Second World War. She has lived and worked extensively in France.

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