When Paris Went Dark (2 page)

Berthe Auroy:
Retired Parisian schoolteacher

Simone de Beauvoir:
Novelist and essayist

Hélène Berr:
Jewish teenager

Brassaï:
Photographer

Jean Bruller (aka Vercors):
Author and
résistant

Albert Camus:
Author and clandestine editor

Jacques Chirac:
Fifth president of the French Fifth Republic, 1995–2007

Jean Cocteau:
Poet, dramatist, and filmmaker

Colette:
Novelist and journalist

Marguerite Duras:
Writer and
résistante

Charles de Gaulle:
Leader of the Free French; first president of the Fifth Republic

Benoîte and Flora Groult:
Novelists and journalists; sisters

Jean Guéhenno:
Lycée instructor; diarist

François Hollande:
Seventh president of the French Fifth Republic, 2012–

Dominique Jamet:
Commentator who writes about his youth in occupied Paris

Vivienne Jamet:
Bordello madam; no relation to Dominique

Maurice Jouhandeau:
Pro-Vichy author and professor

Sarah Kofman:
Philosopher and memoirist

Roger Langeron:
Prefect of Paris police when Germans arrived

Pierre Laval:
Two-time president of Council of Ministers under Pétain

Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque:
Commanded Deuxième Division Blindée (Second Armored Division), which helped liberate Paris

Jacques Lusseyran:
Blind teenager who ran one of the largest resistance groups

Missak Manouchian:
Resistance leader; born in Armenia

François Mitterrand:
Fourth president of the French Fifth Republic (1981–95), early member of Vichy government and later a
résistant

Guy Môquet:
Teenage
résistant

Philippe Pétain:
President of the État français (Vichy); hero of Verdun (World War I)

Georges Pompidou:
Second president of the French Fifth Republic (1969–1974)

Henri Rol-Tanguy:
Communist and leader of the Free French Forces at the Liberation

Nicolas Sarkozy:
Sixth president of the French Fifth Republic (2007–12)

Jean-Paul Sartre:
Philosopher

Liliane Schroeder:
Parisian memoirist

Françoise Siefridt:
Parisian teenager

Jean Texcier:
Journalist

Jacques Yonnet:
Writer and
résistant

André Zucca:
Photographer

Otto Abetz:
Third Reich’s ambassador to France

Arno Breker:
Sculptor

Dietrich von Choltitz:
Commander of Paris at the Liberation

Joseph Goebbels:
Head of Reich’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

Hermann Göring:
Head of the Luftwaffe; heir apparent to Hitler

Felix Hartlaub:
Historian and soldier assigned to Paris

Gerhard Heller:
Propaganda bureaucrat in Paris

Adolf Hitler:
Tourist

Ernst Jünger:
Novelist and aide-de-camp to military administrator of Paris

Friedrich Sieburg:
Author of
Gott in Frankreich?
(To Live Like God in France)

Albert Speer:
Hitler’s architect and city planner

Hans Speidel:
Chief of staff to general commanding German troops in France

Josephine Baker:
American entertainer in Paris; member of the Resistance

Jacques Biélinky:
Russian-Jewish journalist

Dora Bruder:
Immigrant Jewish teenager and runaway

William Bullitt:
American ambassador to France at time of Occupation

Edmond Dubois:
Swiss journalist; visited Paris often during the Occupation

Hélène Elek:
Hungarian-born mother of Thomas Elek

Thomas Elek:
Teenage
résistant
and member of the Manouchian Group

Janet Flanner:
Columnist for
The New Yorker;
Genêt was her pseudonym

Albert Grunberg:
Jewish barber who hid in an attic room on the Left Bank of Paris for two years

Ernest Hemingway:
American novelist

A. J. Liebling:
American journalist

Irène Némirovsky:
Russian novelist and Jewish; wrote in French; deported from France and died in concentration camp

Raoul Nordling:
Swedish diplomat in Paris during the Liberation

Pablo Picasso:
Spanish artist

Gertrude Stein:
American novelist and essayist

My affection for and personal experience of Paris led me to wonder what it would have been like to live there under German Occupation during the Second World War. I remember being an especially green and curious twenty-year-old Alabaman walking along the Boulevard Saint-Germain on the Left Bank in the early 1960s. I noticed the evidence of the intense street battles that had briefly occurred in the Latin Quarter at the city’s liberation in late August of 1944. I would look for traces of the impact made by shrapnel and bullets on the grand facades of those magnificent buildings that led up to the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Plaques on buildings all through the 5th and 6th arrondissements announced that some young man or other had died near that spot at the hand of retreating German soldiers or Vichy supporters. But it was not until I had read more about that war, and about the destruction of other major European cities by both Axis and Allied powers, that I began to wonder how Paris had managed to survive the twentieth century’s greatest conflagration almost unscathed.

