And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (19 page)

Women’s magazines were full of articles suggesting ways of beating restrictions and rationing—by, for example, giving old clothes a new look, turning a blanket into a child’s overcoat or transforming men’s trousers into warm dresses. (And with so many Frenchmen in Germany as prisoners of war or forced laborers, there was no shortage of unused trousers in wardrobes.) At the same time, because of the growing shortage of traditional textiles—not only wool and silk but also velvet, satin and lace—designers began experimenting with artificial fibers, notably rayon and fibranne, which could be extracted from cellulose. In fact, long before it was known that the Nazis were using hair taken from their death-camp victims, there was an attempt to mix hair with fibranne to make fabric.

Yet for all this, haute couture survived, with spring and autumn shows amply covered in women’s and fashion magazines. The first chance prosperous Parisians had to wear tuxedos and long dresses under the occupation was for a gala organized at the Paris Opera on December 20, 1940, for Pétain’s charity, Secours National–Entr’aide d’Hiver. And while occasions to dress up were less numerous than before the war, receptions at the German Institute for visiting German dignitaries, as well as other charity galas, invariably brought out the finery.

Perhaps the easiest—and cheapest—way for a woman to draw attention to herself, however, was to wear a jaunty hat. Photographs taken by André Zucca in the streets of central Paris suggest that red and black were the preferred colors. In fact, whether designed by professionals or improvised at home, hats—of all colors, sizes and angles—became the most distinctive fashion emblem of the occupation. They also offered the most imaginative displays of French craftsmanship: there were hats variously made with celluloid, thin slices of wood and newspapers. Nowhere were hats more spectacular than at the races at the Hippodrome de Longchamp and the Hippodrome d’Auteuil, in the Bois de Boulogne. In contrast to the smaller hats for daily use, here they were extravagantly large, often topped by an immense feather or two. Collaborationist newspapers made a point of photographing the most inventive designs as a way of showing Parisians happily at play—alongside smart German army uniforms. The implicit message was that if Parisians could afford to spend an afternoon betting on horses, surely life was much as before. Evidently, these same papers paid little attention to the growing struggle of the majority of Parisians to keep warm and adequately fed.

That money continued to divide Parisians was well illustrated in the restaurant life of the city. Most people could afford to eat only at home. What they acquired with ration cards was supplemented by extras bought on the black market and, for those with generous relatives in the countryside, by an occasional shipment of a chicken or a leg of lamb. But many family-run bistros stayed open, with some willing to risk fines or closure by offering two menus: one official, the other black market; one cheap, the other pricey. So even in seemingly modest establishments, like Picasso’s regular haunt, Le Catalan, on the rue des Grands-Augustins, on some days it was possible to have oysters followed by
gigot d’agneau
. (There were even moments when oysters were so plentiful that their shells were used for fuel.)
More elegant restaurants favored by the German military elite and the wealthy of Paris did not bother with such fictions. At establishments like Maxim’s, La Tour d’Argent, Prunier, Drouant, Laurent, Le Pavillon de l’Élysée and Fouquet’s, everything was available at the right price, starting with the best champagne and ending with vintage cognacs. Of these, Maxim’s, a few steps from the place de la Concorde, had the most loyal German clientele, including Göring on his frequent art-raiding visits to Paris. It was also at Maxim’s that German officers could be seen hosting leading collaborators, like the newspaper editor Jean Luchaire and such celebrities as Sacha Guitry.

Could the nightlife of Paris have been any different? It was, of course, the Germans who decided how it should be; they wanted to be entertained and they wanted Parisians to be distracted. And since music halls, cabarets, brothels and restaurants were closely monitored, Paris by night posed neither a political nor a security threat to the occupiers. But Parisians also wanted this nightlife to continue: it was part of the city’s identity, it provided a sense of normality and it gave jobs to many thousands of actors, singers, dancers and strippers, as well as to seamstresses, furriers, cooks and waiters. True, the sight of Parisians enjoying themselves during the occupation never ceased to surprise outsiders, whether they were visitors from the provinces or Gaullist agents on secret missions from London. But for many Parisians, having suffered the humiliation of defeat, this was one way of demonstrating to themselves—and perhaps also to the Germans—that all was not lost.

