Read And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris Online

Authors: Alan Riding

Tags: #Europe, #Paris (France) - Intellectual Life - 20th Century, #Paris (France), #World War II, #Social Science, #Paris, #World War; 1939-1945, #Popular Culture, #Paris (France) - History - 1940-1944, #General, #Customs & Traditions, #World War; 1939-1945 - France - Paris, #Paris (France) - Social Life and Customs - 20th Century, #Social History, #Military, #France, #Popular Culture - France - Paris - History - 20th Century, #20th Century, #History

And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

BOOK: And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
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ALSO BY ALAN RIDING

Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2010 by Alan Riding
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riding, Alan.
And the show went on : cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris / by Alan Riding.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59454-9
1. World War, 1939–1945—France—Paris.
2. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—20th century.
3. Popular culture—France—Paris—History—20th century.
4. Paris (France)—Intellectual life—20th century.
5. Paris (France)—History—1940–1944. I. Title.
D802.F82P3772 2010    944′.3610816—dc22    2010016841

v3.1_r1

To Alexander

CONTENTS

Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Preface
  
1. Everyone on Stage
  
2. Not So Droll
  
3. Shall We Dance?
  
4.
L’Américain
  
5. Paris by Night
  
6. Resistance as an Idea
  
7.
Maréchal, Nous Voilà!
  
8.
Vivace Ma Non Troppo
  
9. A Ripped Canvas
      
Photo Insert
10. Distraction on Screen
11. Mirroring the Past
12. Writing for the Enemy
13. Chez Florence
14. “On the Side of Life”
15. The Pendulum Swings
16. Vengeance and Amnesia
17. Surviving at a Price
Acknowledgments
Bibliography and Notes
About the Author

PREFACE

HOW ARTISTS AND WRITERS
respond to politics and society has intrigued me since I was a reporter covering the harsh military regimes of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. There, cultural elites variously kept a low profile, supported armed resistance or protested from abroad, but few sold out to the dictatorships. When I moved to Paris in 1989, the subject came into sharper focus: now I found myself in the birthplace of the
intellectuel engagé
, of the legendary Left Bank intellectual always ready to take on the political establishment. But the question that interested me most—how artists and writers react to oppression—belonged, I realized, to an earlier era, not of the Paris of today but of Paris under Nazi occupation. How, I wondered, had artists and intellectuals addressed the city’s worst political moment of the twentieth century? Did talent and status impose a greater moral responsibility? Was it possible for culture to flourish without political freedom?

Such questions were, of course, examined—and with passion—immediately after the liberation of Paris. At the time, the imperative was to punish those artists and writers who had supported the occupying power or the puppet regime in Vichy, those deemed to have failed both their nation and their peers. But then, as now, the judgments were not clear-cut. Did working during the occupation automatically mean collaboration? Should any writer be sanctioned for the “crime” of an opinion? Do gifted painters, musicians or actors have a duty to provide ethical leadership? The search for answers became the starting point for this book.

Many French people believe that the occupation is still a taboo subject; French friends warned me that my inquiries would be met by suspicion, embarrassment, even silence. I did not find this to be true. Since the early 1970s, when Robert O. Paxton published his
book
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944
, the myth of
la France résistante
has crumbled. Books have been written on every aspect of the occupation. Through movies like Marcel Ophüls’s
The Sorrow and the Pity
and Louis Malle’s
Lacombe Lucien
, the French public also learned that collaboration and self-preservation were stronger instincts than resistance.

In my case, I sought out artists, writers and others who had witnessed the “dark years.” Well into their eighties or even older, they all agreed to see me and, I believe, responded openly and frankly. Their testimony was crucial in demonstrating that life during the occupation was not a still photograph in which one moment represents all others; it was a constantly evolving drama, a teeming stage where loyalty and betrayal, food and hunger, love and death found room to coexist, where even the line separating good and bad,
résistants
and
collaborateurs
, seemed to move with events. This was no less true in the world of culture. Its leading players behaved much like the rest of the population, except that, with them, more was at stake: their artistic calling made them role models and, as such, they were held to higher standards of propriety.

The main actors have now gone, yet all around me the décor stands largely unchanged. The very streets and buildings of Paris still carry the memory of those who peopled the stage seven decades ago. Often, while preparing this book, I felt that the past was my companion. Just a short bus ride separates the desk where I did my writing from the places I describe. It is both easy and hard to imagine the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Élysées, the swastika flying in the place de la Concorde, the Louvre desolate and stripped of its paintings, German uniforms filling the boxes at the Paris Opera. The Hôtel Lutetia, on the Left Bank, bears a double scar: from 1940 to 1944, it was the Abwehr’s Paris headquarters; then, in 1945, it became the reception center for returning prisoners of war and deportees. In a few cases, the décor has changed. Across from the Lutetia, the old Prison du Cherche-Midi, so convenient for the Gestapo and so feared by its enemies, has been demolished and replaced by the kind of glass-and-steel anonymity that has no history.

Around my office in the 6th arrondissement, the memories are even fresher. On my own street, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, the early resistance group known as the Musée de l’Homme network held meetings at No. 30. One block away, a German-language bookstore catering to the Wehrmacht once stood on the place de la Sorbonne.
That square was also home to Jean Galtier-Boissière, a satirist who kept the sharpest and wittiest journal of the occupation. To the north, on the rue du Sommerard, a plaque outside a primary school remembers those pupils who were “deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were born as Jews, innocent victims of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the government of Vichy.” Running past the square is the boulevard Saint-Michel, still pockmarked from intense fighting during the insurrection of Paris. Nearby, the French Senate was the Luftwaffe headquarters and, behind it, the last tank battle in the city was fought in the Luxembourg Gardens. On many a wall, plaques record where young fighters died. And every year on August 25, the anniversary of the liberation, these fallen are remembered with bouquets of flowers. I often stop to look at the unfamilar names on these plaques, and I sometimes ask myself if France’s renowned artists and intellectuals served the country as loyally. But I also try not to forget the words of Anthony Eden, Britain’s wartime foreign secretary: “If one hasn’t been through the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that.”

·
CHAPTER 1
·
Everyone on Stage

ON JUNE 14, 1940
, the German army drove into Paris unopposed. Within weeks, the remnants of French democracy were quietly buried and the Third Reich settled in for an indefinite occupation of France. Who was to blame? With the country on its knees, many in France now saw this as a defeat foretold, a debacle that had been in the making since France emerged from World War I, victorious in name but shattered in spirit. In the bloody and muddy trenches of the Western Front, 1.4 million Frenchmen died, representing 3.5 percent of the population and almost 10 percent of working-age men. Further, the 1 million Frenchmen who were left badly maimed, those ever-present
mutilés de guerre
, made it impossible to forget the past. With France already alarmed by its low prewar birthrate, this slaughter of men and future fathers meant that it was not until 1931 that the country exceeded its 1911 population of 41.4 million—and, even then, this was in large part thanks to immigration.

At the same time, the country was being let down by its political class. The Third Republic, founded in 1870 after France’s defeat in
the Franco-Prussian War, was plagued by instability and consumed by political bickering. Although the economy fared relatively well in the 1920s, postwar reconstruction lagged far behind. Then, in the 1930s, confronted by the twin threats of the Great Depression and the spread of extremist ideologies across Europe, France’s rulers chose to ignore both. In a country that had long boasted the originality of its political ideas, a string of dysfunctional governments eroded public faith in democracy and boosted the appeal of the Nazi, Fascist and Communist alternatives. Most critically, with the Great War spawning a nation of pacifists, the French preferred to ignore mounting evidence that the country would soon again be at war with Germany. And when war became inevitable, they chose to believe official propaganda boasting that their army was invincible. This monumental self-delusion only compounded the shock at what followed. When Hitler’s army swept across western Europe in the spring of 1940, French defenses crumbled in a matter of weeks. Neither 1870 nor 1914 had been this bad.

Yet even in the deepening gloom of the interwar years, as artistic and intellectual freedoms were being extinguished across Europe, Paris continued to shine as a cultural beacon. The majority of Parisians were poor, but they had long since been evicted from the elegant heart of Paris by Baron Haussmann’s drastic urban redesign a half century earlier. This “new” Paris was the favored arena of elitist divertimento, drawing minor royalty, aristocrats and millionaires to buy art, to race their horses in the Bois de Boulogne, to hear Richard Strauss conduct
Der Rosenkavalier
at the Paris Opera, to party in the latest Chanel and Schiaparelli designs.

Painters, writers, musicians and dancers also flocked there from across Europe and the Americas, in some cases seeking sexual freedom, in others fleeing dictatorships, in many hoping for inspiration and recognition. Embracing everything from the literary solemnity of the Académie Française through the avant-garde of Surrealism to the high kicks of the Moulin Rouge, Paris offered both enlightenment and entertainment. And wandering across its pages and stages like eloquent courtesans were intellectuals, artists and performers. Whether admired for their ideas, their imagination or simply their Bohemian lifestyle, they enjoyed the trappings of a privileged caste. “The prestige of the writer was something peculiarly French, I believe,” the astute essayist Jean Guéhenno later wrote. “In no other country of the world was the writer treated with such reverence by
the people. Each bourgeois family might fear that its son would become an artist, but the French bourgeoisie as a group was in agreement in giving the artist and the writer an almost sacred preeminence.”
1
Put differently, culture had become inseparable from France’s very image of itself. And the rest of Europe recognized this. But with the swastika now flying over Paris, how would French culture—its artists, writers and intellectuals, as well as its great institutions—respond? Again, the answer lay in the turmoil of the interwar years.

BOOK: And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
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