And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (9 page)

The occupation of Paris indeed took place almost silently. The city had lost 60 percent of its population and, apart from German vehicles, its streets were empty. German troops took up positions in front of ministries and army buildings, while senior officers installed themselves in the city’s best hotels, starting with the Crillon in the place de la Concorde and soon also the Meurice, Lutetia, Raphaël and George V. The German military command, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, or MBF, set up its headquarters in the Majestic Hotel,
close to the Arc de Triomphe. The Luftwaffe, in turn, took over the French Senate, setting aside an apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens for Air Marshal Hermann Göring himself. The swastika was raised where the French tricolor once hung, even above the Eiffel Tower—although at least there blocked elevators forced the German soldiers to climb to the top. In 1914, the Kaiser’s army had planned to take Paris in forty-two days but failed; Hitler’s army had done so in thirty-five days. And yet France as a nation had still to surrender. On June 16, the government left the Loire Valley for Bordeaux, where Reynaud argued in favor of moving it—as well as the navy and surviving army and air force units—to French possessions in North Africa. With this in mind, twenty-seven deputies, including Daladier and two former Popular Front ministers, Georges Mandel and Pierre Mendès-France, left Bordeaux for Casablanca on board the
Massilia
. But the new army chief, General Maxime Weygand, appointed in late May in place of General Maurice Gamelin, vetoed any suggestion of restationing the remnants of the army in North Africa, prompting Reynaud to resign.

He was in turn replaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, who just weeks earlier had been recalled from his post as ambassador to Spain and named deputy prime minister. For most of the French population, it was a reassuring appointment. Pétain had emerged from World War I with enormous prestige as an officer who combined victory with treating his troops humanely. When he was elected to the Académie Française in 1929, the vote was unanimous. Further, although he finally married when he was sixty-four, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man, with a twinkle in his eye to prove it. Even at the age of eighty-four, he seemed to be the right man for the moment. The following day, in an emotional speech in which he acknowledged Germany’s military superiority, Pétain offered himself as a “gift” to France to alleviate its woes. “In these painful hours, I think of the unfortunate refugees who, in a state of extreme destitution, hurry along our roads. I offer them my compassion and my concern. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that the fighting must end.” And he confirmed that he had sought out the Germans to prepare a cessation of hostilities.

Even though Pétain did not actually say “armistice,” this was the word that set off immediate rejoicing across the country. To this day, older French people can remember where they were—and how they felt—when they learned of Pétain’s decision. And few would claim
that, at that moment, they felt humiliated. “I was on a train, I was totally miserable, and someone shouted, ‘Armistice!’ ” Francini, the music-hall performer, recalled. “What a relief, what joy! The nightmare is over, we all thought. I was not a
pétainiste
, but I asked myself, if it wasn’t Pétain, who would it have been?” Those in army units retreating chaotically felt no different. “If you were on the road, with almost no weapons, and a man you respect takes the microphone, you said yes,” Michel Déon remembered. “We all breathed a sigh of relief. We could not go on, physically, morally. We had no more ammunition. I have never seen a country on its knees like that. Some officers led little pockets of resistance, but I had no officer.”
²²
The eight days between Pétain’s speech and the entry into effect of the cease-fire only made things worse: many French soldiers who became prisoners of war were captured during this period. A German military intelligence report dated August 15, 1940, based on interviews with imprisoned French officers, observed: “A large percentage of them are old, broken men, thoroughly dejected and demoralized in spirit.” It quoted a German general saying that, after the retreat of a French division was interrupted by destroyed bridges, “all its officers and equipment halted along the road and waited until it was captured.” The report added that many French enlisted men “complain bitterly of the conduct of their officers.”
²³

One senior French officer, however, was defiant. As soon as Pétain had spoken to the nation, de Gaulle flew to London. The following day, he broadcast a stirring message over the BBC telling the French not to lose hope, that their defeat was not final, that France was not alone. He called on French soldiers in England after Dunkirk and others still in France to join him, and he concluded with appropriately uplifting words: “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance should not and will not be extinguished.” De Gaulle was taking a tremendous gamble. From a military point of view, his action was more than insurbordination; for a two-star general, this was high treason. Further, he was largely unknown in France and, in any event, few people heard his message when it was first broadcast. Nonetheless, June 18, 1940, would be recorded as the day that de Gaulle entered French history.

