The French Review

received Bonapartists and international figures into her home, a veritable treasure trove, where she lived surrounded by artworks salvaged from her collection, memories of Napoléon I, Napoléon III, and her son, the prince imperial. McQueen’s narrative places particular emphasis on Eugenie’s firm resolve to design a suitable site of memory to the glory of Napoléon III, Saint Michael’s Abbey in England. The author’s style conveys affection for an empress obliged to work with, politicize with, and socialize with men who embraced nineteenth-century gendered attitudes about her role. To counter their opinion, Eugénie sought out opportunities to surround herself with a powerful female attendance. The presence of her dames d’honneur at court and the oval portraits of aristocratic female sitters in her salon bleu who silently stand in for countries with which Eugénie had formed alliances, evinced her determination to construct an empowered public persona. The writer’s text betrays an uneasiness that Eugénie’s progressive thinking , encouraged by her husband, had been thwarted by male figures who perceived her role as a docile, acquiescent, and passive consort, bedecked in ultra-feminine attire. McQueen’s highly original volume seeks to reinstate Eugénie upon her throne in splendor, as patroness of the visual arts and last empress of the French. Louisiana Tech University Dolliann Hurtig MITCHELL, ALLAN. The Devil’s Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941–1944. New York: Berghahn, 2011. ISBN 978-0-85745-114-9. Pp. viii + 119. $49.95. Allan Mitchell already gave us an excellent overview of the Occupation of France’s capital in Nazi Paris (2008), where the subject of the present title is barely mentioned. He saved a compelling story—Ernst Jünger’s sojourn in Paris as part of the Occupational Authority—for this longer essay. Jünger left us perhaps the most detailed diary of a major German figure in the Occupation. Well known as a novelist and essayist before the war, he was, after soldiering in the Blitzkrieg that stunned France, assigned to the Military High Command, sited in the Hôtel Majestic. There, he kept a meticulous, if strangely cold, journal of his life as a flâneur, salonnier, and witness to the chronic infighting among the occupying entities in Paris: the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo and the SS, the Propaganda and Foreign Ministries, and the Vichy government. Mitchell remarks on Jünger’s silence on the everyday life of Parisians, on his ethical concerns about Nazism, and on the banal discussions of his personal life. He concludes that Jünger was an Einzelgänger, a loner, and deftly self-centered. Nevertheless, he was “a star among stars in the city of cities” (68), and saw himself as representative of the most sophisticated European, not just German, elite. He had studied in Paris before the war, and like so many other high-level German soldiers and bureaucrats, felt that assignment to Paris was a just reward for the life of intellectual sophistication he had chosen. Yet his diary evinces a sorrowfulness that edges from beneath the gloss that the Germans put on their stewardship of Paris. Aggressively ignored by most of the populace, they knew that to live in Paris, especially after 1941 and Hitler’s invasion of Russia, was to live in a bubble on a continent increasingly devastated by a terrible war. Jünger asked to spend a few months on the Russian front in Reviews 203 1942–43, but came back to Paris sobered by what he had seen: the future of Germany’s destruction. Snidely critical of Hitler and his Nazi cohort, he was petrified of being caught out by the Gestapo; he hid his journal in a safe in his room, and destroyed many of his notes after the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944, in which he barely escaped being implicated. What we have then is a reconstruction, from some notes he did keep, but mostly from memory. He constantly fiddled with this retrospective for years after the war; the final version of the Pariser Tägebucher did not appear until the 1990s (Jünger lived a long life, dying in...