And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (20 page)

The committee then set about distributing the newspaper—in her journal, Humbert describes carrying one hundred copies through the streets of Paris in her briefcase—as well as continuing their efforts to help British and occasionally other foreign soldiers reach London. Just two weeks later, a second edition of
Résistance
appeared, this time with six printed pages. Its main document was the text of de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, appeal to the French, which appeared under the headline “The Hour of Hope.” It also referred to other clandestine newspapers, notably
Pantagruel
, put out by a music publisher, Raymond Deiss.

Humbert, who at times seemed to think she was acting in a thriller, began to scent victory. “We must start drawing up lists of these turncoats, these cowards, these imbeciles,” she wrote of the
pétainistes
she kept meeting. “The Fourth Republic will have nothing to do with people like that—or rather it will know what to do with them!”
⁴
When she saw French porters carrying the bags of German officers, this once-gentle mother of two became still more outraged. “We simply have to stop them, we can’t allow them to colonize us, to carry off our goods on the backs of our men while they stroll along, arms swinging, faces wreathed in smiles, boots and belts polished and gleaming. We can’t let it happen. And to stop it happening, we have to kill. Kill like wild beasts, kill to survive. Kill by stealth, kill by treachery, kill with premeditation, kill the innocent. It has to be done, and I will do it later.”
⁵

Instead, their conspiracy began to fall apart. In early January 1941, the first arrest was made—of the lawyer Nordmann, who was caught distributing
Résistance
. The network kept operating, issuing the third edition of its newspaper at the end of that month, with several thousand copies printed and many now distributed anonymously by mail. Vildé was in the south of France at the time, trying to build support for his group. He had been to see his old friend Gide; then he turned to Malraux, confident that the self-proclaimed hero of the Spanish civil war would be ready for more action. But Malraux gave Vildé the answer that he would give to other resistance recruiters: since resistance without a good supply of weapons was pointless, he
planned to await the American entrance into the war. “That’s all very nice,” he told Vildé, “but it’s not serious.” In mid-February, there was a more serious setback: having reportedly received tips from two employees at the Musée de l’Homme, the Gestapo raided the museum and, after interrogating a dozen staff members, arrested Lewitsky and Oddon. Fearing that his own role would soon be revealed, the museum’s director, Rivet, fled to the unoccupied zone and later sought refuge in South America.
Résistance
’s three editors—Cassou, Aveline and Abraham—also decided to leave Paris for the south, passing the reins to a strong-minded intellectual activist, Pierre Brossolette.

There were also other new recruits, including Pierre Walter and Georges Ithier, two friends of Vildé’s. The most prominent was Jean Paulhan, the former editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, who continued to work at Éditions Gallimard and who agreed to set up the Roneo machine in his home. The fourth and fifth editions of
Résistance
, both published in March, were printed in his apartment on the rue des Arènes, in the 5th arrondissement. But on March 26 Vildé himself was arrested, betrayed by Albert Gaveau, a double agent who had joined the network.
^*
And in mid-April both Humbert and Walter were detained by German police. By the summer of 1941, a total of nineteen members of the network were in the hands of the Gestapo, held first in the Cherche-Midi and La Santé prisons in Paris and later at the nineteenth-century jail in Fresnes, south of Paris.

In May, Paulhan was also arrested. In Humbert’s journal, she notes that she was interrogated about Paulhan and denied even knowing his name. But the Germans knew that Paulhan had kept the Roneo machine at his home. Paulhan’s good fortune was that while he had never hidden his anti-German views, he had remained on good terms with Drieu La Rochelle, the Fascist writer who succeeded him as editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. And thanks to Drieu La Rochelle, Paulhan was freed. On May 20, he wrote to his savior: “My Dear Drieu, I fully believe that it is thanks to you alone that I was able to return tranquilly this evening to the rue des Arènes. So thank you. I embrace you. Jean Paulhan.”
⁶
Two days later, in another letter to Drieu La Rochelle, Paulhan recounted his experience.
His interrogator, a German captain, said that he knew Lewitsky had handed Paulhan the Roneo machine and added that he had promised Lewitsky that Paulhan would be released once the machine’s whereabouts were established. Paulhan told Drieu La Rochelle that after five days in La Santé, he had admitted: “1. that L. had indeed given me a case containing the Roneo; 2. that after learning of L.’s arrest, I had thrown it into the Seine (in little pieces).”
⁷
Then, to Paulhan’s surprise, he was released.
^*

Other members of the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme were less fortunate. One reason was that after Germany invaded its former Soviet ally in June 1941, the French Communist Party was at last free to join the resistance. And its first action was the assassination of a German naval cadet at a
métro
station in Paris on August 21, 1941. This and similar killings led to German reprisals, with scores of hostages executed. One victim was Honoré d’Éstienne d’Orves, an aristocratic Gaullist naval officer whose early resistance efforts had been betrayed by an infiltrated German spy in January that year. When the Musée de l’Homme prisoners went on trial in Fresnes in January 1942, then, harsh punishments were expected. In his prison journal on October 21, Vildé had recorded a visit by the trial’s French prosecutor, who pledged “to have my head,” a threat that he readily believed and dismissed as unimportant. “And yet,” he said, “I love life, God, I love life. But I am not afraid of dying. To be shot would in a sense be the logical conclusion to my life.”
⁸

On February 17, the court’s German judge pronounced guilty verdicts and death sentences for seven men, including Vildé, Lewitsky, Walter, Ithier and Nordmann, and three women, among them Oddon, although the women’s sentences were immediately commuted to deportation. Humbert and another woman were condemned to five years’ imprisonment in Germany, while others in the dock were given lighter sentences. The following day, Walter’s lawyer raised Humbert’s hope for reprieves. Echoing the lawyer’s words, she noted in her journal, “The Germans could not ignore demands for clemency for Vildé from distinguished names such as François Mauriac, Paul Valéry and Georges Duhamel. And once Vildé’s sentence was commuted, the others would automatically follow. Gaveau, the despicable informer on whom I have never clapped
eyes, would be found wherever he might be and ‘dealt with.’ ”
⁹
But on February 23, the seven men were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, west of Paris. Only Vildé’s final request was honored: he was the last to be executed.

