Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Under strict orders, the first Germans to arrive behaved well. On the Métro members of the Wehrmacht ostentatiously gave up their seats to women and old people, and there was a widely disseminated slogan, “Have confidence in the German soldier.” Many Parisians were impressed: here was order brought of disorder. In their smart Feldgrau the occupiers looked like serious soldiers, unlike the demoralized rabble Parisians had seen passing through the city over previous weeks. There were comparisons, not always unspoken, with the Tommies who had sailed off and left France at Dunkirk, and with Woodrow Wilson’s Americans, who had let France down so badly in 1919 and had not lifted a finger to help her this time. Within the month would come the shocking news that the Royal Navy had sunk the French fleet, with heavy loss of sailors’ lives, at Mers-el-Kebir.

  THE NEW MASTERS

  Among the eminent visitors to Paris was Göring, who dined greedily at Maxim’s; but before him there was Adolf Hitler himself, on Sunday, 23 June, on his way home from having danced a little jig of revenge outside the wagons-lits where the French surrender was signed in the clearing at Compiègne. He was accompanied by his favourite architect, Albert Speer, and the sculptor Arno Breker, a long-time resident of Paris, who planned the itinerary.

  It was the triumphant Führer’s first and last trip to the capital which he intended to be the second city of the Thousand-Year Reich. Beginning at 6 a.m., in less than three hours he managed to “do” the whole city. He paused to incline his head in silence at Napoleon’s tomb and on the deserted steps of the Trocadéro to be photographed with the Eiffel Tower in the background. To Speer’s disappointment, Hitler passed by the Louvre, the Sainte-Chapelle and even Notre-Dame, but on their way out of the city he made a bee-line for the Sacré-Coeur—which the Führer, with a rare display of taste, condemned as “appalling.” At the Place Vauban behind the Invalides an angry Hitler ordered the immediate removal of the statue of the First World War General Mangin; he regarded it as an insulting reminder of the French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s. In the city which he wanted the future Berlin to emulate and indeed surpass, Hitler neither entered a private house nor stopped for a meal. Few recognized him, while the only Parisians he saw were a gardien at the Opéra (who suffered a heart attack), a newspaper vendor, a few flics and a handful of worshippers at the Sacré-Coeur. Breker heard him boast that he had taken it as his own responsibility “to preserve undamaged this wonder of Western civilization. We have succeeded.” There is no evidence that any such order had ever been transmitted to the German army commanders, and—four years later as the Germans prepared to leave Paris—it would be a very different story.

  As it was, the reality of the German occupation very soon became apparent. As a minor foretaste, the doomed statue of General Mangin was accompanied to destruction by the statues of such notables as Nurse Edith Cavell and Rouget de Lisle (composer of the Marseillaise). Other famous statues to disappear included those of Hugo, Zola, Villon, Berlioz and Desmoulins, while city officialdom had to strain itself to protect Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. By loudspeakers the inhabitants of Paris were warned, “The German High Command will tolerate no act of hostility towards the occupation troops. All aggression, all sabotage will be punished by death.” Henceforth there would be a strict curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. each night. Thus were the ground rules laid. Already that first winter as rationing was imposed, suffering was to become intense as life became a constant hunt for fuel and food.

  The new German administration established itself with astonishing rapidity and efficiency, even while the battle outside Paris still continued. Almost overnight there appeared outside the Opéra a maze of signs directing to various military Abteilungen, headquarters, units, hospitals, Kinos, hotels, recreation centres and every other kind of Wehrmacht function. (In the summer of 1944 there was even a helpful arrow pointing “To the Normandy Front.”) Deprived of tourists, the main hotels were swiftly allocated: the Majestic on Avenue Kléber, in 1919 residence of the British peace delegation, became the headquarters of the High Command responsible for the whole of the Occupied Zone—that is, two-thirds of France, including all the northern provinces. The Claridge on the Champs-Elysées combined the police, economic and cultural administrations; the Lutetia on the Left Bank housed the Abwehr intelligence departments, the Crillon on the Concorde the sinister Sicherheitsdienst or SD; next door the navy moved, conveniently, into Gabriel’s imposing Ministère de la Marine, while the Luftwaffe headed by Field Marshal Sperrle—who had Göring’s eye for luxury—occupied Marie de Médicis’s Luxembourg. For their officers’ club the Luftwaffe also occupied the choice address on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré which later became the American Residence; and the Kommandant and his staff took over the Meurice and part of the Crillon. Supreme insult, the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon—where Daladier had stood up and declared war on Germany just nine months previously and which was now decked with swastikas—was requisitioned for the Kommandantur offices. The Gestapo moved in to 74 Avenue Foch and 9 Rue des Saussaies; as the Resistance developed, neighbours of these buildings would be kept awake at night by the screams emanating from their interrogation rooms. Soon there were more than a thousand Germans in the Majestic alone. Later in the war, when all available manpower was needed on the Russian Front, over 100,000 miscellaneous front-dodgers were dredged up from the fleshpots of Paris.

