When Paris Went Dark (17 page)

Yet humor only went so far. On Christmas Eve day in 1940, Parisians awoke to find the following notice pasted on kiosks and in Métro stations:

What strikes us about this announcement is that it does not refer to any political affiliation, nor does it imply that Bonsergent was a terrorist.
He was simply a young French engineer. Parisians were left to wonder whether he had struck a blow for France or whether he had acted out of personal pique.

It remains unclear today as to what happened in the streets abutting the Gare Saint-Lazare that Saturday evening, November 10, when Bonsergent was arrested; official reports and recollections vary. What we can be sure of is that a group of young Frenchmen, coming out of the station after having gone to a wedding in the country, ran into a group of German soldiers heading back to the barracks after a bibulous evening. Liquored up, the groups confronted each other, or bumped into one another, or exchanged a few comments. Bonsergent’s friends skedaddled, but he was caught by the Germans and immediately brought into the lobby of the nearby Hôtel Terminus, where he was held for the military police. He refused to give the names of his comrades, and he was hustled off to Cherche-Midi Prison, on the Boulevard Raspail, in the 6th arrondissement.

Unfortunately for Bonsergent, two significant events occurred between his rather routine arrest and his surprising death sentence. The day after he was caught, World War I Armistice Day, students rallied on the Champs-Élysées for the first—and, during the Germans’ reign over Paris, the only—large popular demonstration against the Occupiers. The exodus had wound down, families were returning to their city, and schools were reopening, though later than normal. Arguments were increasingly heated as a wide range of French men and women—pacifists, “wait-and-see” holdouts, anti-German patriots, Communists, and even vigorous supporters of the new Vichy regime—worried more and more openly over the military and political debacles they had just seen take place. Many frustrated and angry young Parisians saw the annual celebration of Armistice Day as the perfect moment to show French solidarity against the German presence in their city. Primarily at the initiative of high school and university students, the word passed quickly that a large crowd would march up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and, on their way, lay flowers at the statue of the great prime minister Georges Clemenceau, leader of France in
late 1918, when Germany had had to sign its own armistice. Sometime on November 8, the only “call to arms” that historians have been able to track down was distributed in lycées and universities across the city:

Having heard rumblings of such an event, the Free French in London encouraged, by way of the BBC, a big turnout. (Subsequent investigations have left doubts about how many Parisians actually heard the BBC’s call to demonstrate.) Estimates vary, but perhaps as many as one thousand to three thousand young people showed up, first to lay wreaths at the statue of Clemenceau and then to continue their march up the wide avenue to the Arc de Triomphe.
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“The Marseillaise,” by then outlawed by the Vichy government, was whistled, sung, and played on improvised instruments. Many students carried two fishing poles, called
gaules
, signaling with their
deux gaules
solidarity with de Gaulle, the increasingly well-known general who spoke to the French frequently from London.

But the Vichy government had heard of the possible demonstration and had warned the Paris police and the Germans. As a result, the authorities were waiting for the crowd. Initially surprised at the numbers, the police soon realized that the group was not organized; composed of many small groups of friends, classmates, members of youth organizations, and so forth, the march was easy to disrupt by police action. At first the French police seemed to have everything
under control, but soon the crowd felt the stern hand of German police and soldiers who charged the groups as they approached the Arc. The demonstrators scattered. Some were protected by merchants who opened their doors; other merchants and bystanders pointed out the miscreants. Those who could not escape felt the blows of police billy clubs and fists. The authorities fired shots, and several youngsters were wounded. As always, among the victims were the innocent. I was told of one mother, out shopping, who was caught in the crossfire and shot in the thigh; she would have bled to death had not bystanders waved down a car to take her to a hospital. How many of the
manifestants
were killed, if any, has never been confirmed.

The other significant event that had an effect on poor Bonsergent’s fate was that Philippe Pétain and his Vichy ministers had insulted Hitler by not showing up to receive Napoleon’s ashes on December 14–15, 1940. The commander of occupied France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, under intense pressure from Berlin for being too soft toward such incipient expressions—nonviolent and violent—of noncompliance and rebellion, decided to make an example of young Bonsergent, and he did. The French had their first “resistance” hero—one with the solid and popular name of Jacques and a patronymic that implied decency and military rank.

By midwinter of 1940–41, days had indeed shortened; surprise arrests had become more frequent; friends and colleagues had disappeared into the Parisian prison system; sentences had been meted out for purported offenses toward the Occupation authorities; but no one had yet been put to death for them. The authorities’ poster had announced not only the death of a young professional but also the beginning of the end of the “correct” minuet that had theretofore defined the Occupation.