On my way to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, I had stayed for about six weeks with a family in Dijon, the capital of Burgundy. There I heard for the first time about the military occupation of France from those who had lived it. The mayor of Dijon was a cleric, Canon Félix Kir (for whom France’s popular aperitif is named), who welcomed our group of young Americans to the city hall. Before we went, my host family informed me that their mayor was a hero of the Resistance; that
a group of French hirelings of the Vichy government had tried to assassinate him at one point, but the wallet (some said a breviary) he carried near his heart had stopped the bullet. Every Dijonnais knew the story.

The head of my host family would take me into the woods of Burgundy to show us the place where he and his young friends used to lie in wait for German traffic. At the same time, the family and I would watch news reports of young African Americans standing courageously against the brutality of segregation. It was during this period that the Birmingham, Alabama, civil rights demonstrations were at their height. At the same time, the Algerian War, during which Algerians tried to push the French off the African continent after more than a century of colonialism, had just ended. I found myself trying to define, as a son of the state governed callously by George Wallace, what was just becoming clearer to me—namely, that the South was changing, and radically so, while my host family was explaining patiently how Algeria was really French. I was explaining the South’s slow progress toward equality; my hosts were trying to justify benevolent colonialism. But we both agreed on one thing: the Nazis had been evil, and Europe and America had done well to rid that continent of Hitler and his cohort. Though blind to our own partial answers about contemporary social change, we were, on the other hand, confidently in solidarity about the German Occupation of France.

I remember, too, that while roaming France and Paris I would frequently find myself before some centrally located monument, maybe one that was topped by a stone sentinel, bearing an endless list of names of people from that community—many with the same patronyms—who had been lost during the great conflict of 1914–18. The towns and villages and cities of that epoch had officially remembered every local male who had died or disappeared during that horrendous conflict. Standing before these sad memorials, I wondered why there were not similar monuments raised to the local casualties of the Second World War. Yes, in post offices and other official buildings, in museums and some schools, we find names of those affiliated with a particular institution who died during World War II; but, more often than not, that list is tacked onto a First World War plaque or monument almost as an
afterthought. Furthermore, the lists are for the most part composed of names of those who died in deportation or who publicly or violently resisted the Occupation. Rarely do you find lists of the region’s military who died during the war. One senses the lack of a widespread communal and patriotic desire to remember, as if World War II had had a much more modest impact on national and local history.

This should not be surprising. Even today, the French endeavor both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philippe Pétain, the recently appointed head of the moribund Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty—known by all as the Armistice—had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape. The word
collaboration
(the Germans first used
Zusammenarbeit,
“working together”) evolved into an epithet. One French veteran told me, with conviction, that it might have been better, at least for French memory and morale, had an armistice never been signed—had the French fought to defend Paris, then the Loire Valley, then central France, retreating, if necessary, all the way to the Mediterranean and North Africa.

But the Third Republic did sign this agreement, and it did agree to an administrative division of French territory, and it did legally vote to end the Third Republic itself, established in 1871 after an ignominious defeat by the Prussians the previous year. For the first time since the Renaissance, France in 1940 was a geographically incoherent nation.
^*
This administrative and geographical division would be replicated as a moral and psychological division for decades after the war as collective memory endeavored to rewrite history.

France dissected.
(Creative Commons)

In what ways did Paris in 1940 pass from being a city known for its freedoms to a closed, uncanny, unfamiliar place? What effect did the open-endedness of the Occupation, the uncertainty of its duration, have on Parisian daily life? And how did this “uncanniness” affect both Parisians and their occupiers? Films and novels, memoirs and diaries, photographs and letters of the period, all make some reference to how the atmosphere of the City of Light changed with the arrival of German soldiers and, soon afterward, of the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus. To the
Parisian, the Germans might have been ethnic “cousins,” but they were not French, and they certainly were not Parisians. Not since the late Middle Ages, during the Hundred Years’ War, had the city had so many unwanted military visitors for such an undetermined spate of time. That, coupled with factors such as curfews, food shortages, air raid drills, a lack of automobiles, and the “repedestrianization” of a modern metropolis, turned the city into a quiet, eerie warren of sinister places and anxious citizens. Questions and facts such as these have guided my research and the story I relate.

