When Paris Went Dark (36 page)

“Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure,” wrote Camus’s fictional diarist.
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And in her cramped apartment in the Palais-Royal, that protected bubble within a bubble in the center of Paris, the indomitable Colette added a last chapter to her earlier newspaper articles, giving us another subtle analysis of what Paris had become after four years of military occupation. Not unlike the sleepwalkers that Camus describes, Parisians seemed to be going through the motions of life without living at all. Colette had early on decided not to leave Paris for the country; the city, even in anxiety, continued to provide inspiration for her work, giving her insight into how people love and live under depressing circumstances. “What a trail it leaves in our hearts, four years of war,” she intoned.
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From her window she had noticed that children had lost a good part of their youth; benumbed by hunger and constant, unconsummated threats, they laughed and mimicked the sounds of the air
alerts rather than leave the gardens. They used indecorous language, for which they would have been slapped before the war, but who could blame them, when so many adults were likewise accommodating themselves to disruptive circumstances? Those on the cusp of adolescence, she noticed, did not try to hide their clumsy sexual groping and passionate kisses; in the Métro, Colette sees them pressed up against each other, oblivious to those around them. Girls try to dress like women, women like girls. The war has scratched away at the veneer of decorum, so important to a society’s stability. It was not prudishness that inspired Colette to describe a changed Paris but rather a desire to record, as a journalist, signs of the wearing down that war had caused. And it was literal:

And there was the new sound of the wooden-soled shoes of a group of girls running through the Palais-Royal’s arcades on their way to stand and giddily scream “Jeannot” under the window of the apartment where Jean Marais, the brilliantly handsome movie actor, lived with his lover, Jean Cocteau, Colette’s neighbor.

A flirtatious playwright, artist, and novelist, Cocteau produced his own journal after the war. In it he reveals another view of the tired, dejected, suspicious Paris that most memorialists depict. In his rather superficial jottings, he unapologetically describes the life of one of the most successful occasional collaborators during the Occupation—his own. There is no mention of the penury that afflicted so many of his urban compatriots; he ate, drank, and partied continuously for four years. Nor is there any of the self-flagellation, retrospective guilt, or apology one finds in the postwar memoir of another “fellow traveler,” the theatrical actor and film director Sacha Guitry. Openly and
comfortably gay, Cocteau moved in all the best circles, always in motion in a Paris noted for the absence of easy transportation. (He mentions a bicycle only once.) His need for attention and his easy morals probably got him rides in the limousines of many wealthy Parisians and Occupiers who found him amusing. At the same time, he kept in close touch with his less obnoxious artistic colleagues, signing, for instance, a letter to the Occupation authorities asking for the release of his friend the poet Max Jacob from Drancy. (Jacob would die of ill health before that release could be effected.) Cocteau fretted about air raids, but only because they kept him from parties; he panicked when
Life
magazine listed him among collaborators who must be chastised after the war. But he could not help himself. The Paris he maps in his journal is a sort of ego map, one that enables us to see how distant collaborationist Paris was from the rest of the city. At the end of the war, many thought he would be “purged” along with other artists who had flown too close to the flame of Nazi fascism. Yet his extraordinary naïveté most likely protected him, and he was barely touched by the postwar “purification” trials. He died in 1963, a few hours after having learned of the death of his friend Edith Piaf.

