The air attacks gave the Germans the only possible public relations boon they could have hoped for after four years of occupation. Few Parisians believed the most outrageous claims of German and Vichy propagandists: that the Germans were protecting Paris from an “Allied army of crime” that was in the pay of the Jews and the Soviets. But the air raids did give some credence to the claims of Vichy supporters that the policy of collaboration served as the only viable option for a nation stuck between two warring parties, neither of which had France’s best interests at heart. Huddleston noted that Parisians were angry and resentful about the bombings, which “definitely did harm to the Allied cause.”24
Vichy leaders moved quickly to take advantage of the growing anti-Allied sentiment. Pétain, the living symbol of collaboration and the man who coined the term, came to Paris in late April for a mass at Notre Dame in memory of the dead from the La Chapelle bombings. It was his first appearance in Paris since 1940, and the city gave an ecstatic reception to the man who had once been France’s greatest hero. Pétain played the role for all it was worth, posing for photographs near bomb craters in Montmartre and in front of the damaged outer walls of the Sacré Coeur basilica, his eyes filled with tears for the cameras to record. Appearing without bodyguards or uniformed security as he moved through bombed-out areas, he basked in the reception the capital gave him. One sympathetic observer noted that “never in the palmiest days of Hitler, in the most triumphant days of Stalin, has a chief been better received than Pétain was in Paris.”
While many in the Resistance might have found comparisons to Hitler a bit too close for comfort, there was little doubt that Pétain’s popularity offered a potential counterweight to the efforts of de Gaulle and the FFI to win over the hearts of Parisians. Even among members of the Resistance, however, there was surprisingly little animosity toward Pétain personally. One Resistance leader told Alice Moats that “the patriots among us hate the Vichy government, but few of us can bring ourselves to hate Pétain.” Moats, who risked exposure and arrest to see Pétain’s arrival at Notre Dame, heard Parisians discussing the hope that Pétain might return to Paris permanently, take control of the government as he had in 1940, and sign a deal with the Americans to end the air attacks. Such hopes were unrealistic, but they spoke to the desires of Parisians for an end to the war and the bombings under almost any conditions.25
Although the bombings continued relentlessly, the Transportation Plan came nowhere near to achieving its goals. It failed to stop German units from getting to Normandy from other parts of France. The German 12th SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr divisions, for example, experienced delays of less than twenty-four hours as a result of transportation problems around Paris. In fact, the Germans did not suffer a single insurmountable supply problem; their supply lines were more secure than those of the Allies, which suffered from a lack of appropriate port facilities. The Germans responded to the damage caused by Allied bombing by taking over more of the French civilian rail network’s capacity. As a result, the Germans made up the difference, while the residents of Paris had to make do with even less. The Transportation Plan harmed French civilians much more than it harmed the Germans. Seen from French eyes, the plan was more than simply inefficient; it was murderous.26
The air attacks were terrifying enough on their own, but they also aggravated the single most important problem facing Paris in the days after the landings: a dangerous shortage of food. As early as the occupation’s first winter Parisians had begun to feel the sting of privation. Those with connections in the countryside wrote to their friends and relatives asking them to send anything edible to the increasingly malnourished city. As the war dragged on and as German requisitions from the French countryside increased, meat virtually disappeared from the Parisian diet, reducing the city’s residents to what one Parisian called “the level of beasts” as they scoured Paris for food. As early as the spring of 1943, Parisians began to suffer from a host of diseases associated with poor nutrition. One visitor to the city that year found the food situation in Paris much worse than in the countryside or in smaller French cities. Huddleston confided to his diary that he “could not understand how the ordinary Frenchman lived at all. The insipid and unnutritive vegetables, the small portion of horrible bread, which was about all he could get, reduced him to a skeleton.”27 A report prepared by a Swiss Red Cross official estimated that Paris had 25,000 severely malnourished babies and toddlers. The supposedly nutritious biscuits Pétain fed to students at school could not stop the wartime trend of declining average weight and height among French children.28
In another of the tragic ironies of war, the food situation in Paris grew markedly worse as a direct result of Allied efforts to liberate France. Not only did Paris need fully functioning rail lines to bring food into the city, but the landings had also cut Paris off from the fertile agricultural lands of Normandy, the city’s primary source of milk, meat, and vegetables. Even before the landings, milk deliveries had fallen 50 percent and meat deliveries 40 percent because of the extensive damage to the rail network of northern France. Many truck drivers and railroad workers refused to go north of the capital because of the dangers involved. With much of Normandy in Allied hands, moreover, the region’s ample food stocks went more often to England, which also badly needed them, than to Paris. As a result, food prices in Paris were as much as eight times higher than those in the countryside.29