  In addition to this top-heavy administration, each of the Nazi bigwigs—Göring, Ribbentrop, Goebbels, Rosenberg—found an excuse to set up their own Verbindungs office in the Capuan seductiveness of Paris. But throughout the Occupation one of the most influential Nazis in Paris was the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz, who operated out of the Hôtel de Beauharnais—with its Napoleonic associations—at 80 Rue de Lille. Aged only thirty-seven in 1940, Abetz was a remarkable man, by his own lights a genuine francophile—married to a Frenchwoman—who had spent much time in pre-war France. He managed to convince Hitler that France, if treated considerately, might swiftly accept a subordinate place in the “New Order.” His job in Paris was to work on “elements receptive to conditioning favourably public opinion,” and he was immensely successful, rapidly building up an extensive network of contacts. Few turned down his invitations. Illustrative of how fashionable Paris, the gratin and le tout Paris (café society), reacted to Abetz and the more sortable among the former enemy was Baron Elie de Rothschild’s account of the parties given at his town mansion on the Avenue de Marigny while it was occupied by a Luftwaffe general. On returning from prison camp after the war Rothschild observed to the old family butler, Félix, that the house must have been very quiet during the Occupation. The butler replied, “On the contrary, Monsieur Elie. There were receptions every evening.” “But … who came?” asked the astonished Rothschild. “The same people, Monsieur Elie. The same as before the war.”

  Least considerable, and generally unheeded, was the “Embassy” of Pétain’s Vichy regime, which governed the rump state of unoccupied France. Initially the Embassy was run from 27 Rue de Grenelle by Ambassador Léon Noël, but he was soon overridden by de Brinon, the personal representative of Pierre Laval (initially Pétain’s deputy, from 1942 his Prime Minister), set up in style at the Matignon, residence of the premiers of France. The Vichy Embassy had derisory powers and little influence, and kept Vichy eminently ill informed of what was happening in Paris. Although Abetz adroitly always showed it a smiling face, it earned the contempt of the German military as, under Laval’s policy of total collaboration, Vichy became progressively the poodle of the occupiers.

  Already in the summer of 1940, unseen and sinister matters were in hand. Under the mantle of Abetz, censorship in the shape of the “Bernhard List” proscribed 150 books, which had to be removed from the libraries. Also under way was the requisitioning of Jewish houses in Paris and of the works of art contained in them, as well as those in Jewish-owned galleries. The Jeu de Paume became a huge depot for pillaged works of art on their way to Germany, Vivant Denon in reverse. Worse, many
paintings—perhaps between 500 and 600—deemed “unfit for sale” were burned in the Louvre courtyard. These included works by “decadents” like Miró. It has been estimated that by the end of the war some 20,000 works of art were conveyed to Germany. Many were destroyed in air-raids there or, for other reasons, were never subsequently recovered. That so many were located and returned safely to their owners after the war was largely due to the courage and tenacity of the conservatrice at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland, who managed to keep a discreet inventory of every item that passed out of the building.

