When Paris Went Dark (16 page)

One of the major mistakes made by Berlin was its failure to define its role in two key ways—a failure that would end up exacerbating the unpleasantness of the Occupation. First, it did not give specific guidelines to the Occupation authorities to do anything in Paris but “maintain order and security”; and second, it refused to clarify for the Vichy government its future in a Paris and in a Europe ruled by the Reich.
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Such lack of precision combined with the unique presence of a separate État français led to one exquisitely melodramatic episode that embarrassed key political figures—Hitler himself; Otto Abetz (the German ambassador to Paris); the prime minister, Pierre Laval; and Maréchal Pétain. It concerned the decision to return the remains of the King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt, and only recognized son of Napoleon I (who designated him Napoleon II upon his abdication) to the Invalides, where he would lie beside his father. Arno Breker recalled the Führer gazing on Napoleon’s tomb:

This last sentence is an understatement, for the event caused the first serious contretemps between the German Occupation and the Vichy government.

Coincidentally, Pétain was at that moment in the process of reorganizing his cabinet with the aim of ridding himself of the oily, subversive Pierre Laval, a close confidant of Otto Abetz, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s man in Paris.
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Laval had supported the idea of returning the ashes when Abetz mentioned it. (It remains unclear how much more Hitler had thought about his suggestion after he made it in June.) By mid-December, Laval had contrived for Hitler to send the following letter to Pétain:

Pétain, for once, was incensed at the arrogance of the German leader. Informed that he was expected to be at the Invalides to receive the coffin on behalf of a grateful France, he haughtily refused: to appear under the Nazi flag, surrounded by German military, would have offended even the most neutral French citizens. And, to put it bluntly, Pétain couldn’t have cared less about Napoleon II’s ashes (the French use the
term
cendres
to refer to the mortal remains of major figures, even when there has been no cremation). He had other things on his mind: getting rid of Laval, for one, and persuading the Germans to allow him to move his government from the backwater of Vichy to Versailles, nearer Paris, as the Armistice agreement had suggested. To the embarrassment of the newly fired Laval and Ambassador Abetz, Pétain, for once, stood his ground.

What followed was nearly comic, a combination of the ghoulish, the pompous, the hypocritical, and the amusing—one of the few events of the Occupation that can inspire a small smile. The heavy bronze coffin was taken from the Capuchin Church in Vienna, where the Duke of Reichstadt had lain for more than a hundred years next to his mother, Marie-Louise, grandniece of Marie Antoinette. (There were wags in Paris who asked, after the transfer had been announced: “Why move him away from his mother? Why not move them both? Or move Napoleon to Vienna—keep the family together.”) Placed on a special armored train, the coffin made the slow trip from Vienna to Paris through a freezing European winter. One Frenchman remembers that his father, a railroad worker, bundled him up and took him to the Gare de l’Est that cold morning to watch the train come in. His father asked his fellows when the young Napoleon’s body was arriving. “What Napoleon? We’re expecting an important train with the body of some German big shot, the Duke of Reichstadt.” As one historian has pointed out, the French knew more about the Duke of Windsor than they did Napoleon’s boy.

The heavy coffin, which had been surrounded inside the car by a small forest of Austrian pines, was placed on a special caisson that was pulled through Paris by the light of torches down major boulevards, along the icy Seine, past the Louvre, to the Invalides. The scene was right out of Leni Riefenstahl’s (Hitler’s favorite filmmaker) and Goebbels’s lugubrious performance manual: darkness, torches, slow pacing, cadenced drumming, all hints of ancient Teutonic tradition. This parade happened right after midnight, and, of course, there was no one in the streets, only the slowly pacing cortege, led and followed by military vehicles. It was wicked cold, with persistent sleet falling on the
catafalque. When the parade reached the Invalides, the coffin was brought in by German soldiers, formally delivered to the elaborately uniformed Garde républicaine, who laid it at the chapel’s altar, where finally a tricolor flag was draped over the casket. (An exception had been made to allow the French flag to be used ceremonially.)

