Seven Ages of Paris (64 page)

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 indicated 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.”

But not all literary works which passed the German censor should be denigrated. Of lasting historical value, for instance, were the novels or memoirs of writers like Marcel Aymé and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie with their vivid descriptions of Paris under the Occupation, its almost beautiful emptiness and silence, free of dogs and traffic. To be a professional author like Jean Galtier-Boissière, who preferred to live in poverty selling second-hand books rather than undergo the indignity of submitting what he wrote for Nazi approval, required a special kind of courage. Meanwhile their rivals moved on up the literary ladder as their writings were snapped up by publishers who kept going throughout the war.

Perhaps closer to the norm was Colette, who had shown remarkable indifference to all the international crises of the pre-war period and who during the Occupation fell back on a philosophy of “le sage repliement sur soi-même”—translatable, in less poetical terms, as lying low. She recalled the restrained attitude of her mother, Sido, in the face of the Prussian occupation of 1870 (“I went home and buried the good wine”) and got on with her writing, publishing her fiction even in such pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic and anti-British organs as Gringoire and the committedly collaborationist La Gerbe. An apologist for Colette, Patrice Blank, who became a hero of the Resistance, regarded her as exemplifying:

an unconsciousness shared by a large number of French artists. It was very widespread, and the excuse one heard most often was that the theatre should function “normally” and the “voice” of French culture should not be stifled. There were very few, and I underline very few, true résistants.

Similar principles applied to the art world. Many artists had fled Paris; Jews (swiftly excluded from exhibitions or galleries) wisely removed themselves to the U.S., as Chagall did. But just as many stayed. Braque lay low, yet happily received selected Germans in his studio and emerged to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne of 1943. Picasso—as a Spaniard, neutral—for all his outrage over the consequences of fascism that he had poured into his famous Guernica—was not averse to overtures and invitations from the occupiers. The various salons of winter and autumn were held as before, and as early as the end of 1940 the Orangerie in the Tuileries was showing an exhibition dedicated to Monet and Rodin. Even the private galleries and auction houses, like Drouot, managed to prosper, achieving higher and higher prices.

FIRST SUFFERINGS AND FIRST PROSCRIPTIONS

For many Parisians the winter of 1940–1 was one of a “constant hunt for fuel and food,” remembered as the worst of the war. The Nazi occupier was swift to plunder France to furnish his war machine and replenish German larders. With unforgiving suddenness the average daily intake of food was reduced to 1,300 calories per day. Invidious comparisons were made with the sieges of 1590 and 1870; certainly even at the darkest moments of the First World War there had never been such privation. Bread (the Parisian’s staple diet), sugar and noodles were rationed in August 1940; butter, cheese, meat, coffee, pork and eggs followed in October. Coffee was soon replaced by a revolting brew of acorns and chickpeas, called café national. But possession of a ration card didn’t guarantee food. “We have the tickets,” wrote Jean Guéhenno on 3 January 1941, “but they don’t permit one to obtain anything. The shops are empty.” Parisians took to raising vast numbers of rabbits, even in their apartments—the number reportedly rising to 400,000 at one point.

As much of an enemy as hunger was the cold. With communications still interrupted, only a minimum of fuel reached Paris during that particularly cold winter of 1940–1. Worst of all was the plight of the inactive—writers, teachers, artists and unemployed—unable to keep warm in their freezing habitations. Sunday, day of rest, was the day most dreaded by the workers. The mortality rate soared. By 1941–2 it was 62 per cent over the 1938 level for the western areas of Paris, and revealingly only 38 per cent up in the working-class districts of eastern Paris.

For the less privileged Parisians there was not even the possibility of driving into the countryside to fill their cars with food. There was no petrol for civilians, and only 7,000 cars were actually licensed in Paris. A vigilant Feldgendarmerie checked all traffic and permits; on Sundays only Germans were allowed to drive at all. As a means of transportation (apart from the key Métro, which kept running), bicycles took over. Within the first three months of the Occupation 22,000 were reported stolen in Paris. Then came the strange-looking vélo-taxis, often seen propelled by an emaciated woman, with two strapping Germans and their girlfriends in the cart-like trailer.

Apart from the poor, there was one particular section of Parisians that, by definition, suffered worse than any other. No sooner had the Occupation established itself than Jews were forbidden to stand in food queues. By 27 September 1940, the German authorities had issued the first ordonnances proscribing the Jews in France, the jaws of the deadly trap which would close around them. Vichy followed suit with its own statute a week later, defining what constituted a Jew. In Paris the Jews then numbered some 150,000, or roughly half the total in France.

Life became progressively more difficult for the Jews of Paris as with swift relentlessness new restrictions and proscriptions were imposed. Property and business premises were requisitioned. Jewish professors were forced to resign from the Sorbonne, as being hostile to the German Reich. Jewish writers were prevented from publishing, Jewish artists from exhibiting. Jews were forbidden to use public telephones. In September 1941 a massive exhibition was mounted in the Palais Berlitz on the Boulevard des Italiens entitled “Le Juif et la France.” Designed to whip up anti-Semitism among Parisians, over 200,000 visited; there were no known protests, criticism or demonstrations against it. Then came the enforced wearing of the yellow star, the dreadful stigma of the east European ghetto under Hitler. Parisian reactions to it were mixed. Some Jews wearing it were insulted in the street, and children at school were mocked by their classmates. On the other hand, there were many cases of words of sympathy expressed in the Métro, one of the few places Jews could frequent, and there were a few brave examples of disgusted Parisian Gentiles actually volunteering to wear the yellow star themselves.