Almost coincidentally, another early group of intellectual resisters was broken up by the Gestapo. Led by a high school teacher of German literature, Jacques Decour, it began as a protest against the arrest of the prominent French physicist Paul Langevin in October 1940. Joining Decour were Langevin’s son-in-law, Jacques Solomon, a radiologist, and Georges Politzer, a Hungarian-born Marxist philosopher. Langevin himself was released after forty days and placed under house arrest in Troyes, in the Champagne region, until he was able to escape to Switzerland in 1944. Nonetheless, in late 1940 these
résistants
founded two clandestine newspapers,
L’Université Libre
and
La Pensée Libre
, which were among the first to call on intellectuals not to collaborate with the occupiers. All three men were members of the Communist Party, which, despite the German-Soviet nonaggression pact, decided to create a series of anti-Fascist “national fronts.”

From this was born the Front National des Écrivains—the National Writers’ Front—but it struggled to win over non-Communist writers. Then, in the summer of 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Decour won party backing to reach out to non-Communists and, with Jean Paulhan as a key ally, he cofounded the Comité National des Écrivains, which would have its own underground newspaper,
Les Lettres Françaises
. But before its first issue was printed, Decour and Politzer were arrested, with Solomon arrested one week later. Solomon and Politzer were shot by the Germans on May 23, Decour on May 30, 1942.

Just as
Les Lettres Françaises
would eventually be brought out by a new team, remnants of the Museum of Man network also kept up their activities. It was no longer possible to publish
Résistance
, but Germaine Tillion led surviving members in gathering information of use to the Free French Forces in London until, in August 1942, she, too, was arrested and deported to Germany.
^*
Brossolette, the newspaper’s last editor, turned to organizing other resistance groups in the occupied zone and, after meeting de Gaulle in London, became a liaison officer in France between Gaullist groups and British secret
agents of the Special Operations Executive, which carried out sabotage and espionage in Nazi-occupied territories. Arrested in February 1944 while returning from another trip to London, Brossolette was tortured at length in the Gestapo’s infamous Paris headquarters at 84 avenue Foch. On March 22, although handcuffed, he managed to open the window of his room and jump out; he died a few hours later. Others from the Musée de l’Homme network were luckier. Aveline and Abraham, who were in the unoccupied zone when the network was dismantled, joined other resistance groups and survived the war without detention. Cassou, who was hiding in Toulouse, was arrested in December 1941. While in jail, he composed thirty-three sonnets—in his head, since he had no paper—and these were published in secret in 1944. In the spring of 1943, he resumed his underground activities.

As an institution, though, the Musée de l’Homme would pay a high price for its early association with the resistance. In all, twenty-eight members of its staff would be remembered as
morts pour la France et pour la liberté
, some shot like Vildé, others killed fighting in the resistance, and at least one, Deborah Lifchitz, a Jewish ethnologist specializing in Ethiopia and Mali, sent to her death in Auschwitz. At the same time, apart from publishing
Résistance
and providing some intelligence to London, the
réseau
was never more than a minor irritant to the occupiers. For instance, it carried out no assassinations or acts of sabotage. If its leaders were given harsh punishments, then, it was principally to dissuade others from following their example. Yet paradoxically, at least with the seven
réseau
members executed at Mont-Valérien, it was their readiness to fight and to die that would prove the more lasting example. Their clandestine activities had minimal impact compared to the impression caused by their much-publicized deaths. Many other
résistants
would die, while a good number of artists and intellectuals later joined the underground battle against the Germans. But the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme stood out, not only because it was a ragtag army of highly educated people who were thoroughly ill-equipped to take on the Wehrmacht, but also because, at a time when most of the French were coming to terms with the occupation, they were almost alone in acting on their belief in the
idea
of resistance.

*
The Émile-Pauls were the only publishers who refused to sign the self-censorship agreement with the Propaganda Staffel.

*
The embassy itself moved to Vichy, but it kept offices in Paris until the United States entered the war, in December 1941. The embassy in Vichy stayed open until November 1942, when allied forces invaded North Africa.

*
Gaveau, whose mother was German, was arrested in November 1945 and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.

*
Unintimidated by the experience, Paulhan would go on to play a central role in the writers’ resistance movement.

*
Both Tillion and Humbert survived.

_·
CHAPTER 7
_·
Maréchal, Nous Voilà!

SINCE WORLD WAR II
the name Vichy has become shorthand for collaboration with the Nazis, yet until Pétain installed his government there, in July 1940, it referred to a popular spa with a far more benign reputation. In the early 1860s, Napoleon III built a large villa in the resort so he could spend time with his mistress, Marguerite Bellanger, in the guise of taking the resort’s pungently sulfurous waters.
^*
Inevitably, the imperial presence accelerated change. A train connection to Paris followed, and Vichy was soon a fashionable retreat for upper-class Parisians seeking a cure. A delightful park took shape beside the Allier River, more imperial-style villas were built, and stylish hotels, restaurants and the ever-popular Grand Casino sprung up around the town’s central gardens. The Opéra de Vichy, which
opened in 1902, presented a full season of opera and ballet, with even Richard Strauss conducting his own
Salome
there in 1935.