The arrival of 350,000 more German soldiers after the landings and the German requisitioning of 25,000 French cows per month to feed them severely aggravated the food problem. The Germans also seized approximately three-fourths of the available trucks in Normandy, severely depleting the only viable alternative to rail supply. Paris badly needed the trucks, because two-thirds of the French railway network’s rolling stock not requisitioned by the Germans had been damaged or destroyed by the Allied bombardments. The result was a virtual end to regular food shipments into the capital. In July 1943, an average of five hundred railcars had brought food to the city every day; by July 1944, that figure had plummeted to just twenty. Charles Braibant thought that although the city had been hungry for many months, “the real start of the famine” dated to mid-June 1944.30
His observation was accurate. Weekly rations, which even in the early years of the occupation amounted to barely enough to sustain the city’s 2.5 million people, fell precipitously throughout 1944 and again after the landings. By the time of the liberation, a Parisian’s weekly ration included one-half pound of unappetizing meat, often of indeterminable origin and in the form of a grayish sausage; three-fifths of a pound of butter or equivalent fats; and a handful of fresh vegetables, most often rutabagas. Only fruit and locally caught fish were available in reasonable, if not ample, supply. It could take as long as five hours to get to the front of a bread line, and on any given day, as many as three-fourths of the city’s bakeries were closed because of a lack of flour or fuel for the ovens. Parisians Janet Flanner and Gilbert Reynaud Rémy, who both lived in Paris during the occupation, independently estimated that the average Parisian lost forty pounds. Rémy had seen people die in the streets of hunger in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.31
Parisians did what they could to amass enough food to survive, but life became increasingly precarious in the spring of 1944. The semiregular shipments of food from friends and relatives in the countryside had stopped, owing both to shortages in the provinces and the difficulty of transporting what little extra food was available. One city resident celebrated his ability to save his ration coupons for several days and thereby hoard enough radishes, peas, potatoes, and pasta to form something resembling a regular meal. His joy was tempered, however, when he found himself hungry again after just two hours. Two weeks later, he recorded in his journal, “not a cat to be seen on the streets.”32
Alice Moats, the American journalist who had sneaked into France in April, almost blew her own cover because she was not accustomed to the near-starvation diet of Parisians. In a restaurant nea
r the Gare de Lyon, she was served “a cold, disgusting mess” of “gray and lumpy” mashed potatoes that she found too unappetizing to eat. She left the potatoes sitting on the plate, hoping that the waiter would take them away. The waiter, “unable to believe that a person could possibly leave a portion of potatoes uneaten,” would not clear her plate, and she did not want to ask him again for fear of him noticing her foreign accent. Soon, all the diners in the restaurant were staring at her, wondering what kind of person would leave food of any kind uneaten. She chose to leave the restaurant as quietly as she could, but she felt the eyes of the others in the restaurant follow her as she did.33
The city authorities in Paris tried to deal with the food shortages by establishing communal kitchens within individual neighborhoods. Like ration cards, tickets for meals in so-called “national restaurants” were not valid outside a family’s neighborhood of residence. This system controlled movement inside the city and limited formal connections between people living in different parts of the city. It therefore made neighbors dependent upon one another through a barter system that often functioned much more effectively than the traditional cash system. The communal kitchens rarely offered much beyond a thin, watery soup and some hard cakes made from second-grade flour. Often they did not have nearly enough food to meet the needs of the neighborhood. Paris authorities also tried to sell sugar, milk, and coffee substitutes as “patriotic” alternatives to goods no longer available, but they rarely succeeded because of the obvious low quality of those goods.
Even when Parisians could find food, they often had no fuel with which to cook it. Gas and electricity were normally available only intermittently, sometimes for as little as thirty minutes per day. Andrzej Bobkowski, an expatriate Pole living in Paris, had so little gas that it took the meager flame on his stove more than two hours to boil a small cup of water for a “patriotic” tea made from dried herbs. Shipments of coal and wood had long since stopped coming into the city, leading residents to search out alternative fuels. They even burned sawdust. Electricity came on only at night, and usually, only then, for an hour or two. The city’s cinemas compensated by hooking generators to groups of bicycles, whose teenaged riders provided the power to run the projectors.34
There was not even enough power in the city to run the Métro, which operated with unpredictable hours. City authorities looked to save power by closing some of the stations. On some nights, less than half of the stations were fully functioning. Parisians learned to adapt by relying on their feet and the city’s ubiquitous bicycles. A joke even went around the city that the Métro closures were not that important, as Paris would need just four stations for the liberation: Bienvenüe (“welcome”) for the Allies; Cambronne (Parisian slang meaning “shit”) for the Germans; Concorde (“agreement”) for the various elements of the Resistance; and Père Lachaise (named for the city’s most famous cemetery) for the collaborators.35
As such bitterness attests, not all Parisians suffered equally. A thriving black market operated in the city for those with the cash to afford it. Luxuries like butter, eggs, and meat were available but at exorbitant prices well out of the reach of all but the wealthiest Parisians and for those with close connections to the Germans. Before the war, butter cost 15 francs per kilogram. By mid-1943 it cost 1,500 francs per kilogram on the black market. By July 1944, prices had skyrocketed so much that 1 kilogram of butter cost 13,000 francs. Bread, officially listed at 3.75 francs per kilogram, sold on the black market for almost ten times that amount. The Normandy landings only exacerbated the problem. The price of a kilogram of black-market meat rose from 250 francs to 450 francs in the week following D-Day.36