*
One story, endlessly repeated although never confirmed by Baker, is that she fell ill after a private dinner with Göring during which he tried to poison her for belonging to the resistance by putting cyanide in her wine. The unlikely story even has Baker escaping through a laundry hatch and being rescued by her resistance colleagues.

*
Although Radio-Paris was a German-run propaganda station, Chevalier, Suzy Solidor and Yvonne Printemps were among the many artists who also performed on its popular variety shows, for which they were well paid.

*
The Royal Air Force in turn printed scarves for its pilots with maps of France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

_·
CHAPTER 6
_·
Resistance as an Idea

IN THE FACE OF
defeat and occupation, then, the French responded successively with anger, despair, resignation and accommodation. With the notable exception of those Fascist writers who cheered the Nazi victory, most French artists and intellectuals reacted in much the same way. Initially, at least, they, too, looked to Marshal Pétain to shield France from the worst in what promised to be a long ordeal. Feeling powerless, they adopted
attentisme
, an on-the-fence posture, which allowed them to get on with their lives—to write, to paint, to perform, to teach—while waiting to be saved by some external force, presumably the United States. And yet within weeks of France’s defeat, a few isolated intellectuals and professionals in Paris dared to think differently: they refused to accept France’s humiliation as an immutable fact. They had no experience in either politics or insurgency, but almost instinctively they embraced the
idea
of resistance as an alternative to
attentisme
. They believed that long before an armed struggle was viable, the French had to learn to
think
resistance, to reject open collaboration, to believe that opposition to the occupation
was possible. The most surprising feature of these early
résistants
, however, was that they were not anti-Fascist politicians, writers or journalists who had engaged in the ideological battles of the 1930s. In the main, they were little-known ethnologists whose study of human behavior through the ages had led them to spend years far from France.

After the war, this rebel circle came to be known as the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Man network, because it was at the museum’s newly opened Art Deco headquarters on the place du Trocadéro that some of the first conspirators came together. Their improbable leader was Boris Vildé, a Russian-born linguist who had already lived in Estonia and Germany before arriving in Paris in 1933. Still only twenty-five, he was befriended by Gide, who introduced him to Paul Rivet, then director of the Musée de l’Ethnographie, the forerunner of the Musée de l’Homme. This meeting inspired Vildé to study ethnography, and by 1939 he was working as an ethnologist in the Europe Department of the museum. When war was declared, he joined the French army as an artillery officer. After he was wounded and captured by the advancing Wehrmacht in June 1940, he quickly managed to escape. On July 5, he reappeared at the Musée de l’Homme, haggard and hobbling, but asserting that he was determined to do something. The following month, he was joined by another ethnologist, Anatole Lewitsky, and his girlfriend, Yvonne Oddon, the museum’s librarian. They also recruited René Creston, a sociologist at the museum, while the venerable Rivet, already in his late sixties, offered the plotters his blessing and counsel.

Across Paris and beyond, a few other individuals were also seeking out friends and acquaintances with the idea of generating some response to the Germans. One who did so “just to remain sane,” as she put it, was Agnès Humbert, a curator at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, which by chance was next door to the Musée de l’Homme. When she returned to Paris on August 5, she immediately went to see Jean Cassou, an admired art historian who was the director designate of the planned Musée d’Art Moderne. He, too, felt a need to act, and they formed a tiny cabal comprising the writers Claude Aveline and Marcel Abraham (who was Jewish), the publishers Albert and Robert Émile-Paul
^*
and Christiane Desroches, an Egyptologist at the Louvre.