On June 22, the armistice was signed in the same railroad carriage and in the same forest clearing near Compiègne, north of Paris, where the World War I armistice had been signed on November 11, 1918. It was an occasion that Hitler himself could not resist witnessing.
The agreement carved up France. A so-called unoccupied zone,
^*
with a population of some thirteen million, was placed under French rule and covered the southern half of France except for Atlantic coastal areas, while the occupied zone, with its twenty-nine million inhabitants, embraced three-fifths of French territory and was under direct German military rule. Other territorial changes not mentioned in the armistice were carried out de facto: the long-contested provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were again annexed by Germany, as they had been between 1871 and 1918; and a small area of northwestern France, including the city of Lille, was attached to Germany’s military command in Brussels. Under a separate agreement signed with Rome on June 24, the Alpine region of southeastern France came under Italian control. The armistice allowed France to maintain a 100,000-man army without heavy weapons, such as tanks, while the French navy was to stay anchored in its peacetime ports. France was required to pay a massive 400 million francs per day—worth about $8 million at the time but with a buying power of around $120 million today—to maintain the occupation army, an article that would permit Germany to plunder the French economy. Finally, French prisoners of war would continue to be held in Germany, pending a final peace treaty between the two countries.

When the armistice went into effect, on June 25, Pétain again addressed the nation by radio, explaining why he had accepted it and what it meant. Instead of lamenting the French army’s disastrous strategy, he suggested that France had only itself to blame for its situation: “Our defeat was a result of our laxity. The spirit of enjoyment destroyed what the spirit of sacrifice had built.” Then, quickly ensuring that no competing government in exile could be set up in North Africa, he ordered that the politicians who had left on the
Massilia
be returned to France and jailed. On July 3, Britain even helped to unite France behind him: fearing that French naval vessels at anchor in the Algerian port of Mers el-Kébir would fall into German hands, Churchill ordered their destruction, leaving thirteen hundred French sailors dead.

By then, Pétain had decided to establish his government in the spa resort of Vichy in central France, just south of the demarcation line now dividing the country. Vichy’s appeal was not only that it had
many elegant hotels and one of France’s best telephone exchanges; unlike nearby Clermont-Ferrand, which had been considered as a possible headquarters, Vichy also had no industry or troublesome Communist unions. Most of the country’s political and economic leaders and a good number of establishment intellectuals converged on the town. On July 10, in a joint session of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate held in Vichy’s opera house, the Third Republic was buried and Pétain was given full powers. The vote was 569 in favor and 80 against, with 17 abstentions. The following day, Pétain named himself chief of the French state—the new
état français
that replaced the Third Republic—and appointed himself as head of the government and Pierre Laval as his deputy and successor. As Pétain and Laval saw things, all that was left was to start building a new France of family, Catholic and rural values, one cleansed of Jews, Communists and Freemasons. And to set the tone, France’s traditional motto—
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité
”—was abandoned in favor of
“Travail, famille, patrie,”
or “Work, family, fatherland.”

*
Blumenfeld managed to escape France in 1941 and made it to the United States, where he became a successful fashion photographer for
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
.

*
The Germans called it a “Sitzkrieg,” or sitting war, to contrast with a “Blitzkrieg.”

*
A more persuasive reason for marrying Olesia was that she was rich and helped to maintain Drieu La Rochelle long after their divorce. To his credit, though, while he hated his Jewish first wife, Colette Jeramec, he saved her from deportation.

*
This became known as
la zone no-no
, for
la zone non-occupée
, but was also a play on the words
non-non
.

_·
CHAPTER 3
_·
Shall We Dance?