  THE COLLABOS

  The line composed to celebrate the new staircase installed by the Second Empire’s grande horizontale La Païva could well be applied to those who collaborated with the Nazis: “Ainsi que la vertu, le vice a ses degrés” (see this page). While the German military instinctively tended to deal with the French right (not just the extreme right), Abetz’s preference was for collaborators of the left, notably among the pre-war pacifists and those who believed that Versailles had given Germany a raw deal. From the first his wide network of French contacts included writers like Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle and Jean Luchaire, a close friend from pre-war days, editor of Le Matin. Ambitious, and renowned for his expensive tastes, in July 1940 Luchaire declared to a fellow journalist, “I shall be starting a big evening paper in Paris … One must press on, my dear Jacques; one can’t turn back in melancholy to a past that has been scrapped. We are young—we should not mourn but build …” His “building” led to the launch that November of Les Nouveaux Temps, which was to become the most influential of the collaborationist papers, financed by Laval and Abetz, and determinedly supportive of the Nazi line. Also at the top of the collabo staircase, each dedicated to the success of Germany but treated with initial coolness by Abetz, came Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat, both left-wingers by origin.

  Doriot had started life on the politburo of the Communist Party, then swung right to form the Fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) and its journal Le Cri du Peuple. Déat had begun in Blum’s Socialist Party and was at one time regarded as Blum’s successor. Violently opposed to France’s entry into the war, he founded the journal L’Oeuvre and—in February 1941—the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), which had its headquarters in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré at the former Seligman premises, requisitioned under the first takeovers of Jewish property. Doriot’s PPF had a substantial proletarian base, but Déat’s RNP was largely middle aged and middle class. Both parties embraced a large number of women among their membership.

  Among the most anti-Semitic of the collaborationist press was Au Pilori, edited by Jean Drault, which in November 1942 was to come out with a leader urging that “The Jewish question must be resolved immediately by the arrest and deportation of all Jews without exception.” Another eminent anti-Semite was the apocalyptic Céline, so obsessed by death and destruction that defeat and occupation, it has been said, “fell short of his expectations.” Then there was the equally splenetic, extreme right-wing Je Suis Partout, now resumed after a deplorable pre-war record under Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet. Briefly a prisoner-of-war, Brasillach was allowed back to Paris to take over the editorship of Je Suis Partout, whose circulation rose to an astonishing 300,000. He later explained himself in clearest terms:

  The German genius and I had an affair … whether one likes it or not, we lived together. Whatever their outlook, during these years the French have all more or less been to bed with Germany, and whatever quarrels there were, the memory is sweet.

  Could anything be less ambiguous?

  All these grands collaborateurs at the top of the staircase of vice were wholeheartedly committed to the deutsche Zukunft, in the certain belief that Hitler was going to win (which, in summer 1940, looked a fair bet). They would pay a heavy price. Then came the French Communists, sullenly committed by the pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov the previous August to supporting the Germans. Until Hitler turned round and savaged the Soviet Union the following year, L’Humanité was allowed to thrive. Typical was its edition of 14 July: “It is particularly comforting, in these times of misfortune, to see numerous Paris workers striking up friendliness with German soldiers … Bravo, comrades, continuez.” It was not surprising that this kind of exhortation to the “comrades” encouraged them to come out into the open once more, like a lot of foolish mice, making it all the easier for the cat to pounce after 22 June 1941, when the Führer turned on Russia. At the other end of the social scale, and bent on getting on with the occupiers out of rather more selfish motives, came the gratin and le tout Paris, the frequenters of the former Rothschild house remarked on by the old butler, faithful in their infidelity. The arguments were exculpatory; the principle was “business as usual”—to place a curb on Parisian social life would be less of a punishment to the Germans than to the indigènes.

  Lower down the staircase of collaboration came the massed ranks of the petit bourgeoisie, the merchants, artisans and grocers, bistrotiers and restaurateurs—the majority of Parisians. They were significantly—and understandably—dependent on “business as usual” as a matter of survival. Most often their relationship with the occupiers, as that of the Parisian in the street, would be one of icy correctness—one of cold stares, or of avoiding eye contact. The experience could be memorably painful to more sensitive young German soldiers finding themselves in Paris and simply wanting to be friendly, or preferably loved.