Somberly, an official placed at the bier a wreath from Philippe Pétain, chef de l’État français. But shouldn’t there have been one, equally ostentatious, from the Führer, whose brilliant initiative this had been? Indeed, a late night delivery had been made, before the chapel had been opened. A wreath with the name of Adolf Hitler prominently displayed had been left outside the gate. The story is that the wife of the Invalides’s caretaker saw it and quickly removed and burned it in her fireplace. In turn, her husband gathered the wires on which it had stood and buried them on the grounds. So there was no wreath from the magnanimous Nazi manager of this ghoulish farce.

The next day Parisian newspapers described the arrival and the disposal of the remains; soon there were long lines of French and Germans waiting to see the coffin. But overall, this meticulously planned spectacle had, as Pétain knew it would, little impact on the French. (“We asked them for coal and they sent us ashes” was a typically Parisian response.) An especially imaginative rumor, one believed by many, was that de Gaulle had been killed in the bombing of London and his ashes had been spirited to Paris, placed in the Duke of Reichstadt’s coffin, and were now resting next to Napoleon!

So the minuet had miscues and slipups. For about a year, until Germany invaded the USSR in June of 1941, both sides tried to follow the other’s lead, if suspiciously. As the summer months of 1940 passed, many Parisians found themselves increasingly preoccupied with figuring out how to meet the normal demands of everyday life. Larger questions such as resistance, political concerns about the new Vichy government, and philosophical notions about liberty were put aside in favor of worrying about finding nourishment, fretting about the million and a half French soldiers still in POW camps, and adjusting to new and less efficient means of transportation. But there were Parisians who had other, more immediate concerns.

Jacques Biélinky was born in Russia in 1881 and had immigrated to Paris in 1909, primarily to escape the anti-Jewish violence that was frequent in that part of Europe. He became a French citizen in 1927 (not that such a choice would help him escape deportation and death in the camp at Sobibòr in 1943) and began to write for Jewish papers, both in French and in Yiddish. When the Germans arrived in Paris, many Parisians were curious, angry, or neutral. But Jews knew that the web of Nazi racism was encroaching on them in one of the continent’s most progressive cities. Within two months of their arrival, the Germans began a census of all foreigners, “with the assistance of the owners of apartment buildings, apartment managers, and concierges.”
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The effort made even French Jews apprehensive. By the end of September, the Vichy government had passed specific anti-Jewish ordinances defining “Jewishness” and setting up regulations regarding property ownership. From July of 1940 until December of 1942, Biélinky kept a meticulous journal of the effects of the Occupation on the complexly heterogeneous Jewish population of Paris.

The number of Jews in Paris at that moment is a difficult statistic to pin down, even given the intensive effort of the Vichy and German police to establish the aforementioned census. In general, we can work with these numbers: in October of 1940 there were about 150,000 Jews in Paris, and many more were coming daily from Alsace-Lorraine, from which they had been expelled. Of that number, about 86,000 were French nationals (though some, like Biélinky, had been citizens only since the early twentieth century), and about 64,000 were foreign immigrants, many of them recent. They spoke many languages and held varying degrees of allegiance to Jewish religious practices. They were mostly poor, but a significant number of them had businesses and other affairs that had brought wealth. The many synagogues of Paris ranged from the modest to the opulent, and there were definitely social prejudices on the part of some groups toward others. In fact, many of the poor Jews had convinced themselves that the rich ones would be the targets of Nazi looting and arrest—certainly not they, who had nothing.

Biélinky’s diary gives us a detailed account of life in the first year of occupied Paris as he tried to gauge the dangers for Jews, which were harder and harder to ignore. His journal is a cross between an anthropological study of an urban environment under duress and an analysis of the status of Jews within the capital. Strangely enough, he found that in the beginning, Gentile Parisians gave Jews and their situation little attention, showing disinterest rather than hatred or scorn. He hears almost no anti-Semitic remarks while waiting in shop queues; he even learns that patrolling French police occasionally kept right-wing thugs from intimidating Jewish students and merchants.

