When Paris Went Dark (5 page)

How did this debacle happen, and so rapidly?

When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, feverish diplomatic efforts were engaged to obviate the treaty obligations that would force Britain and France to come to her defense. After declaring war on Germany a few days later, both nations almost desultorily began preparations for a European war. The French had increased their already large army to about 2.5 million men. They pushed past their own Maginot Line in eastern France and moved cautiously a few kilometers into Germany, where they met little resistance, for the Luftwaffe and the panzers of the Wehrmacht were firmly engaged in Poland.
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Thus began nine months of the “phony war” on the Western Front, as Hitler bided his time before taking on the combined Allied forces of Holland, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. One of the lasting effects of Poland’s treaty partners’ lack of resolve to help the country more aggressively—except for a few naval and land sorties by
the French and British, Poland fought Germany alone during that deadly month—was not only a wariness on the part of other Allied nations toward the “big two” but also an internecine distrust between France and Great Britain themselves. Nevertheless, there was a general confidence, born of years of propaganda, that France’s army—believed to be the greatest fighting force in Europe, if not the world—was invincible and that England’s navy only increased that invulnerability. It was widely argued that the Germans would be embarrassingly battered should they try to invade any nation other than Poland, which, after all, had been fought over for centuries, its boundaries changing with the vagaries of the political strength of its most powerful neighbors, Germany and Russia (later the USSR).

Still, Paris was nervous. A national mobilization was imposed, and recruits from all over the nation were arriving at train stations and leaving hourly for the Maginot Line and other fronts. The government was introducing the public to “passive defense” training—that is, showing them what to do in case of an air raid. Blackouts, air raid sirens, and other interruptions of daily life became de rigueur. Métro stations were turned into shelters, and almost every apartment house had an
abri
(shelter; the word can still be seen painted in the basements of many Parisian buildings). Dozens of concrete blockhouses were hastily constructed on the major roads leading into Paris. But these were offhand, almost casual attempts at forestalling an invasion that no one believed would really happen. France was just too strong. But within barely six weeks, the German juggernaut would have breached Paris’s gates, and a quickly agreed-to armistice was signed.

Many saw the armistice that Maréchal Philippe Pétain, newly named head of government, had confirmed with the Germans as a respite, necessary for France to get its household in order while the Germans pushed their war against England. The decision to call for an armistice was not welcomed by everyone, but most French were confident that this political arrangement with Germany would be necessary for only a limited period. Parisians in particular had been through a rough patch of political disagreement during the 1930s, including bloody street confrontations. At least a dozen French governments had been installed
and dissolved since Hitler’s ascension to the Reich’s chancellorship in 1933. For many French, the example of a stable Third Reich seemed to promise the sort of national pride and civic predictability found lacking on their side of the Rhine. In 1939, the Third Republic, established in 1871 after the civil war that had followed France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, was at the nadir of its popularity. The Armistice would allow a harried nation to catch its breath.

But many on the left in 1940 suspected that the Armistice was the French right’s revenge—a way to undermine the legacy of the Third Republic, which they despised. Since the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), when a Jewish army officer was framed for distributing illicit intelligence to the Prussians, the political right, composed essentially of the military, the very Catholic, the aristocratic class, monarchists, and industrialists, had seen or imagined their power wane. The emphases of the Third Republic on public education, support of labor, secularism, and a social safety net appeared to them to have doomed the nation to mediocrity. In addition, once European fascist savagery erupted, France had welcomed tens of thousands of immigrants from Spain (Republicans fleeing Franco) and from Germany and eastern Europe (Jews and other political dissidents). Their presence infuriated the right, enhancing French nativism. A new government, this time headed by a respected military leader, could put the nation back on a more conservative track.

One of those who most fretted during this confusing period was the thirty-one-year-old Simone de Beauvoir, a brilliant schoolteacher and writer then unknown to the French public. (She would not publish her first work, a novel—
L’Invitée
[
She Came to Stay
]—until 1943.) A confidante and lover to Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who had gone off to war in 1939, de Beauvoir has left us detailed descriptions of her reactions to the way confused Parisians, especially intellectuals, schoolteachers, writers, and artists, felt as they saw their city invaded by the minions of a gang of thugs. Assigned to meteorological duties near Nancy, in the eastern part of France, Sartre himself would be taken prisoner when the Germans finally invaded. He was then shipped off to a German prisoner of war camp (from which he
would be released in April 1941). De Beauvoir worried about Sartre, though she regularly received letters from him, at least during the so-called phony war (the French called it
drôle de guerre
)—the period between September of 1939 and May of 1940, when the only major battles in Europe were the Polish campaign and the Russo-Finnish (“Winter”) War.