A minuet demands exquisite timing and subtle appreciation of the movements of one’s partner. It permits a limited number of steps; it suggests intimacy without allowing it. It is the perfect dance for strangers or almost strangers; whether or not a second dance follows depends on the comfort established with the moves and signals of the first.
Minuets were meant to introduce casual acquaintances at large gatherings; if nothing came of one dance, then the disappointed twosome sulked patiently and waited for better partners. Yet in this case, for one of the minuet’s participants, the dance was not one in which there could be a voluntary separation. The darkness that blanketed Paris was increasingly both tangible and intangible. More lights were soon to be extinguished, and the minuet would cease.

In 1937, for the last great international exposition before the war, Germany had been invited to build a massive pavilion just below the promenade on the Place du Trocadéro, where Hitler would stand for his iconic photograph on June 28, 1940, during his brief visit to Paris. (Opposite this Speer-designed edifice of fascist taste and ideology would stand the USSR pavilion, topped by striding figures carrying the hammer and sickle.) One imaginative historian has insinuated that this pavilion represented the first “occupation” of Paris by the Germans. She argues that one of the main aims of the Third Reich’s participation was to persuade the French of Germany’s kinship as a cultural innovator and respecter of tradition.
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Thousands of Hitler Youth were ferried to Paris for the fair; many of them would be back in just a few years for another sort of tourism.

The Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 had already impressed the world with the talents of Hitler’s master image-führer, Joseph Goebbels, who brilliantly combined international spectacle with fascist ideology. The Paris Exposition, though on foreign soil, would provide Goebbels with another venue in which to dazzle the world with the positive qualities of National Socialism. And there was one more way in to the French political psyche for the Nazis: pacifism was a dominant political sentiment in the late 1930s. This tendency allowed Hitler to encourage the French to let him continue his machinations in central and eastern Europe without interruption. It is hard today to overestimate the vigor, passion, and confidence felt by many French pacifists during this period. Their nation had barely survived the First World War, having been almost bled to death. No matter how often we read them, the statistics stun: 1.4 million dead (almost all young men), 4.3 million wounded, three hundred thousand civilians killed or dying from the war’s effects. The military casualties came to about 20 percent of the male population and about 10 percent of the population of France as a whole—by far the largest casualty rate of any of the Allies. As a result, after the war the nation was severely fearful of being overtaken demographically and industrially by its archrival. Yet strangely enough, the same French were supremely confident that they had emerged stronger militarily than their German rivals, especially given the strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919; they now read the German effort to impress through cultural activity—perhaps naively—as a tentative foundation for a peaceful Europe, despite Hitler’s rants about lebensraum (living space for a growing German population), and Jews.

Exposition of 1937: Germany confronts the USSR.
(© LAPI / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

International expositions were supposed to encourage peace among nations, emphasizing what they had in common and diminishing jingoistic reflexes. German visitors to Paris during the 1937 exposition were greeted with open arms, and, though the Spanish pavilion featured Picasso’s devastatingly pertinent painting
Guernica
(about the cruel bombing of that little town by the fascists), the tendency was to think positively, not defensively, about a resurgent Germany.
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Of course, we do not know if the future Occupation of Paris was then well formed in the collective minds of the Nazi leadership, but certainly every attempt was made by the Nazis to attenuate international anxiety about their cultural, political, and, especially, military intentions. The massiveness of their pavilion, its emphasis on up-to-date technology, and its attempts at being “modern” and “traditional” at the same time made a hugely favorable impression on the French. Even though the German pavilion contained not one photograph or other likeness of Hitler—its primary symbols being the striking swastika and eagle—his muscular presence was subtly felt. The legacy of this exposition would last until the first Germans marched into Paris only three years later to find many French citizens more than curious about how the occupier might bring a similar order to the chaos of a humiliated France. This state of affairs played a major role in the early success of the Occupation.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Paris was where Germans went to break out of the moral and artistic strictures imposed by the Nazis. Returning as conquerors reminded them of that freedom. Words like “paradise on earth” and “jewel” pepper the letters and memoirs of the first Germans to walk the streets of Paris in uniform. Even Goebbels’s irrepressible braggadocio was muted:
“Paris ist gefallen”
(Paris has fallen) was so somberly repeated on German radio on June 14, 1940, that it was a while before Germans went into the streets in celebration. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of Nazism, many young Germans from the upper middle classes and the aristocracy had spent time studying in Paris. “Paris envy” was a strong neurosis of the German imagination, and this state of mind never fully diminished until the last of them had slipped out of the city in late August of 1944.