There were definitely targeted ordinances—Jews could not sell their buildings or apartments, Jewish musicians were fired from classical and popular orchestras—but on the whole German soldiers themselves seemed unconcerned with those whom their government considered their greatest mortal and moral threat. For instance, in the Rue Buffault, in the working-class 14th arrondissement, a German garage was right across the street from a synagogue. Jews were at first skittish about going to worship, but the Germans barely took notice of them; there were no incidents. When there were a few anti-Semitic outbursts in a soup line, German soldiers would at first protect the Jews.

Despite the bright yellow signs on the outside of Jewish shops, reminding potential patrons that their owners belonged to the hated race, their business grew. Was it because of Parisian solidarity, or was it a form of Parisian resistance? Biélinky did not know, but perhaps it was both, and the examples reflect how difficult it is to suggest a seamless tableau about Parisian anti-Semitism and apathy. For the most part, non-Jews seem to have ignored the regulations imposed on their
Israélite
neighbors. Even visiting Germans and their wives shopped in those stores, and, unbelievably, some Catholic shop owners put the same yellow signs up because they seemed to attract more customers than other types of advertising. One Jewish woman said that the fact that her parents’ restaurant had a yellow sign meant they never had to worry about German clients. Should a German soldier walk in obliviously, her parents would point to the sign (in German as well as French); he would mumble an apology and leave.

That does not mean that the Germans did not do their dirty work. Rumors were rampant, and Parisian Jews were always waiting for another shoe to fall. Biélinky heard of Jewish bookshops being raided and apartments being targeted with alacrity and precision. Rabbis enjoined their congregants not to talk politics at worship, and not to stand around outside the synagogue drawing attention. Still, our optimistic (or, at least, hopeful) journalist remarked as late as May 19, 1941, that despite increasingly inclusive dragnets targeting Jews, perhaps the worst would not happen in Paris: “On the day of mass arrests of Jews for internment, around one hundred Jews—especially artists and intellectuals—were arrested at the city hall of the 14th arrondissement. Outside, the French crowd, very Aryan, violently protested against these arrests.”
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But Parisian solidarity and sense of justice would not be enough to keep these roundups from increasing, nor would the Wehrmacht, though not unhelpful in some of the SS’s actions, be able to stop their fanatical brethren from trying to remove every Jew, French or foreign, from the streets of Paris.

In another part of the city, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (known universally by her last name alone), France’s best-known woman writer, a feminist and a gifted narrator, was also interested in recording what was happening in her beloved city. She had decided to return to Paris after the exodus and, like Picasso and her close friend Jean Cocteau, who lived nearby, to remain there. She did not wander very far from her enclave: the Palais-Royal. This former palace, built by Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth century, is located in the center of Paris, just a stone’s throw from the Louvre. The site of some of Paris’s most idiosyncratic shops, the building had several apartments on the upper floors; although they were not grand, they had the cachet of location. The Palais-Royal was to Paris what Paris was to the rest of war-ravaged Europe: an island of relative peace and calm despite being in the 1st arrondissement, among the most infested by the German presence. The Occupation authorities had requisitioned about two dozen hotels for offices and billeting in that district—among them the capital’s most famous establishments: the Ritz, the Continental, the Meurice, the Lotti. This geographically small neighborhood contained the Ministries of Justice and Finance, the Louvre, the headquarters of the Banque de France, the Police Judiciaire, on the Quai des Orfèvres, and the Palais de Justice, on the Île de la Cité. It encompassed the luxurious Place Vendôme and the popular Les Halles. And it was home to the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume museums (which Göring would visit more than twenty times during the Occupation). But the Germans did not lay their hands on the Palais-Royal: no hotel in the neighborhood was requisitioned, nor were any apartments or any businesses appropriated. For years, Colette and her husband, Maurice Goudeket, a Jewish journalist, lived at 9 Rue Beaujolais, in a small apartment she affectionately called
le Tunnel.
One of France’s best-known chefs, Raymond Oliver, ran Le Grand Véfour restaurant, located on the ground floor, under Colette’s apartment. High-ranking Germans and French collaborators often lunched and dined there, and Oliver would on occasion send dishes to his friend upstairs. From time to time, a German military band would play in the garden, and military personnel could be found there playing chess outdoors. But the wall around the old palace’s garden seemed to have kept the Occupiers at a distance.

