And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (11 page)

The novelist and director Marcel Pagnol, who had his own studio in Marseille, was one of few to resume work, completing his film
La Fille du puisatier
(The Well Digger’s Daughter), which had been interrupted in May. And, in a move he would later regret, he added a scene in which a family crowds around a radio, listening respectfully to Pétain’s armistice speech of June 17.
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In the weeks that followed, other low-budget films, mostly forgettable, also went into production in Marseille and Nice. But until early 1941, the studios in Paris remained silent. And by then, the French industry had lost a number of key players. Among those who used the excuse of job offers from Hollywood to leave France were the directors Jean Renoir, René Clair and Julien Duvivier and the actors Jean Gabin, Charles Boyer, Michèle Morgan and Jean-Pierre Aumont. Of these, only Gabin and
Aumont would return before the end of the war, Gabin as a soldier in a tank unit participating in the liberation of France, Aumont as a soldier who fought with Allied forces in Italy before reaching France.

Cinema was also one of the art forms most directly affected by the Statute on Jews, the first major anti-Semitic measure of Pétain’s Vichy regime, which was promulgated across all of France on October 3, 1940. The statute’s purpose was far broader than a restriction on moviemaking. It excluded Jews—defined as anyone with three Jewish grandparents—from the government, the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces, the press and the teaching profession. Those returning to work in these fields had to sign a document, as Simone de Beauvoir recalled: “At the Lycée Camille Sée—as in all the
lycées
—I was made to sign a paper where I swore under oath that I was not Jewish nor affiliated to Freemasonry; I thought it repugnant to sign, but no one refused: for most of my colleagues, as for myself, there was no way of doing otherwise.”
¹¹

The only Jews allowed to hold on to their jobs were World War I veterans, holders of the Légion d’honneur and those who had rendered “exceptional services” to France in literature, science or art. A few university professors, like the historian Marc Bloch, successfully applied for this exemption, but it would bring them little protection later in the occupation. Almost immediately, there was also pressure to dismiss Jews from the Comédie Française and the Paris Opera, which, as national institutions, were considered to be extensions of the government. But cinema was the only cultural area to be singled out by the statute. Responding to constant prewar Fascist campaigning against Jewish “control” of the movie industry, specifically against the power of foreign Jewish producers, the statute ruled that Jews could not be producers, distributors or directors of movies or owners or managers of movie theaters.

The Statute on Jews did not, of course, come out of the blue. French anti-Semitism, which had grown in the 1930s from a right-wing obsession into a far wider sentiment, was boosted in June 1940 when Jews became one of several scapegoats for France’s defeat. The charges now thrown at them by Fascists in Paris and Vichy were many: that even French Jews were not really French because they owed allegiance more to Judaism than to France; that foreign-born Jewish refugees, about one-third of France’s 300,000-strong Jewish community, were fifth columnists; that Jews had pushed France into war with Germany; that Jews had infiltrated the government and the
armed forces; that Jews had too much financial and cultural power in France.

Fearing the consequences of a German victory, most prominent French Jews had fled Paris by June 14, 1940, but they had left behind legions of impoverished eastern European Jews who had sought refuge in France and had nowhere to go (and would later become the principal victims of internments and deportations to Nazi death camps). In mid-July, Germany expelled almost 18,000 Jews from its newly annexed province of Alsace into the unoccupied zone. At the same time, having ordered all Jews to register with the French police, where their identity cards were stamped in large letters with the word
JUIF
, Vichy revoked the naturalization of more than 7,000 Jews who had become French citizens since 1927. It further canceled the French citizenship granted to Algerian Jews in 1870. Vichy even abrogated a 1939 law against the incitement of hatred so that anti-Semitic campaigning by the press was now authorized.

