When Paris Went Dark (23 page)

The Métro—a vast system of underground trains and stations—was only forty years old when war came to Paris. A subway system has an immutable trajectory, unforgiving as it controls the direction and the pace of the passenger. Yet it provides, too, an apparent freedom, for one can get on or off wherever one wishes. One can take any line, change cars, wait for another train to pass, ride around all day on a single ticket, or remain in a station. One can direct a glance or ignore one; avoid physical contact or encourage it; talk with others or ignore them; read, eat, sleep, daydream. Here, on these predictable tracks, Parisians experienced the most freedom from official surveillance during the Occupation. Not that there were no thefts, arrests, roundups, attacks, and assassinations on the trains and in the stations, but more than a modicum of anonymity still prevailed as one rode under the streets of Paris.

In the guidebook
Wegleiter,
the Métro is often described as an inescapably useful means of getting around in a city where even Germans had trouble obtaining other means of transportation (except bicycles). “The Métro is the alpha and omega in Paris,” intoned the anonymous writer.
²²
Be careful, he warned his readers: you may get lost in its labyrinthine underground stations, but it can be a place of adventures and pleasant encounters with the French. (This was, of course, before the roundups and assassinations that would make the Métro quite dangerous for both sides.) The soldier was advised to procure a subway map as soon as he arrived in Paris and to study carefully how to get past the ticket puncher (all Germans in uniform could ride free), how to get on and off the train, and how to find his way out of the station. He also learned that about a hundred of the 350 Métro stations had been closed (because of the “difficulty of the transmission of electricity”—only
one of the reasons) but was also urged to admire that there were more than 1,800 train cars that ran over 110 miles of track and carried, in 1942, more than 1.25 million passengers.

Midcentury Métro trains.
(Creative Commons)

The Métro was a subterranean microcosm of what was occurring up in the city’s streets. Using the mostly underground railway had always forced Parisians into cautious engagement with others, both familiar and unfamiliar.
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Paris’s Métro trains were composed of five cars each;
until the Socialists became the ruling party in 1981, the red middle car, with thin leather cushions, was reserved for those who had bought a first-class ticket for about three times what a regular ticket cost. Almost immediately after the Occupation, the Germans—who could travel free, in uniform or not—occupied that car as if by right. Two years later, in 1942, those with yellow stars were relegated to the last car, just as blacks had been from the beginning of the Occupation.

The five-car train replicated some aspects of the city’s newly reorganized society. Many were forced to take the Métro who had never taken public transportation before or who had only taken the bus, the more bourgeois conveyance. One French woman remembers her mother recounting the horror she felt when a German officer reached down to pick her up in a crowded train. “I, too, have a little girl at home, whom I miss so,” he told the tense mother. The others in the car watched, trying not to stare, as the Frenchwoman refrained from wresting her child from the grasp of the friendly officer. However trivial, these episodes raised blood pressure and thorny ethical concerns about collaboration—or
Kontakt,
as the Germans called it—as well as questions about the boundaries separating social interaction and political expression. A series of paintings by the artist Jean Dubuffet depict blank-faced passengers in Métro cars sitting under signs that order
DÉFENSE DE FUMER
and
VERBOTEN RAUCHEN
(No Smoking) in two languages, an innocuous linguistic reminder that French travelers were still tied to the Germans.

During the Occupation many of the stations were closed because they were used by the Germans for workshops and storage or as air raid shelters or for security purposes. Consequently, Parisians could not easily make the transfers (
correspondances
) that allowed them to go from one line to another; and there was of course no predictability as to when stations or lines would be open or closed. No one knew when he or she might have to walk a long distance after learning that a stop had been closed. Citizens found themselves in neighborhoods only a few blocks from their own that they had scarcely known before the war.
Nonetheless the system was essential to the productivity of Paris. Without it, the city would have been shut down, for the absence of gasoline and private vehicles made efficient travel on the surface cumbersome and slow unless one used a bicycle.

Germans learning the Métro.
(Wegleiter)

A Swiss journalist, Edmond Dubois, described his return to Paris in 1942 after a two-year absence. He noticed that the streets were emptier; the taxis had disappeared; there was more use of muscle than engines. But when he took a Métro train, he instantly recalled the Paris he had left two years before:

Dubois and others reveal a dichotomy that repeatedly manifests itself in accounts of the period. There was an awareness that Paris had changed, that everything, from fashion to the daily clock, had adapted to the Occupation. In spite of these disruptions, some minor, some major, Parisians felt they had shown a resistance to the invader that gave them a sense of moral comfort, necessary in any situation where one’s individual liberty had been so severely abrogated: “Everywhere possible, Parisians would ostentatiously turn their backs on the Germans. It was considered good form to use second class in the Métro, as it was to leave a museum gallery when [German groups] appeared on guided tours. Parisians never mixed with the army.”
²⁴
This is only one point of view, and a somewhat affected and pretentious one, but it speaks to the recurring question: How did the typical Parisian live under Hitler’s thumb? Dubois, amusingly, plays to the prejudices of his Swiss readers (comfortably ensconced in their neutrality), whose idea of Paris is limited to their superficial knowledge of a gay, fashionable, aloof city temporarily inconvenienced by a boorish Occupier. But he still reminds us of the daily accommodations every Parisian—except for the most cosseted—had to make with the German interlopers.

