Emeritus Professor Andrew Knapp

I retired from the University and became an Emeritus Professor on 1 September 2015. I remain active in academic research and writing from my home base in France.

My research interests include French government and politics, especially political parties, and contemporary French history, especially the wartime and postwar periods.

I have worked and published extensively in English and French on the Allied bombing of France between 1940 and 1945 (see my France under Allied Air Attack website). France took the equivalent (in tonnage of bombs) of nearly eight Blitzes from British and American bombers, and suffered over 57,000 dead in this period; my primary interest has been to find out why the Allies undertook these raids and how the French, the Vichy state and the Resistance responded. As well as publications in print, this work has fed into five French TV documentaries, on the bombing of France as a whole and of four selected cities – Nantes, Le Havre, Rouen and Royan. In addition, my interest in the varied national and regional memories of Europe’s bombing war has led to two substantial articles, one of which was published in 2017. 

In November 2020, I published a medium-length biography of General de Gaulle, just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Following France’s presidential and parliamentary elections in 2022, I published an article on the transformations and complexities of France’s party system, and completed a book chapter on the bombing of the French Atlantic ports in 1942-3, to appear in 2023. Another book chapter, on the bombing of Le Havre, was published in autumn 2022.