  But a great many Germans found love and more among Parisians. As early as October 1943 some 85,000 illegitimate children had been fathered by Germans in France, and by the middle of the following year 80,000 Frenchwomen were claiming children’s benefits from the military authorities, which French historians consider to have been “only the tip of the iceberg.” The ordinary collabo horizontale perhaps deserves more sympathy from us now than she found at the time. The loss of two million French males sequestered in German prisoner-of-war camps or employed as slave labour represented a terrible deprivation to French womanhood; many of the occupying Wehrmacht were physically attractive and well behaved. But most of all, as the war dragged on and life became harsher and harsher in Paris, sleeping with a German often became the only way a woman could keep her children from starvation.

  COLLABORATION OF INTELLECTUALS AND ARTISTS

  Much harder to assess is the collaboration of the artists and intellectuals, particularly writers. On the assumption that the Germans would be in Paris indefinitely, chef de ballet Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s protégé, took the straightforward line that, at thirty-five in 1940, he should continue dancing as he would soon be too old to do it. Under his direction the ballet company of the Opéra opened with Coppélia on 28 August, little more than two months after the arrival of the Germans; the Opéra had opened four days before with, appropriately enough, The Damnation of Faust. But for whose benefit did Lifar mostly perform? Throughout the war more than a third of the seats (the best, naturally) at the Opéra Comique were reserved for Germans. With Mistinguett and Chevalier on the boards, the Casino de Paris reopened as early 6 July—outside, a sign was posted prohibiting “dogs and Jews.” Jean-Louis Barrault was to argue that continuing one’s theatre work and ignoring the Germans was a positive attitude, and was all that could be done unless one were actively in the Resistance. The Paris theatre was soon back in full swing: by 1943 box-office receipts had attained a level three times what they had been in 1938.

  For productive writers or journalists to continue in business meant rather more than just “getting on.” To be published at all, they had to undertake the Faustian commitment of submitting their work for approval by the Nazi censors, which made each of them technically a collaborator. Moreover, as of September 1940 the association of French publishers signed an agreement with Abetz amounting to self-censorship. In exchange for suppressing works by Jews and “subversives,” the publishers were granted a margin of discretion in deciding what to publish and what to censor. The extent of literary collaboration was indic
ated by the statistic that on average 6,400 books were published in each of the four years of the Occupation. Indeed in 1943, at the height of the war, French publishers led the world with 9,348 titles, as against Britain’s 6,705 and the USA’s 8,320. (In the cinema, although initially Paris was flooded with German films, eventually the French industry overtook German production by turning out 225 full-length features and some 400 documentaries and cartoons; again all had to pass the censor.)

  On the other hand, reading like a roll of honour was the Bernhard List of proscribed authors, whose number soon approached 8,000. These embraced a wide range of distinguished authors from Pierre Loti to Georges Duhamel and Henri Bordeaux, to André Malraux and (of course) Charles de Gaulle. What Parisians most wanted to read was pretty much as before the war: books on travel, novels, escapism. One of the most successful was Lucien Rebatet’s Les Décombres, an outpouring of anti-Semitism and anti-republicanism which was nevertheless something of a literary masterpiece in its extraordinarily powerful evocation of the collapse of 1940. Published in 1942, it sold more than 60,000 copies.

  Other well-known authors published under the Occupation included Cocteau, Simenon, Eluard, Queneau, Aragon, Marguerite Duras, Saint-Exupéry, Camus, de Beauvoir and Sartre. “Politically,” Beauvoir complained, “… we found ourselves reduced to a position of impotence.” She and Sartre spent their time either gossiping at the Flore or bicycling in the countryside—apparently undisturbed by war or occupiers—while also freely publishing their works. Sartre’s first play, Les Mouches, was staged in 1943 at the Théâtre de la Cité and was highly praised by the drama critic of the German Pariser Zeitung; and in June 1944, as the Allies were landing in Normandy, his best-known play, Huis clos, with its famous line “Hell is other people,” opened in Paris. Alleged to be anti-German, the allegory was so subtle as to elude the notice of the censor. Later Camus parted company with Sartre, joining the Resistance to form the underground Combat. Sartre meanwhile joined the CNE (Comité National d’Ecrivains), largely dominated by Communists and fellow travellers, and acidly described by a modern historian as being “less interested in resistance than in drawing up lists of other writers and journalists whom they would proscribe and silence after the war.”