And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (35 page)

The Communist poet Louis Aragon was an important resistance figure in southern France. (
Rue des Archives
)

The American socialite Florence Gould, shown in a portrait from the late 1930s, held a weekly literary salon in occupied Paris. It was attended by both collaborationist and resistance writers as well as by some Germans, among them the renowned novelist Ernst Jünger, who was stationed in Paris with the Wehrmacht and is seen here on horseback leading a parade. (
top: Florence Gould Foundation; bottom: Marbach/Rue des Archives
)

The Kiev-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky spent her last beach vacation in 1939 with her daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, and her husband, Michel Epstein. From May 1940, the family lived in the Burgundy town of Issy-l’Évêque, where she wrote her best-known work,
Suite Française
, published only in 2004. In July 1942, she was arrested by French gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz, where she died one month later. (
Fonds Irène Némirovsky/IMEC
)

Late in the occupation, the young writer Marguerite Duras joined the resistance along with her husband, Robert Antelme, right, and her lover Dionys Mascolo. Antelme was subsequently arrested and deported to Germany, but he survived the war. (
Collection Jean Mascolo/Sygma/Corbis
)

The popular writer Colette spent much of the occupation in her apartment in the Palais-Royal, where her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, was forced to hide every night in a maid’s room in the building’s attic. (
Pierre Jahan/Roger-Viollet
)

Pablo Picasso, who spent the occupation in Paris, wrote a surrealist play,
Le Désir attrapé par le queue
(Desire Caught by the Tail), which was performed privately in Michel Leiris’s home on March 19, 1944. Brassaï recorded the occasion in a photograph that shows, among others, Simone de Beauvoir holding a book to Picasso’s left, Albert Camus engaging with the dog below him and Jean-Paul Sartre, with a pipe to Camus’s right. Some Picasso paintings are displayed in the background. (
Estate Brassaï-RMN
)

Two of France’s most popular actors, Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault, were the stars of Marcel Carné’s movie
Les Enfants du paradis
, which was shot largely during the occupation but released only after the liberation of France. By then, Arletty was in disgrace for having had a German lover. (
Rue des Archives/RDA
)

The writer Albert Camus, left, who joined the resistance in late 1943 and edited the clandestine newspaper
Combat
, is seen here after the liberation of Paris with the resistance leader Jacques Baumel and the writer André Malraux, who is wearing a French army uniform. (
René St. Paul/Rue des Archives
)

A week before the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, the French Communist Party called for an insurrection and thousands of young Parisians took up arms, building barricades and harassing the retreating German forces. (
Roger-Viollet
)