Since the sixteenth century, Paris had become the standard by which other European cities—and, eventually, other world cities—measured themselves, both in terms of its aesthetic qualities and its political shenanigans. It was a very old capital city, attaining its permanent status as such at the beginning of the sixth century during the reign of Clovis I. Every French monarch since then had enhanced his reputation by spending lavishly on marking Paris as a major cultural and commercial center. Beginning in the Renaissance, French became the lingua franca of the European intelligentsia, gradually replacing Latin. French adventures abroad had shown that the nation could mount formidable obstacles to the incursions of their neighbors. The French had established massive colonies in America and had followed the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch as international entrepreneurs and colonial capitalists. For more than three hundred years Paris had created the impression that it was the European center for luxury, fine living, subtle diplomacy, advances in science, and innovations in philosophy. It became a beacon for all those who were “trapped” in less progressive nations. During the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Paris’s philosophes had shown that the city, though under the rule of an absolute monarch, was a center of progressive ideas, and this well-deserved reputation had mesmerized the world. From around 1750, to go to Paris for study and conversation was a sign of intellectual adventure and seriousness. On the other hand, Paris was a city that seemed addicted to revolt if not revolution; it had to put its ideas into action.

Largely because of this history, Paris was, of all of the capital cities that suffered during the Second World War, the most beloved, most familiar, and most mythical in the eyes of the world. Warsaw Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Prague—all fiercely occupied by the Nazis—were not as much in the world’s concerned gaze. To watch as the Luftwaffe bombed London in 1940–41 evoked massive anger on behalf of those who treasured the cultural patrimony of that large city; though relentlessly attacked, London would never be occupied. Leningrad would be surrounded, starved, and bombarded for almost a thousand days, but never occupied. Moscow would be within hours of being seized before Stalin finally eked out a vicious defense. But by mid-June of 1940, the Germans—the Nazis—were strolling comfortably through the boulevards and gardens of Paris. The fear that Paris, too, might be bombarded had waned, but the images of its Occupation evinced, from Buenos Aires to Shanghai, a different sort of visceral protectiveness on behalf of Europe’s urban jewel.

The historian Philippe Burrin describes three approaches to writing a history of military occupation: the first is to elucidate through comparison—that is, to use a variety of examples that will illuminate constants and differences; the second is to describe “the structural effects of occupation on the occupied society’s environment and living conditions”; and the third is to call on what he describes as “the face-to-face interaction between occupiers and occupied people, dealing with both groups on the level of… lived experience and symbolic representation.”
²
When Paris Went Dark
falls within the third group and has cousinship to the second. This narrative aims to give an account of how the Parisians viewed the Germans and vice versa; of how the Parisian figured out a code of daily conduct toward his nemesis and effected it; of how the citizen of the Occupation handled his psychological and emotional responses to the presence of a powerful enemy; and of how each side perpetuated real and symbolic violence on the other. A prominent French historian of the “black years” noted that “an occupation is not defined alone as the imposition of a foreign authority over individuals. It is first and foremost the
investment
^*
of a space, taking possession of a place, the affirmation of a presence by its signs and its symbols.”
³
Are we capable of imagining and describing the claustrophobic trauma of living in a familiar environment that has suddenly become threatening? One chronicler of the period, writing in 1945, thinks not: “[The psychological atmosphere] of Paris during the Occupation… changed from one year to the next, one month to the next, and, in critical periods one hour to the other. No one, no matter his or her learning or his or her intuition, is capable of evoking that atmosphere if he had not himself breathed it.”
⁴
This is the challenge to the contemporary chronicler: how to depict the intangible qualities, often inarticulately expressed, of a military occupation. Improvised hiding places, prison cells, hotels, doorways, elevators, apartments, cemeteries, schools, convents, theaters, offices, nightclubs, bomb shelters, sewers, Métro stations, restaurants, cabarets, bordellos, bookstores, arcades, department stores, small shops, automobiles, public parks, public bathrooms—all demanded a new ecology of the Occupation, underlining how systemic such an event was.

In order to help my readers learn about Paris’s topography, then and now, I have cited specifically the quarters, neighborhoods, and arrondissements (administrative sections) of the city in which the events occurred. Parisians know the personality, the history, and the social identity of each of these divisions. The Occupation authorities’ intention—though often haphazardly implemented—was to reduce spatial freedom. An occupying force cannot allow the free use of public spaces, and it makes every effort to restrict the liberties one expects in private spaces. Spatial disorientation brought the disintegration of psychic comfort, thereby multiplying the oppressive effect of being occupied. As one astute teenager noticed: “The silence caught you by the throat, made sadness press into your thoughts. The houses had grown too tall, the streets too wide. People were separated from each other by spaces that were too big. Even the air which flowed down the
empty streets was furtive and kept its secrets.”
⁵
The natural rhythms of life in rural settings—e.g., seasons, diurnal and nocturnal changes, large open spaces—can sequester daily living from constant surveillance and interruption, but those patterns do not pertain for an urban existence. Early twentieth-century sociologists of everyday city life attempted to isolate and define the perpetual discomfort that can prevent one from feeling at home in a modern city. Many of their observations pertain even more so to a city under military, cultural, and political control by an outsider.