And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (23 page)

One other organization was also punished for its success. In December 1940, a former army officer, Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, founded the École Nationale des Cadres de la Jeunesse, literally the National School for Youth Leaders. Based in the Château of Uriage, a small mountain spa near Grenoble, the École d’Uriage, as it was known, was unapologetically elitist in its aim to build a new generation of leaders for postwar France. Among its teachers were Mounier and Hubert Beuve-Méry, a Catholic journalist who in December 1944 would found the afternoon newspaper
Le Monde
. Guided by
these and other intellectuals, Uriage’s orientation was Catholic, nationalist and anti-Communist, as well as both
pétainiste
and anti-German. The four thousand men and women who attended its courses, which lasted between three and twelve weeks, underwent an intense program of political, intellectual and moral education, after which they were supposedly imbued by the “spirit of Uriage.” But this freethinking was not to Vichy’s liking, and the school was closed by Laval in December 1942. After that, many of its graduates, as well as de Segonzac, Mounier and Beuve-Méry, joined the resistance. Meanwhile, a more artistic experiment was taking place in Oppède-le-Vieux, north of Aix-en-Provence, where the renowned architect Bernard Zehrfuss drew together musicians, painters, sculptors and architects into a commune of sorts, which, surprisingly, received a subsidy from Vichy. Among those who spent time there in 1941 was Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, herself a writer. But by 1942, this, too, was looked on with suspicion by Vichy: Zehrfuss obtained permission to travel to Barcelona and used the opportunity to join the Free French Forces.

The closure of both Jeune France and the École d’Uriage in 1942 illustrated how the realities of the occupation were replacing the conservative idealism of the National Revolution. In Pétain’s one attempt to build a popular base for his regime, he recruited veterans of World War I to form the Légion Française des Combattants. It grew quickly, numbering some 590,000 by early 1941 and later in-corporating nonveteran volunteers. Along with Vichy’s
préfets
, the legion worked to ensure an orderly occupation, one that enabled Germany to wind down its security presence in France. (In mid-1942, for instance, Germany had fewer than three thousand police officers stationed in France.) However, while the legion could summon large crowds to welcome Pétain on his visits around the unoccupied zone, it was never effective in helping him resist German pressure. In practice, as he repeatedly discovered, his bargaining power was minimal. And it was further weakened when he resisted Nazi demands that France declare war on Britain. Soon, Vichy was doing little more than responding to events beyond its control.

The first of these was Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In time, it would require France to send still more manufactured goods and raw materials to Germany, followed by mass recruitment—first voluntary, then enforced—of Frenchmen to work in German factories. But the most
immediate consequence was the mobilization of France’s Moscow-line Communist Party to start resisting the occupation. The party’s first shot, literally, was fired in the Barbès-Rochechouart
métro
station in Paris on August 21, 1941, killing a German naval cadet.

Similar murders followed, with a furious Führer ordering the execution of fifty hostages for every German killed. As if in anticipation, hundreds of Communist and Jewish hostages were already being held in French prisons. After a German soldier in Bordeaux and an officer in Nantes were killed in late October, forty-eight hostages were shot. In late November, another ninety-five were executed. Public outrage and condemnations by the Catholic church forced Vichy to protest and, it claimed, it obtained some reprieves. Yet in the nine months after the Communist Party took up arms, 471 hostages were shot. After one year of relative calm, the occupation was degenerating. Resistance attacks and executions continued, even after the Germans warned that, in reprisal, “near male relatives, brothers-in-law and cousins of the agitators above the age of eighteen years will be shot” and that female relatives would be condemned to hard labor. In September 1942, after several German soldiers were killed in an attack on Le Rex, a Paris movie theater patronized exclusively by German troops, 166 more hostages were shot.

Long before then, Pétain began to sense that much of the French population was beginning to lose confidence in him. In fact, on August 12, 1941, even before the first German soldier was murdered, he broadcast an urgent appeal for national unity. “I have serious things to tell you,” he began. “From several regions of France, I have felt an ill wind blowing in recent weeks.” He acknowledged that his National Revolution had not yet become reality, but he blamed followers of the ancien régime and those working for foreign interests. Recalling his role in World War I, he went on: “I know from experience what is victory; today I see what is defeat.” He concluded by urging, “Remember this: a defeated country, if it is divided, is a country that dies; a defeated country, if it knows how to unite, is a country that is reborn.”

