And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (39 page)

Without Carné’s determination, the film might never have been completed. Just as the cameras began to roll in Nice, Allied forces landed in southern Italy and, on September 8, accepted Italy’s surrender.
^*
This not only prompted Germany to take over the southeastern region of France under Italian control; it also threatened the financing of
Les Enfants du paradis
, which had been planned as a French-Italian production. Carné and his crew and cast were summoned back to Paris, where the Germans took Paulvé off the film and, after a three-month delay, handed the production to Pathé. Some filming was then done in Paris, but by the time Carné resumed work in Nice in early 1944, storms had badly damaged the film’s outdoor décor.

There were other complications. In the countdown to the long-expected Allied invasion of France, political tensions were rising. Le Vigan, the Nazi sympathizer who had a part in
Les Enfants du paradis
, fled France for Germany, forcing Carné to replace him with Pierre Renoir. More ominously, both the Gestapo and Vichy’s
milices
were hunting down Jews and members of the resistance as never before. One morning, two French policemen in civilian clothes arrived on the movie’s set looking for an extra whose wife, they said, had suffered an accident and was about to have a leg amputated. Carné hesitated, aware that the story could be true or could be a trap. Finally, concluding that if the extra was on the run, he could easily hide in the crowd, Carné took a megaphone and called out the man’s name. “Perhaps he was in the resistance, perhaps he was a Jew, but we never heard of him again,” the director recalled five decades later. “He was certainly shot, perhaps also tortured. The police must have been working for the Gestapo. Why did he come forward? When his name was called, he should have suspected, he should have.… I have never forgiven myself. I will relive that scene for the rest of my days.”
¹⁵

Filming was completed following the liberation and, on March 9, 1945, almost two years after it was born as an idea,
Les Enfants du paradis
had its premiere at the Palais de Chaillot, in Paris, and was proclaimed an immense success. Of all the movies made during the occupation, it would be the only one to assume an important place in the history of cinema. The paradox was that it was just the kind of film that the Germans wanted France to make: quality entertainment with no hint of politics or nationalism. By presenting it after the liberation, Carné ensured that it would be remembered as a purely French film, untainted by the occupation. But he made it only because the Germans allowed him to do so.

*
All managed to flee France and survive the war, although Pathé’s former head, Bernard Natan, who was in jail for fraud when the Germans took Paris, died in Auschwitz.

*
The Hôtel de Matignon, the traditional home and office of French prime ministers, was used by Laval and other senior Vichy officials during the occupation.

*
Similar
comités d’organisation
were created for most industries, trades and art forms.

*
In March 1949, Mamy became the last person to be executed as a collaborator.

*
This 1941 exhibition in Paris had a section devoted to cinema, which showed photographs of Jewish producers under a banner reading,
LES JUIFS, MAÎTRES DU CINÉMA FRANÇAIS
, “Jews, Masters of French Cinema.”

*
The banquet scene entered movie lore because Carné ordered platefuls of fruit to be injected with carbolic acid to dissuade hungry extras from eating them between scenes.

*
Around the same time as the movie was made, the Dupeyrons were sheltering an American airman shot down over France.

*
The oddest thing about the movie is that, while there is a shot of a calendar displaying May 1941, nothing else indicates that the story is taking place during the occupation.

*
Galtier-Boissière gave Bonnard the nickname of Gestapette, uniting
Gestapo
with
tapette
, French slang for “homosexual.”

*
The war in Italy would in fact continue—against German troops—until April 29, 1945.

_·
CHAPTER 11
_·
Mirroring the Past

PARISIANS FOUND IT REASSURING
to see that, along with concert halls and movie houses, their theaters were quick to reopen. It made them hope that their lives had not been totally deformed, that another part of the French way of life had survived, that the reality of defeat could occasionally be forgotten in the illusory world of the stage. As curtains rose again and directors and actors were called back to work, a glimmer of optimism also returned to the professionals of the theater world, especially those who had been in uniform and had not earned a decent wage for months. And, as with other art forms, the new powers were satisfied. Vichy wanted the capital’s main stages—in this case the Comédie Française, the Théâtre de l’Odéon and Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot—to resume their activities as soon as possible, both as a symbol of continuity and to dissuade the Wehrmacht from occupying them. And the Germans, still surprised to have taken the city with barely a shot fired, wanted Parisians to believe that daily life was going on much as before.

So almost everyone welcomed the arrival of the 1940–41 theater season, with its promise of popular revivals and new plays. No one thought to suggest that an evening at the theater was an act of collaboration, even if Germans were also in the audience. Rather, theatergoing was viewed as a healthy antidote to depression.

What is more surprising is that, as with cinema, the occupation would be remembered as a theatrical golden age. Even with the need to rush home on the last
métro
before the curfew, the popularity of theater as an escape mechanism was immense: box-office revenues jumped by 163 percent between 1941 and 1943. Most productions were straightforward entertainment—historical dramas, romantic comedies or bedroom farces of the kind that had long defined the city’s
théâtre de boulevard
. “You can’t be a Nazi in theater,” said Annie Ubersfeld, a theater lover and young
résistante
at the time. “You cannot be so excessively dominating in a theater, you can’t have a virulent Nazi approach. It just doesn’t work in theater. Anyway, most theater was
théâtre de boulevard
, where the issue was whether the heroine went to bed with someone or remained a virgin.”
¹

As in the prewar years, this lighter fare was accompanied by productions of Corneille, Molière, Racine and Shakespeare
^*
as well as the Irish-born playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw and John Millington Synge. But what most marked the period were new plays by writers who are now considered pillars of twentieth-century French theater, among them Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and the ever-prolific Sacha Guitry. Even Albert Camus, first and foremost a novelist and essayist, would have a play staged in 1944.