De Beauvoir noticed almost immediately a change in Parisian temperament as its citizens awaited with anxiety, but not yet dread, the results of their mutual defense pact with Poland. In the diary that she kept during these lonely months, she noted that there was a “mini exodus” out of Paris—nothing like the one that would empty the city nine months later, but still a symptom of Parisians’ bafflement at the threats from new types of warfare. As she accompanied Sartre to his mobilization reporting station in late 1939, she noticed that

This feeling of anxiety and of alienation from her familiar environment, of a “narrowing” of her sentient world, would soon spread to all Parisians, before and during the Occupation itself. With these sentiments came another that de Beauvoir was especially attuned to: the fact that anticipation of war, military occupation, and resistance called for a recalibration of psychological as well as physical senses of time. She said often in her diary that she felt “out of time”; that she desperately wanted to know the future and not be seduced by past happier memories, and that she wanted to mitigate her impatience at having constantly to live in the present. “Boredom,” she wrote on September 5, “hasn’t set in yet but is looming on the horizon.”
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By November, she was writing: “For the last two months I had lived my life simultaneously in the infinite and in the moment. I had to fill the time minute-by-minute, or long hours at a time, but entirely without a tomorrow. I had reached the point that even the news of military leaves, which gave me hope by defining a future-with-hope, had no effect on me and [was] even painful to me, or almost.”
⁴

De Beauvoir and Sartre.
(Creative Commons)

Another prescient chronicler, Edith Thomas, an active French Communist and archivist, kept a daily journal of the Occupation that came to light only in the early 1990s.
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Thomas described what Paris was like on May 8, 1940, only two days before the Blitzkrieg would end and the taking of Paris would begin:

We know how things would end, but back then Parisians had no concrete information, so rumor, guessing games, BBC propaganda, and news bulletins took the place of planning. This waiting was one of the most enervating aspects of the Paris during the war, especially after the Germans arrived. It would not end until Allied tanks were seen on the outskirts of Paris in late August of 1944.

Before the Occupation of Paris per se, though, France experienced three almost simultaneous traumas that would thoroughly demoralize the capital’s population: the lightning defeat of the French and Allied armies in May and June of 1940; an ensuing massive civilian exodus southward from northern France and Paris; and, as a result, the collapse of the Third Republic. The effect of these events was to impart a sense of helplessness and confusion that would enable the Germans to occupy Paris even more efficiently and calmly than they had anticipated.

As we have seen, the period between the German attack on Poland in September of 1939 and the first Blitzkrieg incursions into the Low Countries in May of 1940 was defined by an irresponsible lack of preparation by the French high command, confident in their retrofitted First World War strategy—attack and defeat the Germans in Belgium, with the help of the British—and in the technical brilliance of the Maginot Line, they confidently waited for the Germans. Unfortunately for them, Hitler’s generals did not move their armies as the French had projected. The Wehrmacht skirted the Maginot Line, rolled unchallenged through the dense Ardennes forest into northeastern France, while at the same time invading the Netherlands, then Belgium, and moving south speedily. They thereby cut the Allied forces in half. Within seven days, the French army and the British Expeditionary Force, sent to help it in extremis, were thrown on their heels so quickly that a stunned world could barely keep up with the news reports of German advances. As early as May 18 (eight days after the German attack), French generals, to the stunned horror of their British allies, were seriously and openly stating that the Battle of France was over. It would actually last another grisly month, as a weakened French army retreated slowly southward. Rather than focus attention on the restaging of their still large army and adapt quickly to the new strategies of Blitzkrieg, Allied military leaders and politicians spent most of this period arguing over whether to continue fighting in France itself, fight from its colonies, or sign an armistice with Germany.

Within no time German troops had reached the English Channel, where the frantic evacuation at Dunkirk in late May and early June of 1940 managed to save the British Expeditionary Force as well as many French soldiers. The retreat by sea of almost half a million French and British troops rescued an army, but it demoralized two exhausted and weakened nations. Churchill, in office only a week, had tried everything to bolster the French government and its army. But the fact that the British did not evacuate more French citizens was one of the several events during this hectic period that would drive a wedge between England and France. Numerous French right-wing politicians opined: “The British want to fight to the last drop of French blood.”

By June 8, the Germans had crossed the Somme, north of Paris, and then the lower Seine, east of the capital. A German journalist exalted the pace of Hitler’s legions:

As the capital slipped into imminent danger of being surrounded, the confusion that settled in at French army headquarters at Vincennes, on the western edge of Paris, was startling. The absence of a radio (wireless) connection with their armies, even the lack of carrier pigeons (used with some success during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War), compounded the cluelessness of France’s general staff. Within five weeks of their first incursions into Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, German forces would reach the Loire, roughly halfway into France. Unable to duplicate the miraculous stands of 1914 and 1918 that had saved Paris, the French army would be swept away like chaff in a brisk spring wind.

Meanwhile, the Third Republic politicians were angrily divided; in varying degrees, their opinions were affected strongly by pacifism, a fear of communism, their hatred of the English, the fecklessness of their own military leadership, political ambition, and a stubborn admiration for Hitler’s National Socialist experiment. All these factors froze Prime Minister Paul Reynaud’s government. The interrogatories were endless: Does the army continue to defend French territory, eventually to the Pyrénées and the Mediterranean? Does the government leave France to lead the country from their African and Asian colonies? Or does it seek an armistice with Germany and save some French autonomy? Should Paris be defended in order to buy time for more English or eventual American intervention? Or does the army declare the city “open,” crossing its fingers that the Germans will treat the French capital with respect?