Together, they assumed the grandiose name of Les Français Libres de France, the Free French of France, but their ambitions were modest: to meet once a week to exchange news picked up on the street or heard on the BBC and to write subversive pamphlets and tracts to be distributed around Paris. Their first sheet, written by Cassou in September and left on café benches and public toilets, already distinguished them from those intellectuals who still hoped that Pétain could “save” France. It was called
Vichy fait la guerre
(Vichy Wages War). Using information from the BBC, it specifically denounced Pétain’s regime for ordering its troops to fire on British and Gaullist naval forces trying to “liberate” Senegal, the French colony in West Africa. The following month, after collaborationist newspapers began attacking Cassou as a Communist and a Jew (his wife was Jewish), he and Humbert were both fired from their jobs by Vichy.

Meanwhile, Germaine Tillion, another ethnologist from the Musée de l’Homme, who had just returned to Paris from assignment in Algeria, was similarly dismayed by what she found. Unaware of Vildé’s initiative, she made contact with Paul Hauet, a retired colonel who was already helping French prisoners of war escape from German camps in France. At the Palais de Justice, several lawyers, among them Albert Jubineau, André Weil-Curiel and Léon Maurice Nordmann, also began to mobilize their friends, while even some French employees in the United States embassy decided to act.
^*
Soon word reached Paris of another small circle of spontaneous
résistants
led by Sylvette Leleu, a schoolteacher in Béthune, in northwestern France. Still another group appeared in Brittany.

Vildé was quick to recognize that these tiny groups needed to coordinate their activities, which also involved helping British soldiers and airmen escape France through Spain or through Brittany. Adopting the nom de guerre of Maurice, Vildé began traveling secretly to Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse to make contacts and gather information about German military positions and movements. This intelligence was then transmitted to London through the United States embassy office in Paris. For security reasons, Vildé kept many of his clandestine activities to himself, although it later transpired that he had supplied London with details of the German submarine base at
Saint-Nazaire and of German anti-aircraft defenses in Strasbourg. By October 1940, he had also pulled together the various groups into a loose network, which was named the Comité National de Salut Publique, or National Committee of Public Safety. What they had in common was their opposition to the Nazis and to Vichy and their support for de Gaulle, who at that point was more symbol than true war leader. Humbert, who incautiously kept a journal in which she detailed her every meeting, suggested on October 20 that they were at best amateurs: “How bizarre it all is! Here we are, most of us on the wrong side of forty, careering along like students all fired up with passion and fervour, in the wake of a leader of whom we know absolutely nothing, of whom none of us has even seen a photograph.”
¹

The new committee’s next step was to publish a clandestine newspaper—one of the first of the occupation—called
Résistance
. Describing itself as the official bulletin of the committee, it published its first edition on December 15, 1940—just four pages printed on a Roneo, or mimeograph, machine belonging to the Musée de l’Homme. Cassou, Abraham and Aveline formed the newspaper’s editorial committee and, Humbert noted mischievously, “I am the typist, naturally.”
²
Its first front-page editorial, written by Vildé himself, began:

Resist! That is the cry that comes from your hearts, in the distress that the disaster of the Fatherland has left you. It is the cry of all you who do not resign yourselves, of all you who want to do your duty. But you feel isolated and disarmed, and in the chaos of ideas, opinions and systems, you ask what is your duty. To resist is already a way of protecting your heart and your mind. But above all, it is to act, to do something that translates into positive actions, into calculated and powerful actions. Many have tried and have often been discouraged by feeling powerless. Others have joined together. But often these groups have also felt isolated and powerless. Patiently, with difficulty, we have found and united them. They are already numerous (more than an army for Paris alone), those passionate and determined men who have understood that organization of their effort is necessary, that they need a method, discipline, leaders.
³

The editorial went on to urge people to form groups, name leaders, learn discipline and secrecy and prepare for when they would be
called on to fight. Vildé further stressed that the committee’s members were all independent actors who had never participated in the squabbles of party politics. He concluded: “We promise we have only one ambition, one passion, one will: to see a pure and free France reborn.”