Seven Ages of Paris (63 page)

On 17 June 1940 William Shirer revisited Paris from a triumphant Berlin just three days after the German entry. He felt an ache in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the familiar but empty streets, which he had loved “as you love a woman”:

I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits.

… First shock: the streets are utterly deserted, the shops closed, the shutters down tight over all the windows. It was the emptiness that got you … [All] had fled—the patrons, the garçons, the customers …

Going round the Place de l’Opéra, he noted,

For the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone garçon was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them …

… I have a feeling that what we’re seeing here in Paris is the complete breakdown of French society—a collapse of the army, of government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe.

The following day, he observed that there was already “open fraternizing” between German troops and Parisians. He added that two newspapers had appeared the day before in Paris, La Victoire—“as life’s irony would have it”—and Le Matin: the latter “has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament!”

Momentarily Hitler lost his nerve before Dunkirk and—in a profound error of judgement—issued his controversial “halt order,” which was to save the British Expeditionary Force. The “Miracle of Dunkirk” came to pass, and 337,000 men (including 110,000 French) were evacuated by sea. For the Germans the campaign to conquer France now became largely a matter of marching, a pursuit down the highways. On 22 June France was forced to agree to a humiliating armistice. The brilliant six weeks’ Blitzkrieg had cost the Germans no more than 27,074 killed. Contrary to the received image, the French army, or at least parts of it, had fought bravely, and had lost in killed alone 100,000 men. But one million prisoners-of-war had been taken, and they would remain in miserable conditions, sometimes exploited as slave labourers, in Germany for the next five years.

What was so shattering for Paris, and it was to set the tone for the ensuing four years of Occupation, was the sheer speed of the German takeover. It was the end of centuries of tradition: Paris the fortress had suddenly become the “open city.” But life in the capital returned to a semblance of normality with parallel speed. The refugees began to come back. At the entry of the Germans, the Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, reckoned that the total population had sunk to 700,000, or a quarter of its pre-war total. The fashionable western arrondissements were all but empty. Then, three weeks later, and under pressure from the Germans, some 300,000 returned. Exhaustion shows in photographs of a working-class family trudging home on foot, wheeling a worn-out grandmother in a child’s pram. There were others who, in the privacy of their homes, found a way out rather than face what the future would bring; one of these was an eminent neurosurgeon who, having seen the Germans arrive on the Champs-Elysées, injected himself with strychnine.

Over the course of his ten-day visit that June, William Shirer noted a marked change. Whereas on the 17th he had recorded the streets “utterly deserted,” by the 23rd he found that the Rotonde and the Dôme restaurants in Montparnasse were:

as jammed with crackpots as ever, and in front of us a large table full of middle-aged French women of the bourgeoisie, apparently recovering from their daze, because their anger was rising at the way the little gamines (elles sont françaises, après tout!) were picking up the German soldiers …

Another neutral American, Ambassador William C. Bullitt, who had walked out in disgust from the U.S. delegation at Versailles in 1919, looked on with dismay as the German commanders moved into the Crillon just across the road from his Embassy. He sent one of his staff, Robert Murphy, over to the hotel to make contact with the new Kommandant of “Gross Paris,” General Bogislav von Stütnitz. There, in the Prince of Wales Suite, one of the Wehrmacht colonels turned out to be an old friend of Murphy’s from pre-war days in Bavaria. Over the champagne Stütnitz declared cheerfully that the war would be over by the end of July—six weeks hence.

Almost immediately one of the city’s most chic bordels, encouraged by the atmosphere of “business as usual,” put up a sign announcing that “The house will reopen at three o’clock.” W. H. Smith on the Rue de Rivoli became a German bookshop. The theatres and cinemas opened their doors again; famous restaurants like Maxim’s, the Grand Véfour and Fouquet’s went on as before for their new clientele; racing resumed at Auteuil with the terraces crammed with binocular-bearing officers—the Kommandant taking over the President’s box. Haute couture regained its former eminence, with Coco Chanel swiftly going to ground in the Ritz with a German officer, from which she seldom emerged until the war was over.

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.