When Paris Went Dark (24 page)

Waiting in line is not just about waiting in line. Indeed, the psychological stress of those waiting for service or a product is a major subject of marketing research. What happens when we wait in line? Why we are obsessed with lines that move faster than ours? Why will we always choose the shorter one, even if the longer is moving and the shorter one isn’t? When standing in line, we also become more judgmental of others: the lady who opens her chaotic purse only when she reaches the cashier; the guy with expired coupons; the person who asks questions but cannot understand the answers; and so forth. Waiting in line makes us impatient and unfriendly—our greatest fear is that the line will stop right before we get to it: the cashier will take a break, or the produce we are waiting to buy will be sold out. One can only imagine how these stresses were multiplied in a period where waiting in line could mean the difference between sickness and health or even life and death. The lines were not only sources of information about supplies, but also sites of potential danger, especially if one happened to say something one shouldn’t have said. Every memoir, journal, or work of fiction about the Occupation mentions the trouble, if not anxiety, of waiting in line. Lengthy and slow lines in an occupied city reinforce the idea of being a prisoner, of having one’s will continuously thwarted. The Occupiers knew that lines were a means of control—of one’s time, one’s space, and one’s desires.

Given the situation, the Parisians’ famous système D (
système de débrouillage;
a system for getting by) kicked in, and myriad methods were invented for beating the lines. Professional “waiters” offered for a fee to stand in line; others brought small chairs on which to sit; children were used as placeholders; some, if able, even rented hotel or other rooms near popular bakeries and butcher shops. One concierge rented out her basement for those who wanted to be first in line for the horse butcher across the street. Then there were the bumptious, who broke in line or used pregnancy, military or civil decorations, or a physical handicap to push ahead. Complaints to the French or German police often led to shouting matches and threats of fistfights or hair-pulling. Vichy, always sensitive to public opinion, was especially nervous about the threat of civil unrest. They believed that arbitrary action by the Germans would pit the French state against its own people, further weakening its slowly declining prestige. Low morale—brought on by having to wait in line for inferior or unavailable products—could lead to a resistance that would reveal the tenuousness of the Vichy state’s control of the French.

In a remarkably prescient 1941 book,
La Queue
(The Line), censored and thus unpublished during the Occupation, the journalist and novelist Paul Achard described the pervasiveness of standing in line as part of Parisian culture during the war. He presents conversations overheard while waiting in line, suggesting, among other things, that those interminable periods, those lost minutes and hours, provided the gossip necessary to overcome the paucity of credible news from official reports, radio broadcasts, and newspapers. A new type of solidarity was implicit in queuing up, a replacement for forbidden political gatherings. The lines forced people, mostly strangers, to be close to each other, which meant that Parisians were more sensorially aware of those around them. Queuers could check out clothing to see how their fellows were making do in a city known for fashion. They caught each other’s scent, touched each other, and exchanged meaningful glances. Social hierarchy became muddled. It was often unwise to talk about anything in line other than the weather; but waiting in line was infinitely boring if one could not chat. Parisians endured the queue, so
derided and hated, as “a course in philosophy, [fomenting] eloquence, self-control, courage, and patience. Its motto should be ‘Wait [in order to] do without.’ ”
²⁶

Lines, lines, lines…
(Roger Schall / Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The line was a sign, too, of how much a wealthy agricultural nation had been looted by a foreign enemy; a reminder of the scarcity, lack of choice, and humiliation imposed daily on a proud populace that had theretofore been vigorous and selective. Waiting in line had its own rules; casual conversation—especially complaining—was at first forbidden in the lines. Orderly queues must be maintained; a slight infraction could mean being asked to leave. There are many tales of
breaking curfew in order to be first in line, of having to pay someone to hold your place while you went to stand in another queue for another product, and of having to keep your children close at hand in the cold or rain because there was no one with whom to leave them. The French police often watched lines closely. Body language and whispering became the primary modes of communication. As the Occupation continued, official Paris viewed lines as potential congregations of malcontents.

Most of those in line, of course, were women. As noted earlier, Paris—indeed, all of France—had been severely “de-manned” by the war and its effects. By the fall of 1940, more than a million men were in stalags and
oflags
(for officers) in Germany, far from their homeland; about two-thirds of them would remain five years in captivity. In addition, women had few political or financial rights in France during this period, so they had to learn how to “be a man” in a very short time while continuing their traditional roles as homemakers and nourishers. In the countryside, they were responsible for everything from clearing fields to bringing in harvests. In the city, they were forced to leave their homes, often in the face of criticism from traditionalists, to earn a living. Taking care of young ones was difficult, especially when school was not in session. Despite the Vichy regime’s emphasis on maternity and the hearth as the centers of French life, the state provided little social or financial support to these overwhelmed women. It is no wonder that so many “little Fritzes,” offspring of French women and Germans, were born during this period. Finding succor demanded compromises that would not be respected at the war’s end.

