French historian Anne Simonin, an FSI-Humanities Center international visitor in 2009–10, talks about her discoveries in the Hoover Archives, including papers on French collaboration and French resistance in World War II in researching materials in the René de Chambrun collection. (Chambrun was Pierre Laval’s son-in-law and Marshal Pétain’s godson.) Simonin also found papers on international resistance as well as military operations in that war of the British, French, and Americans in the Charles Carman collection. That collection concerns the Jedburgh operations, in which teams of three were parachuted into occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. “Through the library, you can find books which were quite rare because of the shortage of paper during the war,” Simonin states. She also mentions two books by Pierre Lazareff, who also wrote for the newspaper Paris soir, Dernière édition and De Munich à Vichy that are available in the Hoover Institution Library but not in French libraries, not even the Bibliothèque nationale. Click here to view the video from the Stanford Humanities Center YouTube channel.
