Historian Diamond paints a gripping picture of the harrowing escape from Paris as Hitlers armies approached the city. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Diamond shows how this ordeal became for civilians and soldiers alike the defining experience of the war.

Hanna Diamond is Senior Lecturer in French History in the Department of European Studies at the University of Bath. She lived and taught in Paris for many years and has spent her career researching into the lives of the French people during the twentieth century. Her previous book, Women and the Second World War in France 1939-48: choices and constraints is also based on personal narratives and oral history. It was the first to explore the range of women's experiences of the war. She is currently working on a micro history of a mining community in southern France.

• Introduction: Paris: June 1940


• Part One: Exodus


• 1: The Invasion of Paris


• 2: On the Road


• Part Two: Reactions to Defeat


• 3: Death of the Third Republic


• 4: The People's Decisions


• Part Three: Home or Exile


• 5: Summer-Autumn 1940


• 6: Back to 'Normal'?


• Afterword: Forgetting and Remembering the Exodus


• Further Reading