When Paris Went Dark (12 page)

Garnier’s building was thus an appropriate first stop for another “phantom of the opera.”

Hitler wanted to see examples of Paris’s past, not its present or future, to understand how it had arrived at the center of the world’s urban imagination, how it had melded architecture, ideas, fashion, style, and revolution to become the model of metropolitan sophistication. The Occupation would be defined, in part, by similar attempts at “freezing” Paris in its past, by trying to limit change, ignoring the fact that all metropolises must change in order to prosper. Hitler’s visit, then, introduces two major strategies of the Occupation: one, to keep Paris in stasis as an example of the ideal city, and two, to undermine a metropolis’s most distinctive trait, its porosity—that is, its openness to new ideas and to foreigners.

The Führer’s next stop was down the street from the Opéra. Breker notes that “the Boulevard des Capucines, empty of people, without traffic, seemed a stage set” as they approached the imposing eighteenth-century Église de la Madeleine.
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Again, Hitler jumped out of his car and vigorously mounted the steps to the temple’s portals. Looking southward, he could see the Place de la Concorde, with its Egyptian obelisk, and, farther across the Seine, another eighteenth-century building, the former Palais Bourbon, then the seat of the Chambre des députés (most of whom had by then fled to Bordeaux). The view before him remains one of the most imposing vistas one can enjoy of neoclassical Paris, and it must have been especially compelling then, for there was almost no traffic. It was as if a museumlike replica of Paris had been especially prepared for the Leader’s eye. From there, the cortege
sped down the Rue Royale, past the restaurant Maxim’s, which would become one of the favorite spots of German officials. They circled the impressive Place de la Concorde—where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had lost their heads—passing in front of the Hôtel de Crillon and the Hôtel de la Marine, the first headquarters of the occupying army. At each of the four corners of the grand square stand monuments to the major cities of France, among them Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, then part of the new Reich, as it had been part of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. At the square’s entrance to the city’s most famous thoroughfare, the Champs-Élysées, Hitler’s limousine paused; standing in the car, he grabbed the windshield and gazed pensively at what was before and behind him. His cameras find two or three Parisian police officers on the sidewalk. We do not know if they were there coincidentally or by order. Then a figure in a dark cloak crosses our field of vision, almost certainly a member of a religious order, rushing across the street before the cortege continues.

Gazing at his prize.
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Hitler proceeded slowly up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe.
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The cavalcade approached the Place de l’Étoile, where it slowly circled the Arc de Triomphe, host to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a memorial to a war whose loss Hitler was avenging. For the rest of the Occupation, German civilians and military would obsessively and respectfully visit this site. One of their most frequently photographed Parisian monuments would be the eternal flame, often covered with bouquets and wreaths. It might seem perverse that Germans in the 1940s would show such respect to an army that had defeated them in 1918 until one remembers the fervent belief in military honor that informed the Wehrmacht. For the Nazis, also, such visits and respect were obviously a political move, meant to keep the French as quiescent as possible.

A popular German tourist site.
(Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

By way of the elegant Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo and other Occupation authorities offices were already in residence, and the Avenue Raymond-Poincaré, the cortege arrived at the Place du Trocadéro, a large open space between two curved buildings that provided a magnificent perspective over the Pont d’Iéna and, across the Seine, on to the Eiffel Tower. This should have been a familiar site to Hitler; it certainly was to Speer, for here, in 1937—to showcase Nazi ingenuity and products to the visiting millions—the Germans had erected a massive hall for the international exposition. On Trocadéro Hill, the French government had constructed two enormous buildings, still used today as museums and conference halls. Standing between these curved edifices, one can look down the slope toward the Seine and then across the river up at the imposing Eiffel Tower. Tourists still do it as Hitler did then, with cameras rolling.