Whatever answers emerged became concretized in the personalities of two leaders. The best known was the revered though mentally diminished eighty-four-year-old Maréchal Philippe Pétain, who had been leader of all French forces in the Great War and the victor at Verdun, the fort in eastern France that had withstood all that the Kaiser’s armies could throw at it. The other was almost a nonentity, a young, recently promoted brigadier general, Charles de Gaulle, who flew back and forth between France and England at the behest of Prime Minister Reynaud to strategize about how to save France from defeat. But the pacifists and “dead-enders,” those who would fight until death, did not have the weight of the others, nor did they have Philippe Pétain. The last cabinet meeting of the Third Republic in Paris was on June 9; it had only a month of life left. And then on June 10, Italy belatedly attacked France from the southeast.

Winston Churchill, who had only become prime minister on May 10, had flown several times to Paris and then to the Loire Valley, where the government had retreated on June 10 and June 13—five quite dangerous trips amid an already intense war in order to buck up the French resistance to the Blitzkrieg. He pleaded with Prime Minister Reynaud to keep the French fighting, even defending Paris, and then, as events cascaded, Churchill urged him not to sign an armistice with the Germans. Yet the British leader likely recognized the futility of his pleading. On his first visit to Paris, looking out a window of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, Churchill had watched as dozens of diplomatic staff members collected papers that had been thrown into the courtyard; he stared fixedly as they managed a bonfire that fiercely burned the dossiers. As the smoke cast a pall over the Left Bank, Reynaud assured him that the government was not going to leave its capital, an affirmation the British prime minister, in office but a few days, saw only as bravado. His thoughts punctuated by the heavy thuds of files landing in the courtyard, Churchill must then have realized that only England now stood between Hitler and European domination. But he had to ask, even if he knew what the answer would be; he had to exhort, even though he knew the eventual result.

Maréchal Philippe Pétain.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Général Charles de Gaulle.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

An exhausted Reynaud was persistent in his telegrams to President Roosevelt that he would not leave Paris to the Germans without a fight, sending a message through American ambassador William Bullitt as late as June 10: “Today the enemy is almost at the gates of Paris. We shall fight in front of Paris; we shall fight behind Paris; we shall close ourselves in one of our provinces to fight and should we be driven out of it we shall establish ourselves in North Africa to continue the fight, and if necessary in our American colonies.”
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On his last day in Paris, before leaving for Tours, where the government had retreated, Reynaud wrote one final pathetic letter to President Roosevelt, imploring him to come to his nation’s aid. The answer, as everyone knew, was that America would sit on the sidelines as France headed toward an armistice.

One of the major conundrums facing both the pro-armistice and the pro-resistance groups was what to do with the French capital. To let it go without a fight would be so disheartening, so humiliating to the French, not to mention the Allies, that France might take years to recover. Yet to defend it would mean bringing destruction upon the world’s best-known urban masterpiece. Some generals argued for the latter decision, saying that it was time the world saw how relentlessly uncivilized the Third Reich was. Let the French experience what the Poles and the Dutch have endured! But the Germans did not want to
attack Paris, either; as early as May 26 or 27, Hitler had a discussion with his military leaders:

And two weeks later, once he knew the Battle of France had been won, Hitler reiterated: “I have no intention of attacking the beautiful capital of France. Our war machine is operating in the vicinity of the city. Paris has nothing to fear, provided that, like Brussels, it remains an ‘open city.’ ”
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Taking Paris provided dilemmas for both sides. A small but destructive German air raid on Paris on June 3 had given a vision of what air bombardment could do to the City of Light. At the automobile factories of Renault and Citroën, near the fashionable neighborhoods of the 16th arrondissement, more than a thousand bombs had fallen, killing about forty-five civilians. Though this would be the last time until the Liberation that the Germans would bomb central Paris under Hitler’s orders, curious residents could, and did, see “the smoking debris of an apartment house on the [fashionable] Boulevard Suchet, bordering the Bois de Boulogne, a gutted mansion in the Rue Poussin, in Auteuil: spectators then knew directly the violated intimacy of a bedroom cut in two, with its armoires, its broken dressers and chests from which hung against the empty skies a bathrobe, a coat or a pair of curtains.”
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Recessed in the collective memory of the average Parisian was Guy de Maupassant’s story “Boule de suif” (“Butterball”; 1880), about the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870. Everyone who had attended the Third Republic’s schools during its great initiative to establish universal
public education knew this tale. At the beginning of the story, Maupassant describes the retreat of the French army as it pulls back across the Seine at the Norman capital of Rouen, fleeing before a relentless Prussian enemy:

Such depictions of the uninspired being led by the incompetent, both marching under the empty platitudes of patriotism, succinctly reinforced what was happening before Parisian eyes in late May and June of 1940. The French fought courageously, with high casualties: the Battle of France lasted a bit more than six weeks, but between 55,000 and 65,000 French and colonial troops had met their deaths, and maybe as many as 120,000 were wounded.
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Almost two million were taken prisoner. But the conscripts’ individual courage and sacrifice, and the resistance of some units, could not compensate for a
paucity of planning and a lumbering, unimaginative battlefield response to the Blitzkrieg.