As one reads these memoirs, it becomes clearer how many strategies were used, especially among those influential enough to protect themselves through their own notoriety, to effect a modus operandi during a period of social upheaval and inconsistent alliances. There were a handful of important Parisians who, unlike Camus’s diseased Oranians, were not ethically troubled by their comparative freedom to continue living their lives under the Occupation. Celebrities such as the chameleon dramatist and actor Sacha Guitry; Serge Lifar, head of the Opéra ballet; the movie star Arletty (who famously said, “My heart is French, but my ass is international!”); Coco Chanel; and Maurice Chevalier, who, along with Cocteau and many others, skirted these ethical difficulties by repeatedly assuring all who would listen that they were French patriots and that their best moral choice was to continue to entertain all those French citizens less fortunate than they, keeping their spirits high.
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Memorialists, diarists, and other witnesses had noticed for the last few months of 1943 and early 1944 that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were certainly not of the same quality as those who had invaded the city in 1940. The best had suddenly been shipped off to the Eastern Front. (Even bordello madams noticed the change.) Some Parisians remember the sadness on the faces of the departing young men who had felt so keenly their luck at having been assigned to Paris. Their apprehension touched even those who were happy to see them leave and even happier that the Soviet Union was demanding so much from the arrogant Occupier. Germany needed even more than before the wealth of France, especially its food production, its manpower, and its still not inconsiderable industry, but for the Eastern Front there was no substitute for German bodies. Sadly, the Gestapo stayed and took more brutal control—in the form of increased arrests, confiscations, torture, and executions—of a city that had become restive. The distinction between a military occupation and a police occupation became sharper. As Allied bombs fell with more frequency and regularity, and as their troops came closer and closer to Paris, the Nazis dug in, resisting anyone who would challenge their authority. The orders from Berlin were clear: keep Paris as long as you can; its rail centers, its industries, and its large population were still important assets to the Reich.

Beginning in mid-1943, the Occupation authorities changed how they addressed the increasing number of attacks against its personnel. Rather than blatantly reporting attacks and their consequences through newspapers, radio, and by plastering posters across the city, it toned down the rhetoric. The Germans had realized that rather than being cowed by the taking of hostages and the other repercussions of resistant activity, the population was, rather, paying closer attention to the actual disruptions. German anxiety increased as, for the first time since they had arrived in 1940, the idea of an urban insurrection seemed less theoretical. It would not take much, they surmised, for a housewives’ strike to grow into a series of violent street riots.

Parisians were also amused that the combination of less experienced troops, many not battle-hardened, and this ambience of trepidation would sometimes manifest itself in the very behavior of the patrols that still marched through the city. The more nervous they became, and as the distressing news of German reversals on the front increased, the louder the marching platoons would sing, as if they were whistling past the graveyard. After three-plus years of Occupation, Parisians had become fine-tuned analysts of any change in their previously arrogant, carefree wardens. The Parisians were not the only ones who were feeling exiled and solitary: as the news of Germany’s defeats in Africa and Stalingrad, of their reversals in Sicily and Italy, percolated through the ranks, the proud flanks of the Wehrmacht begin to feel more defensive, more threatened, and less cocky than before. Just a smirk or two from a local a day or two after a Nazi reversal would be enough to tell those assigned to Paris that although the city might have been “without a face” it was not without an opinion. Casual contact between the Occupier and the occupied, already tense, became a minefield.

One tongue-in-cheek anecdote describes just such an encounter. A crowded city bus swerves unexpectedly, and a booted Wehrmacht soldier inadvertently steps on a Frenchman’s foot. Instantly, the Frenchman slaps the soldier in the face. The bus passengers become very quiet, but from the other end of the vehicle, a small, elegantly dressed gentleman pushes his way toward the antagonists, and he, too, slaps the German. The passengers gasp; the conductor calls for the bus to stop; the police come to take the three men to the police station. The German soldier complains that both gentlemen had slapped him in
front of the other passengers. He demands justice. Impressed that the soldier would come to the French police rather than report the event immediately to his own superiors, the captain moves immediately to resolve the issue. Turning to the first man, he demands: “What possessed you to slap this soldier? Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

“Oui, monsieur le commissionaire,” answered the nervous man. “But, you see, I have very sensitive feet, and when the bus turned abruptly, the soldier stepped on one of them. The pain was intense, and I spontaneously slapped him. I apologize sincerely for my action.” The German agrees that it was an accident and accepts the man’s apology. The commissioner turns to the prim elderly man and asks: “But why did you walk all the way to the front of the bus to slap this soldier? He didn’t step on
your
foot!”