One has only to live in a Parisian apartment for a week or so to discover how obsessive the French are about locks and doors. Lock shops in Paris are fascinating places to visit; they reflect the preoccupation that the French have always had with security, not only against the malfeasant but also against neighbors. To be offered a
trousseau de clés
(a key ring) is to be entrusted with the secrets of the owner; to lose a key is a minor disaster. Still, no bolts or chains could keep gossip from
circulating, and the rumor economy became very robust during the Occupation. A French term for denunciation is
délation,
and the practice of reporting on neighbors, strangers, family members, business associates, Jews, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and one’s own clients—not to mention political refugees, those in hiding, and resisters—was endemic in occupied Paris.
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This was another type of narrowing, the kind in which looking over your shoulder was not just a casual habit.

In late 1943, less than a year before Paris would be liberated, the film
Le Corbeau
(The Raven), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, brought in a very impressive seven million francs (selling about 185,000 tickets in just over three weeks in Paris alone). In spite of—or because of—its popularity,
Le Corbeau
was never shown in Germany, and the Catholic Church in France attempted to ban it. It was also immediately censored at the Liberation by Free French authorities, and not until 1947 would it be shown again in France and abroad. After the Liberation, its lead actor, Pierre Fresnay, spent six months in jail, partly for having participated in the film, which had been financed by Continental, the German-controlled French studio that made many—and many good—movies during the Occupation. Clouzot himself was not imprisoned, but he was forbidden to produce or direct films for the rest of his life, a sentence that was soon annulled. Around 1968,
Le Corbeau
finally became a staple in rerun houses and
cinémathèques.

Le Corbeau
is an unsettling film, even for today’s viewer: it depicts the moral, social, and psychological disintegration of a fictional small town, Saint-Robin, in the French provinces. Though not set in Paris, it obviously touched the nerves of Parisians. The plot line runs like this: anonymous letters begin to appear in the village’s mailboxes; they
accuse a recently arrived medical doctor of adultery; then more letters (eventually dozens over the course of two months) detail the illicit and immoral activities of the town’s most important and influential politicians and professionals.

In a real-life parallel to the film, police files in the provinces and in Paris were crammed with letters of denunciation from supposedly “well-meaning” but willfully malicious informers. They were sent to authorities for a variety of reasons and were both useful and a pain in the neck for the police. Encouraged early in the Occupation by the Germans and the Vichy government, the
délation,
anonymous or not, lost much of its effectiveness as the war dragged on. Surprisingly, recent research has suggested that there were relatively few denunciations of Jews; that Christian French men and women were criticizing, informing on, and betraying each other, mainly for personal reasons. Most letters contained reports on those who had criticized the Germans or Maréchal Pétain, who were illicitly listening to the BBC, or who were engaged in some imagined resistance activity. Though denunciation did happen in the provinces, it was much more prevalent in cities, where collaboration was more frequent and intimate. Indeed, what makes the atmosphere of
Le Corbeau
so intense for viewers is that it captures the aura of claustrophobia that comes from the social intimacy of the most respected citizens of the small town. “Our city is in a fever,” offers one of its leaders. “Little squares of white paper have been raining down on this town.” And, in real life, such denunciations would of course meet counternarratives, and both would confuse and befuddle the Germans.

Whose narrative of the Occupation was going to be dominant? Was French society composed of petty snitches, focused on themselves and their personal needs and expectations? Or was that society composed of patriots who used overheard information to undermine the authority of the Occupation? One of the primary criticisms of Clouzot’s film is that it revealed a fractious France, obsessed with the narcissism of small concerns, a country that had deserved its defeat and had been conquered by a morally superior nation. Yet the soft but continuously repeated theme of moral indignation was also heard: Do we have to act
this way, even though we are defeated? The film, like its plot, is morally ambiguous. For this reason, if not for its artistry, Clouzot’s
Le Corbeau
remains fascinating to French audiences.
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Examples of letters of denunciation have appeared extensively in print since the end of the war. The missives are often appalling in their blunt carelessness about the lives they are disrupting:

What strikes one first about this note is that the concierge signs her name, invoking the authority of her position—a concierge, someone who definitely should know what is happening in the building she is responsible for. One wonders if she has considered the possible consequences of her actions: maybe the building will be assigned to an “Aryan manager” who might have his own concierge put into place. Also, there is an assurance in the note that reveals how comfortable individuals were in exposing others. Somewhere along the line Renée Berti had learned that she had more to gain in reporting this possible “crime” than in remaining silent.

The suspicious atmosphere created by a hovering Occupation gave opportunities for shenanigans at best and malicious behavior at worst. Broken hearts, romantic rivalries, bad business relations, desire for rewards, envy among neighbors—these were just as prevalent as betrayal of one’s political or religious beliefs. There were so many incidences of denunciation—both anonymous and proudly
signed—that police forces became increasingly inured to them; indeed, there were not enough officers to check every accusation. Yet the Gestapo did stay alert to charges of anti-German behavior and certainly used these letters and notes to track down Jews in hiding. Sometimes even newspaper articles or radio programs would point out “suspicious” occurrences or sites. Of course, anonymous denunciation occurs in peacetime, but the uncertainty of a military and civil occupation offers opportunities, and often rewards, that in this case produced thousands of letters, notes, phone calls, and person-to-person betrayals.