The food line was where female solidarity had its most palpable manifestation. More concerned about unhappy men—released and wounded prisoners, crucial employees, and others—the Germans and their Vichy supporters overlooked the potential for disruption inherent in a line of tired, frustrated, and angry women. Since everyone—or at least everyone who was not actively cooperating with the Germans or the Vichy government—had to wait, social orderliness and excessive politeness were imposed on those who lined up. But there was also a barely hidden assertiveness required to maintain one’s place or even to
squeeze up. (This collective cultural memory affects Parisians even today; it does not pay to allow your mind to wander when waiting in a French queue.) Standing in line was useless unless one had “tickets,” or ration cards, with their scissorable sections marked with dates and amounts. The merchants wore scissors around their necks, tools soon recognized as the symbols of the inevitable amputation of one’s access to food or clothes or shoes or fabric. The daily papers were filled with warnings and stories about stolen packets of tickets, counterfeit tickets, and the black market for tickets. Elsa Triolet, poet and wife of the poet Louis Aragon, wrote that
tickettomanie
(ticketmania) had taken over France.
²⁷
That’s all people wanted to talk about, she reported; some even waited in line because it broke the monotony of their day. Others took tickets worth nothing in their own provinces and traveled to places where they were worth more. Dinner invitations would often have a request printed next to the RSVP that asked the guest to bring tickets for 250 grams of bread.

Standing in line was not optional; it was a necessity of daily life. And it exposed the individual citizen by taking her out of the relative comfort of her home. If a mother could not find a friendly neighbor or concierge to take care of her children, they had to accompany her. To lose one’s place in line was a small tragedy, so children had to learn to stand like soldiers, holding hands, not daring to leave their mothers or fathers. Often children were sent to stand in line themselves, but there was always the danger that adults, including merchants, would take advantage of them. Because of their small hands, easily adaptable to the minute artisanry needed for forgery, some children were urged to counterfeit the stamps necessary to print phony tickets. Merchants were often sharper at discerning these games than the officials themselves.

“Everything is heard in line,” wrote Achard, and this, of course, is where rumors could most efficiently be passed on.
²⁸
Parisians were desperate for news affecting them directly—news about curfews, shortages, arrests, the war, the progress of the Allies—and the effectiveness and speed of reports true and false remain stunning to students of the period. But there were also spies in those lines, official and unofficial
police and Gestapo informers. Jean Galtier-Boissière, a French journalist, recounts a “true” story: a formerly rich old lady, down on her luck, registered at a “Society for the Help of the Middle Class,” run by a respected Vichy officer. The organization furnished jobs for petits bourgeois under economic stress, and a few days later, she was called to the
Kommandantur
(headquarters of the Occupier’s bureaucracy), where officers proposed that she denounce anti-German comments she might hear in lines; for this she would receive sixty francs a day.
²⁹
We do not learn if she agreed or not, but the story speaks at least to the paranoia of the Parisian line stander as well as to the ingenuity of the Occupation bureaucracy.

For millions of French men and women, the bars and confinement of prisons were replicated in the city by means of ukases, posters, radio announcements, layers of police authorities, reported gossip, and denunciations. So, too, followed their sisters, agoraphobia and claustrophobia; with fear came an insistent desire to avoid what caused it. The result was just what the Occupation authorities desired: a potentially powerful adversary—the French citizen and patriot—was intimidated, frustrated, and disheartened. But not everyone was willing to stand silently in line.

