When Paris Went Dark (56 page)

*
As early as March of 1941, the Occupation authorities had set substantial fines, followed by death sentences, for anyone caught or reported listening to broadcasts from the BBC and Swiss radio. Still, Parisians tuned in.

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Recent research has suggested that the warehouse was a bit farther west of where the Bibliothèque is located, closer to the Salpêtrière hospital. But Sebald’s point remains well taken: Paris has forgotten aspects of its sordid past.

*
Earlier called the Mouvements unis de la Résistance (United Resistance Movements), this new configuration finally gave an official name and recognition to the uncoordinated resistance activities—both passive and direct—that had been going on at least since the first Germans had entered France in May of 1940.

*
Some references to Franz Kafka in
The Myth of Sisyphus
had to be excised. Of course, no Jewish writer or thinker could be cited in a Vichy- or German-approved work.

*
The staff also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Pascal Pia, Raymond Aron, and André Malraux. The newspaper would continue publication for two decades after the war. It had taken its name for the Resistance group Combat, which had its origins in northern France.

*
Unknown to Camus, Jean Guéhenno was writing similarly in his private journal, referring to Paris after years of Occupation: “Air raids are constant. Five or six per day… The railroad stations around Paris are one after the other destroyed. From now on we feel almost completely isolated” (Guéhenno, 410). Time had become long and short at the same time, he continued, as signs proliferated that the Germans would leave soon, but still they stayed.

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An almost successful attempt had been made on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, at Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia. Carried out by anti-Nazi but still pro-victory Wehrmacht officers, the attack succeeded in only lightly wounding the Reich’s leader. Officers died around him, but he survived, thus feeding his megalomania. Searching for disloyal Wehrmacht staff officers severely disrupted military operations in the middle of a two-front war and led to Hitler’s decision to micromanage even more carefully the Reich’s war plans, including the defense of Paris. Several major officers stationed in Paris were later charged with treason; consequently the Occupation went through a very unsettling—for the Germans, at least—period of confusion.

*
Pétain himself had from day one in Vichy pestered the Germans about moving the capital of the État français at least to Versailles, right outside Paris, if not to the capital itself. They of course refused; Paris was too rich a prize for them to.

*
Estimates vary, as always, but there were about twenty thousand German troops of varying quality around Paris and perhaps only about five thousand within the city itself, a paltry number to defend a major metropolis against the Allies while protecting retreat paths for the Wehrmacht reeling from the Normandy breakout.

*
When the last handful of women auxiliaries had to be evacuated from Paris, von Choltitz asked Nordling and the Red Cross to round them up and give them safe passage. Many carried heavy luggage that, when opened and searched, revealed linen, silver, and other fine goods that had been lifted from the luxurious hotels in which they had been working and living.

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For not having ordered the air bombardment of Paris, General Hans Speidel was arrested by the Gestapo a week after the Liberation. He had refused to use either the Luftwaffe or the V-1 and V-2 rockets that were being loosed on London—though later his orders would be countermanded, and about a dozen rockets did fall on and around Paris, but to little effect. He was also questioned about his role in the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler. Miraculously, he survived these contretemps and would later return to Paris as NATO commander in chief from 1957 to 1963. French eyebrows were raised at this appointment.

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Von Choltitz was caught between two unruly forces—the FFI and his Führer—neither of which fully comprehended what was happening on the ground in Paris. Indeed, one historian reminds us that “[von] Choltitz… saw himself and his army not as oppressing Paris but as protecting it from the gang of violent thugs he believed the Resistance to be” (Neiberg, 148)—an argument von Choltitz would make for years after the war, to the point where many Parisians hailed him as the hero who had saved their capital.

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Among the most prized must have been the ones that had been put up only a few months before:
ZUR NORMANDIE FRONT
(To the Normandy front).

*
A few days earlier, de Gaulle had landed at Saint-Lô, in Normandy, making his way through that region and Brittany as the liberated French wildly celebrated his arrival. Driving from Le Mans to Chartres, and then to Rambouillet, right outside Paris, he awaited news of the insurrection and prepared his triumphant victory march down the Champs-Élysées.

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And yet dozens if not more in the Second Armored Division were from Spain, veterans of the Republican war against Franco’s fascist regime. Spaniards also played important early roles in the armed resistance, since most French soldiers were away in prison camps. In 2004, the city of Paris recognized the part these men from south of the Pyrenees played in the liberation of Paris. There is a memorial plaque now on the Seine side of the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall.

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The Germans could not leave without one last measure of defiance toward the city that had defeated them. German planes flying in from Holland and Germany dropped more than a thousand bombs on the capital, primarily in the eastern sections, on the evening of August 26; there were hundreds of civilian casualties in this, the last bombing of the city.

*
This unit was a part of the American First Army’s V Corps, under the command of Major General Leonard Gerow, with whom General Leclerc would have serious command issues. At one point, Gerow wanted to court-martial Leclerc for having taken the initiative against Paris on the orders of General de Gaulle rather than defer to Allied command.