Colette and her friend Jean Cocteau in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.
(Serge Lido/Sipa Press/Sipa USA)

The Palais Royal and its secluded gardens

At her second-story window on the northern edge of the enclave, Colette would sit on her chaise longue and write her letters, stories, and newspaper columns. (During the war, she composed “Gigi,” the story that would bring her wide international fame.) From October of 1940 until her husband’s arrest in December of 1941, she wrote a series of articles for the collaborationist newspaper
Le Petit Parisien.
As one of her critics says: “This collection… is not among those that would have allowed Colette to pass into posterity.”
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Yet it provides an important glimpse of the first reactions of Parisians to the sudden arrival of the German occupiers. To the chagrin of many who were less sanguine about the invader, Colette wrote a sort of advice column to her women readers, suggesting how to make do during this difficult time. The columns make little reference to the political nature of the Occupation; after all, they were being published in a newspaper controlled by
German and Vichy censors. But they do let us know how soon the Occupation began to wear on Parisians and in what ways many of them coped. Twin concerns dominate her pieces: winter cold and the paucity of good nourishment. Colette suffered much from an arthritic hip that kept her inside her apartment. She could barely navigate the steps down to the shelter during air raid warnings and rarely ventured into the Métro because of the stairs down to the tracks. Yet she maintained, at least in her columns, an optimism that would, as a friend said after the war, be seen as a sort of heroism, a keeping of one’s sangfroid during difficult times. She repeated her commonsensical mantra: despair, sorrow, and penury teach us how to live better than do joyous moments, and things would get better. “I have known happy Paris too well to worry about unhappy Paris,” she famously wrote.
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Colette had always challenged in her work the bourgeois hypocrisy that defined elite Parisian society, and this comment is a perfect example of her devil-may-care attitude about the Occupation.

Her columns also introduce another subject in need of more attention: the role of women in Paris during the Occupation. More than a million and a half French soldiers had been captured in just over a month, most of them spirited away to Germany. They would be released in dribbles for the next four years, used as bargaining chits by the Germans to ensure, through blackmail, as much quiescence as they could from the French population. The large absence of men (in stalags, in hiding, or working abroad) meant that Paris became a significantly feminized city, yet another major consequence of the presence of a masculinized other. Women, then, had to leave the hearth and venture out into the world to find jobs, food, and companionship if they were to survive physically as well as psychologically. Raising children became more burdensome; the temptation to accommodate oneself with the German Occupier became harder to resist, less ethically severe. Colette suggests in her columns that Parisian women should follow her strategy: lie low, find food, and stay at home as much as possible. “Au lit, au lit!” (To bed, to bed!), she half seriously offered as advice. What most of her readers did not realize, of course, is that in addition to her physical infirmities Colette had the anxiety of worrying
about her Jewish husband, a journalist, too, who had been “relieved” of his job at the daily
Paris-Soir
by the Germans as soon as they arrived. Her neighbors and nearby merchants offered him a hiding place every night if one were needed, for they knew that the police—French or German—arrived while you were still in your bed. One young woman on the floor above even told Maurice that he should come “jump in bed” with her if surprised by a raid. Sure enough, Goudeket was arrested by the Gestapo in December of 1941 and imprisoned for two months. Colette’s prestige and the respect German ambassador Abetz’s French wife had for her enabled his release in February of 1942. For the rest of the war, they lived anxiously, awaiting another ominous knock on their door.
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From her second-floor window prospect, Colette knew that there were stories “out there,” as her readers tried to adapt to a new set of daily occurrences. For example, just because the Germans were everywhere did not mean that crime had disappeared: one of her best friends was mugged in one of the Palais-Royal’s arcades. And because she religiously believed that to eat meant more than to nourish the body—it meant nourishing the imagination as well—one had to know the black market and other sources (friends in the countryside, for example) intimately in order to obtain impossible-to-get foods such as garlic, cheese, and pork. Colette also wrote of how much more sensitive she and others had become to sounds, both human and nonhuman—loud, unexpected sounds as well as quiet ones, which had become audible because of the diminution of traffic in the empty streets—sounds such as the occasional gunshot kept her from concentrating on her work. (Children in the garden, with their constantly popping cap pistols, did not help.) But she still refused to leave Paris for the country; the city, even in distress, continued to provide inspiration for her work, which dealt with how people love and live under seemingly depressing circumstances. Even though her connected friends kept her and her husband, Maurice, protected from further Nazi harassment, and even
though she finally gave up writing her newspaper articles, the anxiety never totally disappeared.