Most Parisians depicted the black market as a place frequented by the rich and the collaborators, although most residents turned to it on occasion in a desperate search for food. They had little choice, as official rations were not enough to feed most families. By one estimate, more than 20 percent of the food coming into the city ended up in the hands of black marketers. Some Parisians even rationalized that shopping on the black market was a patriotic activity, because the food at least stayed in France rather than being shipped back to Germany, as so much of French produce was.37
But if the black market was out of reach for most Parisians, it did not necessarily operate in the shadows. Some restaurants had concealed back rooms and secret menus, but others operated openly, making money selling fine foods to those few who could afford them. Such restaurants posted signs saying that they operated sans tickets or hors catégoire, meaning that the food inside could not be obtained by ration coupons, but by cash only. Alice Moats observed that such restaurants, mainly frequented by Germans and collaborators, had “butter on the tables, fresh cream overflowing in every dish, juicy meat,” and even unheard of luxuries like pâté, steak, cheese, and vintage wines. For most Parisians, wine and liquor were rare luxuries, being available only in poor quality and sold in restaurants and cafés only three days a week.38
Moats recorded two dinners she attended in her time in Paris in April and May 1944. They tell the tale of the two ways of life in wartime Paris. The first dinner, which she attended under an assumed name at the invitation of an old friend, was in the home of one of Paris’s most famous collaborationist families on the Avenue Foch. There she was welcomed with martinis and a full five-course meal, which was served and prepared by the family’s staff. The meal featured champagne, white wine, red wine, brandy, and the only real coffee she drank during her extraordinary trip. Over dinner the guests spoke openly and with no shame about the best places in the city to find black-market goods of all kinds. Little wonder that the guests expressed their fear of the city’s communists, and little wonder, too, that Moats left that night aware that the small but rich group of collaborators was the only segment of the Parisian population not going hungry during these difficult times.
The other dinner she wrote about was in the small Left Bank apartment of a key Resistance leader, whom she never identified by name. That meal was cabbage followed not by brandy but by the passing of coarse cigarettes to curb hunger. The conversation that accompanied the meal revolved around impressions of the Americans and British, who they hoped would soon liberate France, as well as the desire of working-class Parisians for vengeance against the collaborators. One of the résistants at the meal told Moats that he was far from alone in having “a long list of people he was planning to shoot and there wasn’t a German name on the list.”39
Food remained the city’s main problem. Jacques Bardoux feared an open battle in the city less than he feared starvation. On June 26, he wrote, “Paris might know a disaster [caused by a battle in the city], but it will know famine,” unless something happened soon to change its fate. Jacqueline Gaussen-Salmon, the painter, thought that the city was too hungry even to dream about liberation. On July 12 she wrote in her journal that “the great fear of famine crushes all our spirits. No one thinks of anything but food.”40
But if most Parisians were hungry, at least they still had a bit of freedom. Some Parisians lost much more than their prewar material comforts. In June and July the Gestapo increased its arrests of suspected Resistance members, presumed political opponents, and labor leaders. More and more Parisians found themselves in the torture chambers of the Rue des Saussaies and on the Avenue Foch. The terrible prison at Fresnes overflowed with political enemies of the Reich, most of whom the Germans deported to camps in the east. Roundups of Paris’s few remaining Jews continued as well, with 240 Jewish children being sent to the squalid suburban camp at Drancy on July 21, followed by another 400 children ten days later, and a final roundup of Jewish children on August 17, the day that the last trains left Drancy for Auschwitz. With them went the last Jews to remain in a city that had had a thriving Jewish population before the war. In 1940, some 140,000 Jews had lived in Paris, and two-thirds of them had been born in France.41
If there was any kind of silver lining in these terrible events, it was in the behavior of the Paris police
. Since the Allied landings, some Parisians had noted that the police seemed less willing to work with the Germans and had, in fact, stopped arresting Parisians for their political views alone. This refusal on the part of the Paris police may help to explain the increased activity by the Gestapo, which now had to do more of its own dirty work. Jacques Bardoux was one of the Parisians who noted a new attitude among the police. He asked a policeman he knew about this turnabout and recorded his impressions in his journal that night. The policeman told him that the vast majority of the Paris police force was “against the Germans.” He added, “We want very much to have the opportunity to set things right with the odious and rotten Nazi regime. We are for the Republic, although not a communist Republic.” The Paris police had, in fact, begun to unite the force’s four separate Resistance groups, pledging their allegiance to Charles de Gaulle. The prefect of the Paris police, however, remained loyal to the collaborationist city administration of the right-wing and anti-Semitic Pierre Taittinger, founder of both a successful champagne-making house and the Jeunesse Patriotique (The Young Patriots), a fascist youth movement of the interwar years. And if Parisians detected a change within the police force itself, it was a minor one, as even the most militant members limited their resistance to passive acts.42
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