Yet within months, Vichy’s internal divisions would be further exposed by the trial of prewar French political leaders. For Pétain, the ultimate purpose of the trial was to blame the Third Republic for France’s defeat and to legitimize his own regime. In October 1941, tired of waiting for the trial, Pétain himself summarily condemned
the former prime ministers Blum and Daladier as well as the former army chief General Maurice Gamelin and two other politicians. The last prime minister before the defeat, Paul Reynaud, and his interior minister, Georges Mandel, were acquitted, although both were then handed over to the Nazis and sent to camps in Germany. Then, in February 1942, the five found guilty by Pétain were brought before the Supreme Court of Justice in Riom, near Clermont-Ferrand, for a fresh trial, now public. Part of the prosecution’s case was that Blum’s Popular Front had carried out social reforms—such as paid holidays and a forty-hour week—that had weakened France’s will to fight. Gamelin refused to answer any questions, which was perhaps wise since, ten days before France declared war on Germany, he had told the National Assembly, “The day war is declared against Germany, Hitler will collapse.”
⁸
But Daladier skillfully demonstrated that senior military officers—and not politicians—were to blame for the debacle.
^*

Ending his testimony on March 6, Daladier went further, turning away from the judges and addressing the public: “Germany suffered its first defeat with England and its second with Russia. There is no doubt that Germany will be defeated; it is inevitable. We must not let our confidence waver.”
⁹
In mid-March, after twenty-four hearings and four hundred witnesses, Hitler ordered Abetz to halt the trial. He had hoped it would show that France, and not Germany, was responsible for the war; instead it had become an embarrassment. On April 14, the trial was suspended and those in the dock were sent to camps in Germany. Blum was taken to Buchenwald and Dachau, where, somewhat surprisingly, he was treated well and lived in relative comfort. All five survived the war.

The French public was not enthusiastic about the growing armed insurgency, criticizing both the Communists for provoking reprisals and the Germans for carrying them out. But for Vichy, initially even more than the political opposition coming from de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, the emergence of the Communist-led Francs-Tireurs
et Partisans, or FTP, posed a different problem: this organization of guerrillas and partisans challenged Vichy’s claim to be the only viable alternative to the German occupiers. Vichy’s response was to step up its anti-Communist propaganda, even doing Berlin the favor of portraying Moscow as the main threat to the “new” Europe. Still more eager to fight Communism were French Fascists in Paris, led by Jacques Doriot, head of the Parti Populaire Français, and Marcel Déat, the journalist who had also recently founded his own party. Immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, they began working with the German embassy and the Wehrmacht to create the Légion des Volontaires Français Contre le Bolchévisme to send French volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front. The initiative was backed by Vichy’s Paris delegate, Brinon, and, more astonishingly, by Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart. In practice, the LVF, as the legion became known, contributed little to the Nazi war effort. Most of its seven thousand or so volunteers were killed, and the few survivors were incorporated into a French Waffen-SS brigade in 1944. Nonetheless, for propaganda purposes, it became a powerful symbol of French collaboration.

But if Bolshevism was the new enemy, Vichy was all too ready to continue collaborating with Germany in tackling the old enemy, the Jews. In the year following its Statute on Jews of October 1940, it issued a stream of laws and decrees targeting Jews. In some cases, they complemented Nazi diktats, including one ordering the takeover or Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses in the occupied zone, an action extended to the unoccupied zone in 1941. With Jewish businesses, though, Vichy had its own reason to act before the Germans did: in this way, at least in the unoccupied zone, it ensured that the companies passed into the hands of French trustees or owners, rather than Germans. But, in general, Vichy was also eager to strip Jews of all influence. When, in March 1941, Germany nudged Darlan into creating a special department for Jewish affairs, the General Commission for Jewish Questions, he named an infamous prewar anti-Semite, Xavier Vallat, as its head. Vallat in turn proudly told Theodor Dannecker, who ran Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish Office in Paris, “I have been an anti-Semite for much longer than you.”
¹⁰
In June 1941, a second Statute on Jews was decreed, banning Jews from a series of professions, including medicine, law and architecture. Darlan’s notorious justice minister, Joseph Barthélemy, then added new restrictions on Jewish activities, such as acting in movies, the
theater and music halls. These measures affected the occupied zone as well as the Vichy area.

As early as October 1940, Vichy had claimed the right to intern foreign Jews and, soon, many thousands were being held in camps in the south. The following year, instead of waiting for foreign Jews in the occupied zone to present themselves to the authorities, Vichy instructed the French police to go in search of them. The first big
rafle
, or roundup, of Jews, carried out by French police in Paris on May 14, 1941, resulted in another thirty-seven hundred refugees, mainly Polish, being sent to internment camps. Among the intellectuals of Paris, Jean Guéhenno was unusual in taking note of this escalation of official anti-Semitism. “On rue Compans,” he wrote, “several men were taken. Their wives, their children begged the police, they shouted, they cried. The humble people of Paris who watched these harrowing scenes were filled with disgust and shame.”
¹¹

A second
rafle
in Paris, between August 20 and 25, rounded up forty-two hundred men, but this time one-third were French Jews and they were sent to an unfinished housing estate in Drancy, outside Paris, which would soon become the main transit camp for Jews being deported to the east. Among those arrested was the philosopher Jean Wahl,
^*
prompting Guéhenno to observe sourly, “But he is a major criminal: he is Jewish.”
¹²
The third
rafle
, this time of mainly French Jews, is recorded on a plaque near the École Militaire in Paris. On December 12, 1941, it states, French police and German military police arrested 743 prominent French Jews and held them in a stable of the École Militaire before sending them to the Royallieu camp at Compiègne, where some died of hunger and cold. The survivors were among the 1,112 Jews aboard the first deportation train to leave France for Auschwitz on March 27, 1942.

In the spring of 1942, with Hitler’s “final solution” now moving ahead, Vichy was expected to help. In April, after Laval returned to power, Vallat was replaced at the General Commission for Jewish Questions by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a still greater fanatic who was totally loyal to the Germans. As part of their European strategy for eliminating Jews, the Nazis decided that 100,000 Jews should be deported from France. And since they needed French police to carry
out the arrests and French trains to transport the deportees, they began preparing a new
rafle
with René Bousquet, Vichy’s secretary-general for police.
^*
They agreed that, as a first step, 40,000 foreign Jews between the ages of sixteen and forty would be sent east, including 10,000 from the unoccupied zone. Laval then proposed that children under sixteen also be included, so that they would not be separated from their parents. Laval even turned down an American offer to take 1,000 Jewish children, arguing that they were not orphans. The roundup, which was postponed from July 14 to avoid Bastille Day, began before dawn on July 16 and continued the following day, with at least 4,500 French police, aided by volunteers from Doriot’s Fascist Party, arresting 12,884 Jews, including 4,051 children. Most were taken in convoys of buses to a sports stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they were held in grim conditions before being transfered to camps at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers as well as to Drancy prior to deportation.
^*

The
rafle du Vél’d’Hiv’
, as this roundup became known, shocked many Parisians and brought protests from the United States embassy in Vichy and, more significantly, from five prominent Catholic bishops, led by Archbishop Jules-Gérard Saliège of Toulouse. On August 23, as part of his sermon, Saliège read a short text that was distributed as a leaflet and later read on the BBC French service. “Children, women, men, fathers and mothers treated like a lowly herd; members of the same family separated from each other and shipped off to an unknown destination; our age was destined to see this dreadful spectacle,” he said. Referring to two nearby internment camps, he added, “In our diocese, moving scenes have occurred in the camps of Noé and Récébédou. The Jews are men, the Jewesses are women. The foreigners are men and women. One cannot do what one wishes to these men, to these women, to these fathers and mothers. They are part of the human race; they are our brothers like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this.”
¹³
As an institution, though, the Catholic hierarchy remained silent. And the arrests continued across the occupied zone, with 6,500 foreign Jews interned in
the unoccupied zone also sent to Drancy. By the end of 1942, 36,802 Jews, including 6,053 children, had been deported from France.