Colette and others also took notice in their journals and memoirs of the subtle changes that occurred in daily social interactions between Parisians as well as between Parisians and their German “visitors.” A new sort of awareness had to be developed: checkpoints for papers were more frequent; looking ahead as one walked familiar streets became routine. There was a reorientation of the habitual use of the senses as Parisians made their way through a changed city. One’s hearing had to adjust to the unfamiliar, disorienting silence caused by the absence of traffic noises. Memoirists even mentioned that the sound of wooden—as opposed to rubber, a material that was rationed—soles pounding on the pavement allowed one to track the number as well as the speed of passing pedestrians. (In December of 1942, the singer Maurice Chevalier would introduce his song “La Symphonie des semelles de bois” [The Symphony of Wooden Soles].) Sight and touch were more often put to use as citizens became aware of what their neighbors were wearing, how their fellows were coping with the new restrictions the war economy had produced, from foodstuffs to textiles. Private motorized transportation having been radically restricted, densely packed public transportation became an environment in which Parisians of all social and economic classes were aware of the body odor of their compatriots. As a historian of everyday life in this period has convincingly posited: “To break a plate, tear a pair of pants, choose one café over another, speak with any neighbor can have grave consequences. The simplest gestures in a time of peace are no longer at all trifling in an occupied, pillaged, destroyed country.”
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Wit, humor, and a sense of the absurd soon become expressions not only of a sense of fatalism but also of resistance. Jokes and pranks (some of them cause for imprisonment) were soon part of the Parisian response to the invaders. Perhaps the most repeated joke of the period managed to knead enemy, victim, and ally into a single confection:

Hitler, searching for a way to invade England, calls in the chief rabbi of Berlin and asks him how Moses parted the Red Sea. If he can get
that information, the Führer will end his harassment campaign against the Jews. The rabbi answers: “Give me a week, Chancellor.” Returning a week later, the rabbi announces that he has both good news and bad news. “Well,” insists an impatient Hitler, “do you have the answer or not?” The rabbi replies, “Yes, sir—it was the staff Moses always had with him that had the power to create a path through the waters.” Demanded Hitler, “Where is it?” Answered the anxious rabbi, “Well, that’s the bad news. It’s in the British Museum.”

A more ghoulish joke:

A Parisian reports to his friend a rumor that at 9:20 the previous night, a Jew attacked and killed a German in the Métro. He even ate part of his entrails, including his heart. The friend says with a laugh, “You’ll believe anything you hear, Pierre.”

“But it’s true!”

“No, my friend: it’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“First, Jews don’t eat pigs; second, Germans have no heart; and, third, at 9:20 everyone is listening to the BBC.”