By 1940, the fifty-one-year-old Eiffel Tower had become a metonym for Paris. Design experts often stated that, along with Charlie Chaplin’s bowler and Mickey Mouse’s ears, its silhouette was the most recognized in the world’s visual archive. The very “uselessness” and “meaninglessness” (its architecture was without any symbolic interest) of a tower built essentially as an advertisement for an engineer’s genius were suggestive of the contemporary art so despised by Nazi aesthetics. Yet Hitler could not resist—nor could he avoid—posing with the tower in the background. Of the nine times he got out of his car on his tour, this one would produce the most iconic photograph. The juxtaposition of the conqueror of France in a tourist shot with Paris’s best-known monument wavers, once more, between the sinister and the kitschy. Though the photograph became the most reproduced of all the day’s images, its irony was not evident to Hitler and his entourage. Highly desirous of being recognized as connoisseurs of beauty, deeply
moved by their new responsibility to protect the world’s best-loved city, the group was oblivious to the moment’s contradictions. Time and subsequent events would give this famous snapshot an aura of the absurd. Here was Hitler, arrogant yet respectful, a tourist yet a conqueror, posing in front of a French structure whose monumentality belittled him.

A tourist at the Eiffel Tower.
(© AKG Images / The Image Works)

The cortege next crossed the Seine for the first time, traversing the Pont d’Iéna, to stop at the Hôtel des Invalides, constructed by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century for his aged and ill soldiers. Hitler left
his limousine here and walked carefully around the massive church that was at the center of the old soldiers’ home. Ascending the steps on the building’s south side, the group solemnly walked into the massive chapel to look down on the sepulchre of the Führer’s great antecedent. In another of the visit’s most reproduced photographs, a thoughtful Hitler, wearing a light duster rather than the leather coat he had had on earlier, stands out from his entourage. (So many visiting German soldiers would repeat this visit during the Occupation that a wooden covering had to be laid over the chapel’s precious marble floor to protect it from the hobnailed boots of the Teutonic tourists.) Looking down on the porphyry sarcophagus, Hitler must have seen the list of victories inscribed around the emperor’s tomb, one of which is
MOSCOWA
. This staged scene reflects another major strategy of Hitler’s brief visit, namely, to be seen paying respect to a leader who had also sought to create a “new Europe” held together by military strength and his own charismatic leadership. In 1806, prints had been made and published of a similarly somber Napoleon visiting the grave, in Potsdam, of Frederick the Great. The French emperor had also been a radical leader, seeking to derive legitimacy by proximity to the remains of a mythical predecessor.

For a closer look at the sarcophagus, Hitler then descended into the crypt, whose entrance is inscribed with the famous words from Napoleon’s will—
JE DÉSIRE QUE MES CENDRES REPOSENT SUR LES BORDS DE LA SEINE, AU MILIEU DE CE PEUPLE FRANÇAIS QUE J’AI TANT AIMÉ
(May my ashes rest on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I loved so well). Then, leaving the Invalides, the group sped along the fashionable and narrow Rue de Lille, passing by the German embassy, sited in the Hôtel de Beauharnais (another Napoleonic connection; Josephine’s first husband was a Beauharnais), then down the Boulevard Saint-Germain to the Rue Bonaparte and the Latin Quarter.
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The group headed next for the neighborhood of Montparnasse and its well-known expatriate hangout, the Closerie des Lilas, where Hitler teased Breker about his dissolute days as a student in the Latin Quarter. The cars then turned north again to the Île de la Cité, the mythical center of Paris. They cruised past the exquisite thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle, and drove even more slowly in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, but Hitler did not set foot on the Île de la Cité. Was the tour taking too much time? Or was the medieval genius of the place too foreign to his sensibility? He once again impressed his entourage with his knowledge of the rather unknown—and mediocre—Palais du Tribunal de Commerce, another Second Empire building on the island’s Quai de la Corse. (Few Parisians today could tell you where to find the Tribunal de Commerce, or, in fact, what it is.
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Hitler channels Napoleon.
(The Granger Collection)