“No, indeed he did not, but when I saw this gentleman slap a German soldier, I wanted to do the same, for I thought that meant the Allies had landed!”

One of the most difficult things to understand about this period is why the Germans, anxious about the impending loss of Paris, continued their roundups of Jews and why they continued to execute hostages. Not only were convoys leaving Drancy and Bobigny for Auschwitz up until the last minute, the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and the Vichy Milice continued to track down those preparing for the inevitable fall of Paris. In his book
Nazi Paris,
Allan Mitchell has an interesting theory about this obsession to keep maintaining protocol and order. Up until the moment when the last German truck and the last motorcycle would leave Paris, it was important for the authorities to show that they were still in charge so that the populace would not dare to rise up. Given the fact that the city had been controlled rather successfully by a powerful bureaucracy for more than four years, given the number of false alarms that Parisians had already had about an impending liberation, this theory makes sense. The German fear of showing weakness or debilitated commitment to the Reich’s successes reinforced their strategies of occupation until the very end.

Nine days before the city would be free of its nemesis, one of the worst antiresistance actions occurred. Three groups of young
résistants
were anxious to get their hands on weapons, the greatest need of underground fighters. (The Germans had been stunningly efficient and effective at controlling access to arms heavier than pistols and grenades.) But the teams broke one of the cardinal rules of clandestine groups: they moved too fast, bringing into their confidence others who turned out to be spies for the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Betrayed, the would-be fighters were arrested en masse, interrogated, then loaded into trucks that took them deep into the Bois de Boulogne, the large wooded park on the western border of Paris. There the thirty-five young men were ordered out of the vehicles, and as they descended they were machine-gunned. After the fusillade, three grenades were thrown into the pile of bodies as a clumsy coup de grâce. The gory scene took place near an artificial waterfall (
cascade
) in the park, not far from the famous Longchamp racecourse. Ten years later, a member of another group described the way in which the crime was discovered: park personnel had heard machine-gun fire the night of August 16 but had waited until daylight to find out what had happened. The pile of bodies told the macabre story. “A few cadavers were still warm that morning, which suggested how long and painful their agony had been. We found no papers or IDs on the victims.”
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A memorial plaque now looks over the site of this massacre of unarmed potential liberators. Once the city had been freed, other sites—including the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the center of Paris, as well as quickly emptied prisons—would reveal the hastily buried bodies of those the Germans and the Milice had considered “terrorists,” and whom they executed as they left town.

Memoirs, letters, novels—they at best present a broken mosaic, and when one tries to piece it together there is always a tendency to give coherence when there was none. Contemporary journals and diaries are perforce focused on the daily lives of their writers and the happenstance of those lives; there is often much depth, but from a narrowly focused personality. Official documents—of the Resistance, of the Germans, and of the Allies—are disparate, and often reflect the confusion that is the handmaiden of war. Uncertainty reigned on both sides—or all three sides—of the major players in Occupied Paris. The
city was an island of relative peace in a continent being torn apart; yet there were many within the city who challenged the authority of the Occupiers. It was a city where Jews were being hunted down daily, but in July of 1943, a bureaucrat from the Vichy Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives had complained to his German partners that “there were thirty-two Jewish pharmacies still operating in the Paris region [and] dozens of Jewish physicians still practicing.”
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There was a continuing effective control of resistance efforts by the police, but there was, too, an increasing number of attacks against the Occupier. Even Allan Mitchell, a very precise historian, hesitates when describing the atmosphere of Paris in 1942–44. In his concluding pages, he writes, “Until the very last days of the Occupation, Paris was remarkably quiet, occasional bomb attacks and assassinations notwithstanding.”
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These inconsistencies reveal how complex daily life was, both for the Parisians and for those directly involved in the repression that defined the Occupation.