For the public at large, of course, celebrity actors were an important part of the attraction. Some, such as Raimu, Robert Le Vigan, Harry Baur, Marie Bell, Elvire Popesco and Cécile Sorel were veterans of the Paris stage; others drawn to the theater, like Jean-Louis Barrault and Edwige Feuillère, were already well known across France for their movie roles. At the same time, the occupation spawned a new generation of leading men in their twenties—Jean Marais, Louis Jourdan and Gérard Philipe among them—who alternated between stage and screen. And while movie contracts were
more lucrative and promised greater fame, theater offered special kudos, above all for appearances in serious drama. In all, with fifty-four theaters open in Paris, the acting profession was kept busy.

The Nazis interfered little beyond ensuring that French theater was “cleansed” of Jews. Some twenty theaters said to be run by Jews were quickly Aryanized (and the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt renamed the Théâtre de la Cité), while the Comédie Française and the Odéon were required to dismiss fifteen Jewish actors. Jacques Copeau, the director who was then provisional general administrator at the Comédie Française, noted in his journal on July 26, 1940, that the Nazis had already asked for the names of his Jewish actors. And he added: “The Germans have declared, so I am told, that while they are in Paris not one Israelite playwright or composer will be performed, not one Jewish actor will appear on the screen.”
²
Louis Hautecoeur, Vichy’s secretary-general for fine arts, urged him to play for time and not cast Jews in the first productions of the occupation. But Copeau came under more German pressure and, fearing reprisals against the theater, asked his Jewish actors to resign. Thanks to commercial theaters, though, there were still Jews on the stage and a good many more in the audience. Then things changed radically. In early 1942, an eight p.m. curfew was imposed on Jews in Paris, making it risky for them to attend shows. In May, they were required to wear yellow stars. In July, they were prohibited from entering all theaters. And in the fall of 1942, Jews were formally banned from appearing on stage. Jewish playwrights were blacklisted early in the occupation, although every new production—text, cast and even décor—was subject to censorship, with texts scanned for any anti-German or excessively nationalistic sentiments.

But the Germans did want the show to go on. From the moment the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre reopened on July 11, 1940, the Propaganda Staffel was particularly enthusiastic about the distracting qualities of
théâtre de boulevard
, home to endless crowd-pleasing revivals. It also occasionally approved dramas or controversial passages in plays that Vichy had initially banned. Most significantly, it was tolerant of most new plays, even of plays like Anouilh’s
Antigone
and Sartre’s
Les Mouches
and
Huis clos
, which their authors later claimed carried barely disguised messages of resistance.

The theater scene was covered in depth by the collaborationist press, notably the relatively independent cultural weekly
Comoedia
, but also by literary-political weeklies like
La Gerbe, Gringoire
and
the proudly Fascist
Je suis partout
, which boasted Alain Laubreaux and Lucien Rebatet as its widely feared reviewers. For these two critics, whose reviews also appeared in other collaborationist publications, such as
Le Petit Parisien
and
Le Cri du Peuple
, the quality of the play was often less important than the identity of its author; they had their favorites, like Anouilh and Montherlant, while playwrights who had alienated them in the ideological and aesthetic battles of the 1930s could expect no mercy. In fact, German-approved newspapers even savaged playwrights who, in the eyes of the Free French Forces in London, were already close to collaborators. After press attacks on Guitry, claiming he was Jewish, the Germans asked him to prove that he was Gentile. To the relevant family certificates, he mischievously attached a statement from the chief rabbi of Paris expressing regret that he could not count Guitry among his Jewish community.

For all of Laubreaux’s power and self-importance, however, one of his maneuvers backfired.
Les Pirates de Paris
, a play by a certain Michel Daxiat set against the infamous Stavisky affair of the mid-1930s, opened at the Théâtre L’Ambigu-Comique in March 1942. In
Je suis partout
, Laubreaux gave it a warm review, noting that “the public will watch, will be entertained and will reflect.” He added: “For the first time, we have a play where a Jew is called a Jew and where the Jew stands out clearly against a background of a regime of filth and decadence.”
³
What Laubreaux naturally failed to mention was that he was the author of the play, under a pseudonym. The play, which other critics rightly considered mediocre, closed after one month.

Still, unlike cinema, which lost some leading directors and actors to Hollywood, almost every significant theatrical figure stayed in France. One exception was Henri Bernstein, the Jewish playwright of popular
boulevard
comedies, who wisely left for New York. Another was Louis Jouvet, a leading director and actor who during the interwar years had drawn public attention to Giraudoux’s plays. He resumed work in Paris in the fall of 1940 with a new production of Molière’s
L’École des femmes
at the Théâtre de l’Athénée; because of his prestige, he was assured sympathetic support by the German embassy. But Jouvet was already thinking of leaving France and, as a first step, he agreed to appear in a screen version of
L’École des femmes
directed by his old friend Max Ophüls, who was in exile in Switzerland. With the production under way, however, Ophüls began a secret affair with Jouvet’s companion, the Belgian actress
Madeleine Ozeray, who was also in the movie. When the liaison was discovered by Jouvet, the scandal sank the film project. Forced to choose between her two lovers, Ozeray decided to stay with Jouvet and, shortly afterward, she joined him and his company on a long-scheduled tour of Latin America. In the main, they performed French classics, although in Rio de Janeiro they created Giraudoux’s one-act play
L’Apollon de Bellac
. Ozeray finally left Jouvet in Buenos Aires, but the company carried the French flag across the continent until France was liberated. In late 1944, Jouvet was once again running the Théâtre de l’Athénée.