In reality, the collaborationist press needed little encouragement. Typically, the mass-circulation daily
Paris-Soir
welcomed the Statute on Jews with the headline “The Purification Begins”; the subhead explained, “
JEWS AT LAST EXPELLED
from all public jobs in the country.” The article noted gleefully, “Foreign Israelites can be interned.” One month later, collaborationist newspapers were applauding a new requirement that Jewish-owned shops identify themselves with a bilingual sign in the window; it would need to declare both
Jüdisches Geschäft
and
Entreprise Juive
. Vichy went on to do far worse, but the Statute of Jews illustrated the French government’s willingness to take anti-Semitic measures of its own initiative and without German pressure. More ominously, it also signaled that Germany could count on Vichy’s support in persecuting Jews.

In the summer and fall of 1940, though, while the campaign to “cleanse” French culture of Jewish influence was under way, Hitler and his air minister, Marshal Göring, had their eyes on more valuable jewels, those of the art collections of French Jewish collectors and dealers. On June 30, Hitler had already issued an order that all art in France, public and private, be “safeguarded” pending negotiations on a peace treaty. What this meant was unclear, with different arms of the Reich interpreting it to suit their own interests.

One German opponent of art seizures was a respected art historian, now a Wehrmacht lieutenant, Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, who headed the French branch of the Kunstschutz, the German
army body charged with protecting art during military conflict. But while he and Jacques Jaujard, the director of French museums, insisted that the planned expropriations violated the 1907 Convention of The Hague, they faced far stronger forces. Otto Kümmel, the director of Berlin’s museums, had already prepared a list of artworks central to German culture that were held abroad. That encouraged Goebbels to demand that France return any art “taken” from Germany since 1500, notably during the Napoleonic Wars. Acting on behalf of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, Abetz tried to gain the initiative, hurriedly ordering the confiscation of art belonging to numerous Jewish collections and its transfer to the Hôtel de Beauharnais, the eighteenth-century mansion at 78 rue de Lille, on the Left Bank, which housed the German embassy. His argument was this art would serve as a surety against the reparations that France would be required to pay as part of an eventual peace treaty. The German military command, though, was reluctant to engage in banditry; at Metternich’s insistence, it responded that the seizure of any art was illegal and refused to cooperate.

Then, on September 17, Abetz, Metternich and the army were overruled by Hitler: he gave responsibility for confiscating all art “formerly” owned by Jews
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to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, an office run by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue. Initially, the looted art was stored in the Louvre, in three galleries of the Department of Eastern Antiquities, but this was soon overflowing. The nearby Jeu de Paume, a nineteenth-century gallery on the place de la Concorde, was then chosen to be the main transit camp for art being sent east. Although Abetz managed to hold on to scores of paintings, claiming they were to decorate the Foreign Ministry, he nonetheless had to watch as four hundred cases of artworks were transferred from the embassy to the Jeu de Paume.

Von Stülpnagel, the German army commander, was troubled. In a confidential letter to his commander in chief, he condemned the confiscation of Jewish-owned art as damaging to “the esteem” of the German state. “I myself am of the opinion that it ought to stop now,” he said.
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But the issue was out of his hands. The ERR’s Special Staff for Pictorial Art, now charged with finding, collecting, cataloging and shipping off to Germany any art owned by Jews, was well
briefed on the collections to be targeted first. These included those of the Rothschild family, Alphonse Kann, the David-Weill family, Lévy de Benzion, Georges Wildenstein, the Seligmann family, Jacques Stern, Alfred Lindon and the art dealers Léonce and Paul Rosenberg. Most of these wealthy Jews had already fled, dispersing their collections in châteaus and hideaways around the country. In a few cases, it would take the ERR up to three years to find them.

The legal justification invented to cover this organized theft was that Jews were now “stateless,” and therefore the art was “ownerless.” Not satisfied with these princely seizures, the ERR then went after less well known Jewish-owned collections, which were traced, an ERR report later noted, in part through “the address lists of the French police authorities.” These works, too, were stored in the Jeu de Paume. When Göring paid his first visit there on November 3, 1940, looking decidedly proprietorial in a broad-brimmed hat and vast overcoat, he was stunned by what he saw and what, in effect, he was being offered. For Göring’s inspection, the Jeu de Paume had been arranged like a nineteenth-century museum, with hundreds of paintings covering the walls of two floors, plus a good many more displayed on racks. By the end of the year, Hitler had approved the first shipment of Jewish-owned art to enrich the collection of his planned museum in Linz, the Austrian city where he spent his childhood. The first thirty-two paintings, which were destined for Linz, came from the Rothschild collection and included Vermeer’s
The Astronomer
. They were shipped in early February on a train owned by the Luftwaffe, which Göring had helpfully provided. Naturally, there was room for fifty-nine artworks chosen for Göring’s own private museum at Carinhall.