In July of 1940, not long after the arrival of the first German troops in Paris, a mimeographed flyer was stuffed into apartment mailboxes, slid under doors, and placed on café chairs. Created by Jean Texcier, a journalist from Normandy, “Tips for the Occupied” was one of the earliest signs of French resistance to the foreign occupier. These ironic suggestions introduced some of the formative themes of the Occupation just as the German bureaucracy was eagerly setting it up. Texcier lists thirty-three
conseils,
or tips. Among them:

Texcier had intuited early that resistance did not have to be violent, that standing against the occupier did not require a grenade in one’s hand. The flyer wittily and temporarily answered the question “Quoi faire?” What to do? What is the protocol for daily living in a city occupied by a formidable and arrogantly victorious enemy? The massively defeated French found themselves in a quandary. Had not their government signed an armistice with the Germans? Had not a war hero, the estimable Maréchal Philippe Pétain, become chef de l’État français? Were not the Germans acting “correctly,” at least now, at least toward the average French person? Of course it was a bit galling that German signs were popping up all over Paris, that certain avenues and boulevards were closed, that private automobiles had been requisitioned, that a palpable sense of entitlement was emanating from the thousands of German soldiers and bureaucrats assigned to the city. But most Parisians believed that to be a temporary price of defeat once the
fighting and bombing had stopped. Texcier had captured the mood of the moment: be polite but unwelcoming; the Germans were not tourists, but they would be leaving soon. No one dreamed in midsummer of 1940 that more than 1,500 days would pass before Parisians would be free of their hereditary enemy.

French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve crucial functions in that nation’s collective memory. After the liberation of the country, the myth that a large majority of the French population from the beginning actively had opposed the Occupation was important in tamping down serious civil disorder, as the political right and left once again fought for control of a new government. The myth was also necessary to salve national pride over the breakthrough defeat of 1940 and in order to earn a place at the table with the European Allied powers—the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain—as they decided the fate of postwar Europe. In fact, this myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and early 1943. Finally, the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty and as an example of the courage one needed in the face of hideous political ideologies.
³

French historians continue to tie themselves in knots as they work to define and explain the Resistance. They parse the term itself, arguing about when the small
r
became a capital
R
. They use anthropological, psychological, and cultural methods to identify and categorize varieties of opposition to the presence of victorious Germans on French soil. They struggle over the antithesis of resistance: is it cooperation, appeasement, acceptance, accommodation, collaboration, or, worse, treason? Is resistance a moral or a political choice? Could one not resist in good conscience? Is nonviolent resistance really resistance? The historical and popular narratives surrounding these questions are complex, gripping—tortured, even—often misleading, and sometimes mendacious. Add to this the fact that many
résistants
were not French citizens but immigrants, often Jewish, and that saving Jews was
not a stated aim of “official” resistance organizations, and the story becomes even more complicated and blurred.
^*
4

One recent French historian has meticulously analyzed how long it took for the idea of the Resistance to take hold in France. Public opinion moved slowly from a comfortable, benign belief in the leadership of Maréchal Pétain, even with early evidence that his political colleagues were anti-Semitic, anti-leftist, and even pro-fascist. His revered persona obfuscated political distractions, at least for the first year or so of the Occupation. What resistance there was, especially in the Unoccupied Zone (that part of central and southern France still controlled by the Vichy regime), was limited to a propaganda campaign to keep up French morale:

To judge, even today, can lead to ethical headaches. We must always keep in mind that we know the outcome of the Second World War; our judgments are influenced by that reassuring knowledge. No such comfort was available to those faced with the devastating fact of massive defeat and military occupation.

Other historians have argued that the term
resistance
has entirely different connotations when applied to different parts of occupied Europe. Writes Jean-Pierre Azéma:

Using German terms, Azéma argues for the difference between actively, often violently, “withstanding” or “standing against” a foreign host (
Widerstand
) and quietly maintaining a state of nonacceptance, of “resisting”—that is, refusing to concede to the fact of and even ignoring the German presence (
Resistenz
).
⁷
To explain how exquisite some of these distinctions can be would take us further from our subject—resistance in Paris—but it is necessary to be aware of how important the concept was and continues to be to French identity.

Perhaps the origins of this complexity began in the radio war that occurred in June and July of 1940 between two French military men, an upstart “temporary” general (
général à titre temporaire
) speaking on the BBC from London and a venerable, widely respected Maréchal de France (the highest military rank) speaking from Bordeaux and later from Vichy. These speeches, or
appels
(calls to action), introduced the three major terms that would come to define this debate during and after the war:
résistance, occupation,
and
collaboration.
The speakers were, of course, the relatively unknown fifty-nine-year-old Charles de Gaulle (he had been promoted to brigadier general during the brief Battle of France and would later be demoted and cashiered by the Vichy government, although he would continue to use the title of general) and Maréchal Philippe Pétain. One of the earliest uses of the term
resistance
had entered official parlance when Churchill wondered aloud after Dunkirk if there would be anyone left in France to “resist.” Then, in his famous national allocution of June 17, 1940, after he had hastily called for armistice talks, Pétain himself, assuming authority over a defeated France, used the term: “Certain of the affection of our
admirable army, which still struggles with a heroism worthy of its long military traditions against an enemy superior both in numbers and in arms; confident that by its magnificent resistance [that army] has fulfilled its obligations toward our allies,… it is with a deep sorrow that I tell you today that the fight must end.”
⁸
Of course the concept has an entirely different meaning in Pétain’s discourse from the one it will later take on, but it is interesting that a day later, in his rapid radio response, the famous “Appel du 18 juin,” de Gaulle picked up the word: “Whatever may happen, the flame of French resistance must not go out; it shall not go out.” And four days later, in another BBC address, without using the term specifically, he reiterates: “Honor, common sense, patriotism demand that all free Frenchmen continue the struggle wherever they are and however they might.”
⁹

