The Secret Life of France (13 page)

Paris is beautiful, elegant and bountiful. That is her essence. She is not meant for hardship, ugliness and toil. Whenever she is tested by reality, she fails. For Julian Green, it was the hardship of occupation that turned her into the cold, haughty, imperious museum that she is today. Perhaps the daily indignities and betrayals of life under the Nazis took the Parisians to a level of cruelty from which they have never returned. What is certain is that the French bourgeoisie,
grande
and
petite
, did not behave well under the Occupation. Denis Rake, an English spy who was dropped into Occupied France and whose work with the Resistance brought him into contact with many different sections of the population, always spoke very highly of the French working classes. When questioned by Marcel Ophüls in his documentary
Le
Chagrin et la Pitié
(
The Sorrow and the Pity
) about the bourgeois Parisians he met under the Occupation, Rake remains evasive, saying that he learnt quickly not to expect their help. ‘They had more to lose, I think,’ he said generously.

Paris under the Nazis seems to have become a place of betrayal and denunciation. Proof of widespread ignominy can be found in the city’s archives, which are filled with thousands of anonymous letters, addressed to both the French and German authorities, in which the writer denounces his or her neighbour, colleague or acquaintance, sometimes as a communist but most frequently as
‘a member of the Jewish race’. Generally written to the Prefect, the letters tended to begin with the following: ‘It is my honour to bring to your attention the facts which follow …’

Reading the unctuous tone of these letters, it is chilling to think that in a matter of days, the SS, the
Police
Nationale
or the French
Milice
would have shown up at the address provided, arrested the individual and, wherever possible, his or her entire family, confiscated their belongings and requisitioned their apartment, taken them to the French internment camp of Drancy, put them on a French train and sent them to be exterminated in Poland or Germany.

These letters of denunciation, 55 million of them, were found in the French and German archives, many of them three or four decades after the war. Until the seventies, there was an embargo on information surrounding the degree of France’s complicity in the deportation of her Jews. De Gaulle had instigated a policy of ‘wiping the slate clean’ (
passer l’éponge
), essential, as he saw it, for national reconciliation. In the years following the Occupation, there was one of those recurring upsurges of violence to which French history is prone, and which we are not allowed to call civil war, even though a war between political factions within the same country is precisely what began in June 1944, while the Allies were busy liberating France.
L’épuration
(purge) ended in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning.

France’s post-war ‘purge’ was particularly savage. All
the myriad rivalries and jealousies that can inhabit any nation’s towns and villages rose to the surface as Gaullists, communists and Pétainists battled for supremacy in a barbaric display of national retribution. Collaborators were denounced, then tortured or hanged or shot by dubious public tribunals. Women who were supposed to have slept with German officers were dragged half naked into village squares and ritually humiliated by having their heads shaven. But in many regions, the purges reached far beyond collaborators to include political undesirables and ‘class enemies’. Of the ten thousand or so executions that were carried out during the
épuration
, only 791 were legally pronounced death sentences. When it became clear that in many cases these judgements were in fact the French Communist Party (PCF) clearing the path to revolution, de Gaulle began a smear campaign that blamed the communists for all the excesses of the purge, and the Popular Tribunals abruptly ceased.

After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 it came as a shock, to France’s youth in particular, to discover the extent of the nation’s commitment to Pétain’s collaborationist regime. Contrary to the Gaullist myth of a massively resisting nation, the French were predominantly supportive of the ‘victor of Verdun’ – at least until November 1942, when the Germans invaded the South, the hitherto unoccupied ‘Free Zone’. The image with which Laurent and his generation had grown up was of legions of brave French men and women in berets, cycling across the French countryside at night to feed Jews hiding in barns or English aviators
hiding in attics. After de Gaulle died, a series of films – the most famous of which was Max Ophüls’s long-censored
Le Chagrin et la Pitié
– offered a different picture of France under the Occupation and led to decades of guilt and self-recrimination.

Since those years of mass
mea culpa
there has been a readjustment, and, as my own children’s history books show, a more level view of France’s war record has been established. It has become clear that those 55 million letters of denunciation were written by about 3 million people (many informers must have scribbled furiously right the way through the war). A large number of these people seem to have been making the most of the Vichy regime’s repressive climate in order to eliminate a professional or romantic rival. This does not make these acts any less repulsive but it does put France’s participation in the Shoah into a more realistic context.
*

It was thanks to Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, that I began to get a sense of the enduring legacy of the war on this culture. She spoke of the Nazi Occupation of Paris as if it were yesterday and, unlike my own mother’s memories of the Blitz, there was not a trace of nostalgia. There was nothing romantic about Madeleine’s memories. No process of sublimation or rewriting of the past had taken place in the intervening years. The harsh facts were undeniable.
France, in spite of her grandiose system of defence, her impenetrable Maginot Line and her superior firepower, had been entirely overrun by the enemy in five weeks. Hitler consummated France’s defeat by making her sign the armistice in the very railway car in which the Germans had signed their surrender in 1918. As my children’s textbook would put it, she had suffered ‘the greatest military defeat in her history’.

Madeleine, whose mother had died in childbirth, was brought up by her grandmother. Madame de Segonzac was convinced, along with much of the nation, by Philippe Pétain’s credentials as the man to preserve France’s honour. In this, as in many other details, Madeleine’s wartime experiences were quite representative of the rest of the Parisian bourgeoisie. They spent their war in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the Nazis’ preferred quarter, living on the same avenue as the Gestapo headquarters. Madeleine remembers feeling hungry much of the time, remembers, as well, her fear and hatred of the German uniform. She recalls listening, terrified, to the Allied bombing of nearby Boulogne and, at the age of eight, watching three of her Jewish classmates being called aside in assembly and marched away, never to be seen again.