Hitler’s racial obsessions, unsurprisingly, carried over to his view of the French “race,” which he believed had mixed unhealthily with
Neger
and Jewish blood. There were no more Joan of Arcs or Sun Kings for other nations to emulate. Paris had become so preoccupied with itself and its uniqueness that it had lost its sense of “Frenchness,” which, for these observers, was derived from the hardworking, deeply religious, traditional peasantry. The latter had become frustrated with Paris and its demands on the rest of the nation; Hitler believed and insisted that when German soldiers and bureaucrats confronted the French they should be careful to distinguish between Parisians and their compatriots in the provinces. Observers such as Friedrich Sieburg, in his
Gott in Frankreich?
(God in France?), had revealed themselves impatient with the “myth of Paris,” with its claim to superiority over other European cities and its casual disregard, as is clear in its history of revolts, for authority and stability. We have seen how metropolises were antithetical to Nazi ideology; the German city was not where the Nazis had found their most fervent supporters. Cities have always been resistant to autocratic control, and Hitler mistrusted them. A self-confident Paris would be even more threatening than other cities. And
Paris in particular was too “metropolitan”; its porousness had invited too many Slavs, Arabs, Asians, Africans, and Jews into its compass. General Fedor von Bock, the officer in command of troops entering Paris for the first time, had met Hitler in early June in Brussels and remarked later that the Führer was worried about the city, about its potential for taking his victory away from him.

At the height of the Occupation there may have been as many as twenty thousand German personnel in the city: everyone from the highest echelons of the Wehrmacht to the lowliest ranks of the supply offices. Ambassadors; representatives of all of the Reich’s most powerful ministries; female secretaries, telephone operators, and nurses; medical personnel; archivists; intelligence officers; Gestapo; censors—the list was endless.
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What was daily life like for these servants of the Reich? At first, they were delighted to be in a country with so many available consumer items; Germany had been at war for more than a year, and the sight of such excess meant that most of those first appointed to Paris spent every spare minute in department stores and other shops. The German mark had been set at a favorable rate vis-à-vis the French franc, and soon more Germans than French were shopping. This may have been the source of the first popular resentment toward the Occupier—a sense of “We know you are here because your army was stronger than ours, but it’s quite another thing to appropriate buildings, apartments, goods, and foodstuffs because you have the power to do so.” This negative dynamic soon became dominant, and more Parisians began to feel despoiled, insulted, and humiliated. The photographs of Germans browsing through the typical Seine bookstalls, negotiating with the
bouquinistes,
are only one example of how intrusive the military uniform must have been. Even when one tried to forget that “they” were there, an unanticipated sighting could throw one back into the state of despondency that afflicts the
inhabitants of any occupied city. Many Germans understood this and went out of their way to be polite, helpful, and engaging to Parisians. But more often than not, these generous acts only reinforced the frustration and embarrassment of those under the thumb of a hateful bureaucracy.

Passing time.
(Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

There was also the black market, in which Germans were involved both officially and unofficially. The Occupiers had decided that they could not stop the surreptitious purchase and exchange of goods and services, so they set up special units that took advantage of shortages from black marketers and bought themselves. To a large extent this
strategy worked, but what it gained for the German economy it may have lost in terms of offering an unflattering image of the German as just another wartime hustler angling for a good deal.

The Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich
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had taken for their headquarters Paris’s tourist gems, its
grands hôtels:
the Majestic, the George V, the Prince de Galles, the Meurice, the Continental, the Lutétia, and others. They also requisitioned dozens of smaller hotels throughout the city, both for the office and living space these institutions immediately provided and because this strategy emphasized the connection between cultural tourism and military occupation. The Germans were there to stay, but only temporarily; they were visitors, yet they were permanent reminders of Paris’s humiliation. Using tourism as a means of taming an occupied city is subtle and has psychological as well as practical consequences. Once the hard work of conquering has been done, the idea that one can enjoy a major cultural capital as a consuming visitor relieves a nagging guilt. It connects to the fanciful notion, in the minds of the Occupiers, that Parisians were, if not happy, at least complacent about the presence of so many Germans. “After all, you and your fellows are our best customers.”

Within weeks of taking over the city, German diarists, journalists, essayists, and bureaucrats evinced an almost palpable need to describe what they found and how they felt. Most of them took up many of Friedrich Sieburg’s assumptions, expressing their own fears that they might be seduced by a painted woman while trying to appreciate the art, history, and culture of Europe’s most admired city. This trepidation worked at all levels: French women were generally criticized because of their makeup and seductive fashions; it was suggested that Zazous, young men who dressed in zoot suits and wore long hair, should be sent to work in Germany. Too much emphasis was placed on eating as a form of entertainment, on cuisine as an art form. Yes, all this had made the city great, but such a laissez-faire culture could be detrimental to the morals of young
Soldaten
coming into Paris on
permanent assignment or on leave. The Occupation authority immediately published guidebooks in German for Reich visitors to the newly occupied city, including lists and descriptions of its most “decadent” attractions (e.g., approved brothels for its officers and their men), and Paris was soon filled with camera-toting, bargain-seeking, question-asking, and naively curious German-speaking visitors. For the typical soldier, photographs were their diaries, and we know that there were thousands upon thousands sent back home. Perhaps the German propaganda arm wanted to encourage their soldiers to further appropriate Paris and its environs by use of the omnipresent camera. The Wehrmacht provided specially made photograph albums to their soldiers (many of these have been on sale at auction houses and on the Internet for years). Like any tourist, the soldiers in these modest records banally “naturalized” their presence in an unfamiliar and intimidating environment.