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De Gaulle, worried that his sparse Free French forces could not pacify the capital alone, had begged Eisenhower to leave behind enough Allied troops to supplement his. Ike refused, but he did agree to this grand victory parade, larger even than the one organized by the Germans four years earlier.

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The American army estimated that 85 percent of GIs were virgins when they joined up or were drafted. (One wonders how the survey gathered that information.)

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For years afterward he would brag, with a palpable wistfulness, that he had “liberated the Ritz Hotel,” where German elites (and Coco Chanel) had lived in cosseted style for more than four years.

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The British took a backseat in the Liberation, primarily because of the lingering antipathy of many Frenchmen toward their erstwhile allies. The aforementioned
Pocket Guide to France
took notice of this rift. In the section called “A Few Pages of French History,” after explaining the 1940 defeat, the narrator addresses his readers directly: “Some citizens of France in defeat have harbored bitter feelings toward their British allies. Don’t you help anybody to dig up past history in arguments. This is a war to fight the Nazis, not a debating society.”

*
Tondre
is the French term for “shearing” and refers mainly, as does the English word, to the shaving of wool from sheep. It can also mean “mowing,” as a lawn. Those shaved are called the
tondues
, or “sheared women.”

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Immediately after the war, in 1946, the Fourth Republic voted to outlaw prostitution.
Maisons closes
, or bordellos, disappeared from the Parisian cityscape. The explanations for this act range all over the political and moral spectrum, but the effect, of course, was predictable: legal prostitution just became illegal prostitution. Coincidentally, French women won the right to vote from the provisional government in the spring of 1944 and were first able to exercise it in 1945. These two “positive,” pro-women initiatives fell on either side of the
tontes,
that is, the public haircuttings.

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In the early 1970s, Tanguy would legally change his name to Rol-Tanguy.

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Later, halfhearted efforts were made to find out exactly which specific group was responsible for the murders at the Institut dentaire, but to little avail. The FFI insisted it had never given orders to the FTP for this sort of
rafle
and imposition of casual justice; the FTP, supported by the Communist Party, insisted that it had had authority from the FFI—though Colonel Rol always denied it. Besides, the FTP asserted, the ones who were killed deserved it, all of them being unpatriotic Frenchmen—that is,
salauds
(bastards).

*
Another well-known fascist and anti-Semitic French journalist, Robert Brasillach, was not so fortunate. Arrested after the Liberation, he was tried for treason and quickly found guilty. Despite having received a letter signed by such literary and artistic figures as Colette, Camus, Aymé, and Cocteau, General de Gaulle refused to commute his sentence; he was executed—shot—in early 1945.

*
This is my somewhat free translation, in which I emphasize the blatant emotion of a masterful speaker and writer as he composes the first French history of the Occupation. The original French may be found in an appendix.

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Most historians set the bar at sixteen thousand Communists shot or deported to their deaths by the Germans—not a measly number, but not seventy-five thousand, either.

*
In February of 2014, President François Hollande announced that two more women would join Marie Curie in the Panthéon. Both Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz (a niece of Charles de Gaulle) and Germaine Tillion participated actively in the Resistance.

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Since Pétain’s death, at the age of ninety-five, in 1951, his supporters have been petitioning that his remains be moved from this isolated island off the Atlantic coast of France to join his World War I comrades in arms at Verdun, the site of his great victory. They remain on the Île d’Yeu.

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In 1871, as a result of the civil war that had produced the government known as the Commune, Paris had been stripped of much of its autonomy. The prefect of the city had been appointed by the state, but in 1976 substantial administrative autonomy was returned to the city.

*
Ever since his execution, the Communist Party had insisted that Môquet was one of theirs, a valiant example of the “party of seventy thousand,” who had died in opposition to the German Occupier.

*
His first essay, “The Republic of Silence,” was composed and published only a month after the city’s liberation and contains the existentially ambiguous phrase “Never were we freer than under the German occupation” (Sartre,
Aftermath of War
, 3).

*
Signal
was an illustrated biweekly, much like
Life
, that featured home-front news as well as German military escapades. Controlled by the Wehrmacht rather than Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda, it was published at its height in more than twenty-five languages and had well over two million subscribers. Available in the United States until January of 1942, it never appeared in Germany itself. It was distributed in occupied territories, countries allied with the Reich, and in Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.

*
In his preface to the catalog, the historian Jean-Pierre Azéma does draw attention to the contradiction between the “black and white” Occupation and the Occupation “in color”: “What catches Zucca’s lens is the Paris of the good life, where pleasures continue as if nothing had happened… The Paris of Zucca is a bit empty, but serene, without a serious problem, almost existing out of time (Baronnet, ed.,
Les Parisiens Sous l’Occupation,
10).”

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Given at the Hôtel de Ville, August 25, 1944.

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