During World War II, London was transformed into a European city, as it unexpectedly became a place of refuge for many thousands of European citizens who through choice or the accidents of war found themselves seeking refuge in Britain from the military campaigns on the Continent of Europe. In this volume, an international team of historians consider the exile groups from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway and Czechoslovakia, analysing not merely the relations between the plethora of exile regimes and the British government in terms of its military and social dimensions but...

This highly innovative volume provides the first investigation of how political legitimacy operated amid the upheavals of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a gun, but in the values about what constituted "good" government. Exploring the domains of political discourse, state propaganda and high and low culture, it explains how in the aftermath of German victory in 1939-40, a wide range of contenders, including bureaucrats, collaborators, Communists and other resistance groups, all claimed the right to rule. As an...

This highly innovative volume provides the first investigation of how political legitimacy operated amid the upheavals of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a gun, but in the values about what constituted "good" government. Exploring the domains of political discourse, state propaganda and high and low culture, it explains how in the aftermath of German victory in 1939-40, a wide range of contenders, including bureaucrats, collaborators, Communists and other resistance groups, all claimed the right to rule. As an...