Mauvaise conduite: complicity and respectability in the occupied Nord, 1914–1918.

This article examines the occupied war culture of the Nord in 1914–18, focusing on various forms of behaviour met with opprobrium and disdain by many among the occupied population, which flood archival documents. An argument is put forward for a new conceptual category to understand such actions and the wider culture – what is termed ‘mauvaise conduite’ or misconduct, in some senses a forerunner to the notion of collaboration. This concept covers actions which comprised both illegal and legal misconduct – behaviours that were forbidden by French law, and those which were permitted but frowned upon by fellow inhabitants. This conflation of different forms of misconduct – illegal and legal, sexual and non-sexual, friendly and political – was central to the culture of the occupied population, who occasionally expressed outrage at certain actions via physical and verbal attacks on suspect individuals. In doing so, they upheld a moral-patriotic framework based on the notion of respectability. Breaches of this framework were also punished by the French authorities after the war, but only on a small scale, andmauvaise conduitewas eventually replaced in the memory of the occupation by the other aspect of the occupied war culture: resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]