Punctilious analysts of de Gaulle’s speeches and of his politics in these early days of a Free France differ on what he was calling for. Did “free Frenchmen” refer to those who were in the empire’s colonies or abroad rather than to those already under the yoke of the Germans? Or did the term refer to
all
French who refused to accept German domination, within and without France? The reason this question arises is that de Gaulle, throughout his four years in exile, harbored a very conflicted view of “internal resistance,” that is, of the anti-German activities of organizations and individuals within France. It would take him almost three years, until mid-1943, to bring most of those independent resistance groups under his bureaucratic command. His greatest fear was that the best organized of them all, the French Communist Party, would offer strong political alternatives to his already developing vision of postwar France. De Gaulle’s anti-Communism was not ambivalent; the organizational and ideological strength of the French Communists, especially after Hitler invaded the USSR in June of 1941, would preoccupy him until and after the end of the war.

One other point should be made about the reputation of French resistance. Overwhelming attention by journalists and military historians—both then and later—to the June 1944 Normandy invasion helped to elevate the idea that there was a powerful secret army
at work in France during most of the Occupation.
^*
It can be argued that the Resistance was probably never as effective as it was in those few hours and days preceding and immediately following the Allied invasion. Indeed, Operation Overlord needed every scant advantage it could find, and Eisenhower made canny use of the armed and unarmed units in France to help disrupt German response to his massive invasion, one that could well have been stymied or pushed back into the Channel several times before July of 1944. In fact, Ike was quoted widely as estimating that the war had been shortened by two months because of the French resistance fighters. In his postwar memoir,
Crusade in Europe,
he wrote: “Throughout France the Resistance had been of inestimable value in the campaign. Without their great assistance the liberation of France would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.”
¹⁰
But that estimable success was an anomaly; for the most part, the intra-France resistance of the years 1940–44 definitely harassed, but was in no way permanently detrimental to, the Occupying forces, either in northern France or, after the Wehrmacht occupied it in November of 1942, the southern part of the country. As one of our best historians of both the resistance and the Resistance, Matthew Cobb, writes: “For most of the war, the vast majority of the French did little or nothing to oppose Vichy and the Occupation.… Less than two per cent of the population—at most 500,000 people—were involved in the Resistance in one way or another.”
¹¹
On one hand this could seem a rather significant number (out of a population of about thirty-eight million), especially if it had been an organized, deftly led force of armed and unarmed men and women. But it wasn’t. This number includes independent, often individual, actions during almost five years of the Occupation, supported by some French citizens but also criticized by many of them as well. Resistance attacks brought reprisals, horrible ones, prompting the Free French government to warn from London
that disorganization, lack of coordination, and the emphasis on only short-term goals could be detrimental to the central purpose of liberating France.

De Gaulle, himself an army man, distrusted the independence and freewheeling nature of resistance groups while recognizing that they did have some positive effect on the morale of a people still recovering from the humiliations of 1940. Without a doubt, there was a strong, courageous, and tenacious minority who did resist. About one hundred thousand men and women whom the Germans and the Vichy government designated as “terrorists” may have died—in battles, in camps, or as a result of executions—during the war, but the public was decidedly split over the efficacy of their actions and was often angry at their valiant but frequently foolhardy deeds.
¹²
Toward the end of the war, as the Germans were slowly retreating through France toward Germany, the audacity and cunning of the so-called
maquis
(the guerrillas who lived off the land) caused apprehension among ordinary German soldiers and often brought brutal reprisals.
^*
Yet the Germans and their Vichy allies had been very effective in keeping the various resistance organizations at bay throughout the Occupation; their intelligence services, relying heavily on the French themselves to denounce their fellow citizens, were remarkably successful.