The Paris art market, in the doldrums during the 1930s, was also revived by the occupation. Hôtel Drouot, the government-owned and Vichy-run auction house, resumed normal business on September 26, 1940, and, in response to the arrival of moneyed Germans benefiting from an artificial exchange rate,
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Parisians began selling off paintings and art objects as never before. Jewish-owned galleries were quickly Aryanized or bought by Aryans following sequestration. The Bernheim-Jeune gallery was sold for a ridiculously low price to a renowned collaborationist. Kahnweiler, who was a German
citizen, had already lost one gallery in World War I when French government auctioneers sold it as enemy property; now the dealer was being persecuted as a Jew, although he was able to “sell” his gallery to the writer Michel Leiris and his wife, Louise, who was Kahnweiler’s sister-in-law. The André Weil Gallery was taken over by Louis Carré, while Wildenstein passed ownership of his gallery to his manager, Roger Dequoy. Emmanuel David was able to keep his gallery open, thanks to the protection of friends in the Propaganda Staffel.

These galleries also soon counted German officers and dealers among their clients. A few firms specialized in modern paintings that had been seized from Jewish families and that, declared “degenerate” by Hitler, proved of no interest to the Nazis. The market for more traditional French artists also flourished. In the fall, the Louis Carré gallery exhibited works by Matisse and Maillol, while in November, the Salon d’Automne at the Orangerie displayed works by French masters, from Renoir to Rodin. For this salon, living artists had to swear they were French but not Jewish. Other art fairs, such as the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon du Dessin et de la Peinture à l’Eau, soon followed.

Once again, the favored argument among the French was that France’s cultural institutions should stay alive. On September 17, 1940, the Carnavalet and Cernuschi museums in Paris reopened. Then, after a ceremony on September 29 attended by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had led seven panzer divisions during the invasion of France, the Louvre reopened some of its sculpture galleries, although its painting galleries remained empty and closed. The museum was open for only five hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and two hours on Sunday, with entry free for Germans. Most visitors were Wehrmacht soldiers and they could also buy a German-language guidebook; Metternich insisted on adding German-language signs telling them not to smoke and not to touch art objects. At the Orangerie, beside the place de la Concorde, where Monet’s large-format
Nymphéas
(Water Lilies) frescoes remained, a retrospective of Monet and Rodin brought crowds.

The first strictly propagandistic exhibition, Franc-Maçonnerie dévoilée (Freemasonry Unveiled), targeted Freemasonry, which had been banned by Vichy in August 1940 as a “secret society.” Abetz even claimed that 900,000 people visited the show, which opened at the Petit Palais in Paris in October 1940. It would be the first of several
major propaganda exhibitions: France Européenne at the Grand Palais from June to October 1941 claimed 635,000 visitors; Le Juif et la France supposedly drew 155,000 people to the Palais Berlitz from September 1941 to January 1942; and, finally, Le Bolchevisme Contre l’Europe, which opened at the Salle Wagram in March 1942, boasted 370,000 visitors. After Paris, these exhibitions routinely toured other French cities.

In the world of publishing, the Nazis seemed inspired more by ideology than greed—and here, too, they found willing collaborators. While three Jewish-owned publishing houses, Calmann-Lévy, Nathan and Ferenczi, were soon Aryanized and renamed, other French publishers were eager to resume business. Among these, Bernard Grasset and Robert Denoël had shown where their sympathies lay in the 1930s by publishing right-wing authors, including, in Denoël’s case, Céline’s anti-Semitic tracts. Now Grasset and Denoël, both friends of Abetz’s, were willing conduits for German literature entering France.