In the four years prior to the Liberation, Madeleine’s aunt and uncle were deported to Ravensbruk and Dachau for having hidden an English pilot (who had talked under torture). Like many French people, Madeleine’s grandmother had been shocked and appalled by Churchill’s
decision to destroy the French fleet in the port of Mers-el-Kebir in June 1940 rather than run the risk of letting it fall into enemy hands. It was a savage attack. The French fleet, trapped in the harbour, was unable to riposte and 1,297 French sailors died at the hands of their allies, having fired hardly a shot. All France’s latent Anglophobia rose to the surface; the act was seen as yet another manifestation of English treachery. The fact that the Frenchman in command of the fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Admiral Gensoul, had been given warning of the attack and numerous options for averting it made no difference. In its aftermath anti-English posters appeared all over Paris depicting an evil-looking Churchill grinning over the crosses of the French dead.

Admiral Somerville, the commander of the British fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, had been against the attack from the first. He had feared that destroying the fleet would throw the French into the arms of the Germans and had suggested at least allowing the French to put to sea and attacking them offshore, a move that would have had the merit of allowing the extremely proud Admiral Gensoul to save face. Years later, Somerville still referred to the attack as ‘the biggest political blunder of modern times’ and ‘an absolutely bloody business’. Occurring only a few weeks after Churchill’s idealistic proposal, in the aftermath of France’s defeat, for an ‘indissoluble union’ between the two countries, the event made Franco-British relations as bad as they had ever been.

Like most French people, Madeleine’s grandmother,
Madame de Segonzac, had never heard of Charles de Gaulle and missed his famous ‘call to arms’ when it was broadcast from London on 18 June 1940. The Mers-el-Kebir massacre, which took place just over two weeks later, made de Gaulle’s task of recruiting Frenchmen to fight alongside Englishmen much more difficult. For Madame de Segonzac, such an idea seemed absurd and dangerous, and de Gaulle vain and insubordinate. Like most people of her generation, she had no wish to see German uniforms return to France. She did, however, believe that signing the armistice was the only realistic solution. For as long as she could, she blamed Vichy’s excesses on Pétain’s swarthy, inelegant prime minister, Pierre Laval. Indeed, Pétain had such credit with his countrymen that there are still people today entirely unwilling to accept the fact that it was not Laval but Pétain, with his fantasy of building an authoritarian revolution on the back of defeat, who was the true architect of Vichy’s fascist policies.

I only have to compare my own mother’s childhood with that of my mother-in-law to understand the profound differences between the English and French sense of history. Madeleine and all of her generation perceive history as flawed, ambiguous and barbarous in its contingency. The children brought up in England during the war – both country children and evacuees – were able to conserve a sense of history as being morally coherent. They watched the virtues of honour and fortitude win through in the
end. France’s war children, on the other hand, witnessed nothing but defeat, fear and moral cowardice. The forces of occupation were very effective in smothering the rare examples of heroism and, when they could not, they handpicked innocent men from the community and shot them in the village square.

I am often struck by the harshness with which my parents’ generation, whose war was comparatively gentle, judge the French. Indeed, the fountainhead of anti-French sentiment that I so frequently detect in my own father seems to lie right there, in France’s war experience – the main grievance being her swift defeat. They let us down badly, my father says. Why did they buckle so easily? Surely they chose to capitulate, in order to save the furniture? Why wasn’t Paris destroyed like London was? Because the French care more about Beauty and Pleasure than Duty and Honour …

Epicureanism and the devotional pursuit of pleasure in all its forms has been offered as an explanation for France’s poor war effort. And it is a good one: a nation addicted to the finer things in life will always find war harder than a nation that is not. Unlike the English, the French do not thrive on privation. Madeleine says, ‘I remember everyone around me as hungry and frightened. There was simply not enough to eat, and finding food took up most of people’s time.’ Her experience is echoed in Ophüls’s documentary by the testimony of Pierre Mendès-France, politician and resistance fighter: ‘It is very difficult to imagine what life was like then … There was
nothing
…
This was a country in which
everyone
spent their
whole
time looking for
everything
.’

Rationing in France, which was imposed by the enemy and did not (unlike British rationing) benefit from the people’s consent, was very stringent. There was no tobacco, for example, a reality that British airmen tended to forget as they busily smoked their way through their hosts’ hard-won cigarettes. Picture the Frenchman desperately trying to find the heroic Englishman his supply by digging out his stubs and rolling new ones with the remaining tobacco. Picture, too, the vast majority of the French population caught up in the business of searching for that lump of butter, or dash of cream, or that sliver of lard to flavour the fricassee or the ragout and supply that tiny drop of pleasure to the palate. The few who chose not to engage in this struggle against dearth hoisted themselves above reality, not with butter or cream or lard, but with
ideas
– of freedom, glory or solidarity – and joined the Resistance.

The precise nature of the idea being fought for varied, of course, and the Resistance movement reflected this diversity, for there was nothing monolithic about it. You could join
Libération
(CDLL) or the OCM (various shades of right) or the
Front National
, the
Franc-Tireur
(various shades of left) or
Combat
(which was somewhere in between). The regions of France tended to be dominated by one or other of these movements, and the ideology you were fighting for – communist, socialist, nationalist or Christian democrat – often depended on
where you happened to be born. As the war went on, an attempt was made to amalgamate these various movements into efficient fighting units. This attempt gave rise to the AS (
Armée Secrète
), the MUR, the FTP and the MOI, most of which became, on the eve of the Allied landings, the FFI (
Force Française de l’Intérieure
). While de Gaulle was busy trying to overcome British scepticism and convince his hosts to put resources behind such a fragmented entity, a popular French song sung by Maurice Chevalier, ‘Ça Fait d’Excellents Français’, ridiculed the French Army for its mindless and debilitating sectarianism: