X-Nico

Rod Kedward

Oral history formed a central part of Kedward's historical approach, as he has interviewed hundreds of ordinary Frenchmen and women about their experience of being in the Resistance.

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Kedward was given support in France by Henry Rousso who described it in 1982 as a "little known work, full of original ideas".

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Jean-Pierre Rioux in Le Monde of 20 October 1989 described it as "a work which appeared in 1978 and has become a classic in the eyes of specialists and all praise must go to Champ Vallon for having at last commissioned its translation".

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M. R. D. Foot underlined that: "Mr Kedward’s great advantage when he writes about politics is that he understands history. One of his book’s main virtues is that he shows how much people of southern France in those years of defeat and despair were conscious of, and sustained by, the knowledge of previous national catastrophes and of the traditional remedies for them."

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Laurent Douzou in his review of the Maquis book for Le Monde of 10 September found it astonishing that a foreign historian should have such an intimate understanding and knowledge of rural France.

see also