Selling France to the French: The French Zone of Occupation in Western Germany, 1945-c.1955

This article contributes to the literature of occupation, as well as to transnational history, by exploring the social history of the military government in the French Zone of Occupation in West Germany (ZFO). It uses the Zone as a case study to understand the construction of a French community abroad by looking at systems of buying and selling, and asks whether these systems were not in themselves constitutive of the very transformation of members of the military government into a 'French community'. By investigating the insistence that French customers buy French goods at the economat, the shop restricted to their use, the article claims that gender, family and commercial practice helped to define home for members of the French administration in Germany.