A second wave of soldiers on leave, along with civilian visitors from Germany and Austria, followed the initial invaders, but Parisians continued to resist seeing their occupied city as a tourist destination for their enemies. Stories about Parisians misdirecting the frequently disoriented German abound: “Yesterday, in the Métro, a German soldier was hovering over his guide to Paris. He finally asked a laborer where the Bréguet-Sabin station was. The old guy told him, but the German couldn’t understand. Then, overflowing with a sincere concern: ‘My poor boy. What an idiot you are. What the hell are you doing here?’ ”
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In 1968, the novelist Patrick Modiano chose as the title of his first novel
La Place de l’Étoile,
the punch line of a well-known anecdote. A German tourist approaches a Jew to ask where the famous place is. The young man points to his heart and says, “Here,” referring, of course, to the yellow star that Jews had been made to wear.

The same scene had repeated itself all over France; tightly disciplined formations of gray-green-clad, sturdy, and healthy young men marched by the thousands throughout a country still reeling from defeat and embarrassment. Goebbels and his sophisticated cadre of propagandists were well aware of the power that the city then had on the world’s cultural imagination. He wanted the world to recognize—and
be relieved—that the Nazis appreciated that Paris was part of the international patrimony. (In fact, he may well have ordered that the Wehrmacht select its best-looking soldiers to be the first to enter and march in the capital.
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But within the confines of a hypersophisticated capital city, their presence brought even more pride to the victor and a complicated combination of curiosity, apprehension, and shame to the Parisians. Very quickly, almost as if another Blitzkrieg had taken place, the German military had not only marched in with arrogant precision but also established itself “in the very interstices of daily life.”
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And they were there for the duration—not here and gone but established. This is the slowly understood certainty that forced Parisians to realize that their city, though unharmed and still familiar, was no longer theirs but rather
theirs.

To further confound things, rules on informal interaction between Parisians and Germans were never made clear. Of course, the commander of
Gross Paris
promulgated warnings about inappropriate resistance to the authority of his troops, but the codes and protocols of day-to-day relations between citizen and soldier were left to the participants to establish. What rights did the citizen have to resist inappropriate orders or actions on the part of the German soldiers? Was a simple argument between a German and a Parisian a matter for harsh justice? What if a German soldier harassed a young Parisian woman or a woman refused his advances by making fun of him in public? Who had priority waiting in line or taking a seat in a bus or on the Métro? German punctiliousness often protected the daily civil rights of Parisian citizens, while German obsession with order undermined the greater freedoms of assembly, publication, and political action.

The average occupier was not a faceless Nazi focused on reducing French society to penury and humiliation. We, and especially the French, often accept a monolithic image of German repression, disdain,
and cruelty. Such an image enables us to remember history only superficially, and it deprives us of a more dimensional evaluation of the infinite variety of interactions that occurred during the four years of the Occupation of Paris. We must remind ourselves, too, that even though Nazi aesthetics and racial policy held that the French were racially weakened, they were still considered at least “cousins” to the Germans. In German terms, as we have seen, the French were like distaff relatives who had failed to guard the Teutonic side of their heritage and had allowed themselves to “degenerate” from pure origins. Nevertheless, Paris beckoned to the prim German ethos as though it were a huge amusement park.

The Wehrmacht had gone out of its way to provide special canteens for their soldiers; cinemas, theaters, and cabarets had been set aside for them, and they would have access to the French ones that had quickly reopened. Certain movie houses were set aside for German audiences only, the most prominent being the enormous Grand Rex on the Boulevard de Poissonnière, which held more than 2,500 seats. The Germans requisitioned it for their troops, on assignment and visiting; it became the most popular
deutsches Soldatenkino
in Paris, so much so that the Resistance chose it for a major bombing attempt in late 1942, which killed or wounded more than a hundred Germans waiting in line.

In essence, the Germans appropriated a vibrant, heterogeneous metropolis and then attempted to fix and stabilize the imagined version of Paris that had existed in the collective memory of the cultured world. In doing so the Occupier sought, intuitively or purposefully, to vitiate the unpredictable energy that defines metropolises and thus to provide more security for his own purposes. The Occupiers wanted to unmake dynamic Paris, to create a static simulacrum, while preserving for their own enjoyment some of its most engagingly decadent attractions (jazz clubs, cabarets, bordellos).
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