EVEN WITH
half the population of Paris scattered around the country, there was soon a consensus that the city’s cultural life should resume. For musicians, dancers and actors, it was a matter of necessity. They needed to work and saw no reason not to. They bore no responsibility for the country’s disaster, and they had no power to redress the situation. Further, the Germans had no cause to take offense at mainstream theater, movies, ballet, opera, classical music or cabaret. The new Vichy government, which retained responsibility for national cultural institutions, was also eager to show that, while crushed militarily, France was not defeated culturally.

In fact, culture was the one area where the French could still feel pride. And it was not unreasonable to expect artists to lift the public’s spirits until better days came along. This suited the Germans perfectly: they were sure to face fewer problems if the French, particularly Parisians, were kept entertained. Hitler even enjoyed the idea of the French wallowing in their degeneracy. “Does the spiritual health
of the French people matter to you?” Albert Speer recalled Hitler asking. “Let’s let them degenerate. All the better for us.”
¹

The Germans’ priority, then, was simply to make Parisians feel that life was returning to normal. On July 23, Joseph Goebbels, the powerful
Reichsminister
of public enlightenment and propaganda, traveled to Paris to gauge its mood. The Wehrmacht soldiers seemed happy enough: the city’s brothels and cabarets were already catering to them, and some restaurants even offered menus in German. But Goebbels still pronounced the city sad and ordered more cheer. By September the mood had improved and many Parisians made their way home. Although they found a city festooned with swastikas where German soldiers goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées at twelve-thirty every afternoon and patrolled an eleven o’clock curfew every night, the Paris of yore was still recognizable.

Behind the Germans’ apparent laissez-faire, however, they had a more radical strategy in mind. Driving it was a deeply held German inferiority complex toward a culture that for the previous two centuries had dominated Europe. Over the same period, Germanic culture had produced its share of great artists, writers and, above all, musicians, yet it was Paris—not London, not Rome, not Vienna and certainly not Berlin—that defined style and taste for the region. The Nazis had trouble explaining how all this could be done by a culture that it saw as degenerated by Jews, blacks and Freemasons. Nonetheless, it was this leadership and this power that Hitler and Goebbels coveted, so the order went out: no cultural activity taking place in France should radiate beyond the country’s borders.

In November 1940, Goebbels spelled this out in instructions to the German embassy in Paris: “The result of our victorious fight should be to break French domination of cultural propaganda, in Europe and the world. Having taken control of Paris, the center of French cultural propaganda, it should be possible to strike a decisive blow against this propaganda. Any assistance to or tolerance of this propaganda will be a crime against the nation.”
²
At the same time, he saw an opportunity for German culture to infiltrate French society and, above all, its intelligentsia. For Goebbels, cultural collaboration meant distracting the public at large and impressing French artists and intellectuals with Germany’s eternal glory and the achievements of the Third Reich. It also offered a message back home: that France had been vanquished culturally and intellectually as well as militarily.

To implement this, Goebbels left nothing to chance. He set up a complicated new structure called the Propaganda Abteilung, or Propaganda Department, which was answerable to him but also formed part of the German military command in France. With a staff of around twelve hundred, it was headed throughout the occupation by a stern infantry officer, Major Heinz Schmidtke, and had the twin responsibilities of propaganda and censorship. Much of this work was done through the Propaganda Staffel, which had fifty bureaus across the occupied zone, with its most important office in Paris at 52 avenue des Champs-Élysées. This department was divided into six sections, each with a specific responsiblity: press; radio; cinema; culture, which included music, theater, fine arts, music hall and cabaret; literature; and active propaganda. Assigned to the Propaganda Staffel were some two hundred Sonderführer, literally “special leaders,” who in this case were in the main former journalists, critics or propaganda experts recruited by the Wehrmacht to manage French culture. In a report written on September 14, 1940, Sonderführer Fritz Werner, who was responsible for classical music, echoed Goebbels: “Over recent centuries, the French have become masters in the art of penetrating other peoples with their cultural policy.” He described French culture as a wall that stood between France and Germany and that needed to be dismantled to facilitate entente. The answer, he said, was for French culture “to renounce being (too) obstrusive.”
³