And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (56 page)

Gradually, though, the resistance as a whole was becoming better armed and more united. In this, the British Special Operations Executive and the Free French Forces were important outside players. The SOE, which had had secret agents operating in France since 1941, provided radio tramsitters, weapons, training and money to trusted resistance groups; the Gaullists, alarmed by Communist control of much of the underground, offered a degree of legitimacy to non-Communist
résistants
. The problem they both faced was the sheer number of resistance groups—close to 250 have been identified—that had appeared, many of them not only tiny but also proudly independent.

A crucial turning point came in spring 1943, when eight major resistance groups formed the Conseil National de la Résistance, or National Resistance Council, headed by Jean Moulin, a former
préfet
and de Gaulle’s new personal representative in France. But less than one month after the council’s first meeting in Paris, Moulin and eight other leaders were arrested in Lyon by the city’s infamous Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie, widely known as the Butcher of Lyon.
^*
The circumstances of Moulin’s arrest and subsequent death remain a matter of speculation to this day. Was he, as was later charged, the victim of an informer who had infiltrated his group? And after being tortured, did he commit suicide, as Barbie claimed, or was he murdered?

In any event, while a setback, Moulin’s death was not a fatal blow to the resistance, since its main components—groups like Combat, Libération, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans and the Armée Secrète—increasingly coordinated their activities. They suffered losses. Numerous
leading
résistants
were arrested by the
milice
and handed over to the Gestapo for interrogation, torture and either execution or deportation. But by D-Day, with its urban support groups included, the resistance was estimated to number around 100,000 men and women.

In response, both Vichy and the Nazis became more aggressive. Their new weapon was the paramilitary
milice
. Founded by Laval in January 1943 to help arrest Jews and fight the resistance, it had also partly been his response to the growing reluctance of French police and
gendarmerie
to do the Germans’ dirty work. To give it a more elevated mission, it was said to be defending Christian civilization against the usual evils: Jews, Freemasons, Bolsheviks and democracy. It even had its own newspaper,
Combats
(just one letter away from the resistance monthly
Combat)
, and it could count on cheerleading from collaborationist weeklies like
Je suis partout
.

With some thirty thousand full- or part-time members, uniformed in blue coats, brown shirts and large berets, the
milice
was much feared. As part of its psychological warfare, its units would march through towns, swaggering in the knowledge that they could act with impunity. Its leader was Joseph Darnand, an avowed Fascist who in October 1943 pledged his loyalty to Hitler and was awarded the rank of Sturmbannführer, or major, in the Waffen-SS. In December, Laval brought Darnand into his government as deputy minister of the interior, effectively fusing the activities of the French police and the
milice
. Both were answerable to the Germans, although the
milice
carried out its own raids on villages and its own executions. One infamous
milice
leader in Lyon, Paul Touvier, who was finally arrested in 1989 after years of protection by a religious order in Nice, was condemned to life imprisonment in 1994 for ordering the killing of seven Jewish hostages at Rillieux-la-Pape outside Lyon on June 29, 1944. Some
miliciens
also had military training, and they took part in operations against the maquis alongside the Waffen-SS.

In Paris, where the
milice
was rarely seen, a different form of thuggery was provided by what was variously known as the French Gestapo, the Bonny-Lafont gang and the Rue Lauriston gang. It was headed by Pierre Bonny, a former police inspector, and Henri Chamberlin, a.k.a. Lafont, a small-time criminal; they made a tidy fortune on the black market and shared some of their spoils with Nazi officers. In May 1941, they requisitioned the building at 93 rue Lauriston, in the 16th arrondissement, and expanded their operation to
hunting
résistants
on behalf of the Gestapo. Soon the very name rue Lauriston was synonymous with kidnapping and torture.
^*
Jews, too, were among their victims, but most of the 23,000 Jews deported from France in 1943 and of the 16,000 deported in the eight months of 1944 were already being held in camps scattered across southern France. As with earlier deportations, a majority were foreign-born. In fact, while foreigners represented one-third of France’s Jewish population, they accounted for two-thirds of the 76,000 Jews deported from France, some 2,000 of whom survived. Put differently, the deportation rate was close to 50 percent for foreign Jews and around 13 percent for French-born Jews.

With a simmering civil war under way across much of France, the propaganda war was intensifying. Working closely with the resistance, the BBC’s French-language service not only trumpeted acts of sabotage and denounced German repression but also sent daily messages in code, such as the timing of arms shipments. Resistance newspapers proliferated; some were little more than mimeographed sheets, others the well-printed organs of major resistance groups. After the war, the National Library collected examples of a total of 1,015 clandestine publications that circulated at one time or other during the occupation.

Combating the Allies and the “terrorists” of the resistance were collaborationist dailies and weeklies, as well as Radio-Paris and Radio Vichy, all trying to alarm the French with the prospect of a Bolshevik takeover. Michel Francini, the young music-hall performer, was working at the time on a weekly variety program called
Les Ondes joyeuses
(Happy Airwaves) on Radio-Paris. “Everyone turned to Radio-Paris for entertainment,” he recalled. “The politics were all lies.”
²
One Frenchman in particular, Philippe Henriot, proved a skilled and articulate propagandist for the Nazis. Having found inspiration in the right-wing nationalism of Maurras’s L’Action Française in the 1930s, Henriot embraced the Nazi cause after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. He also became a loyal supporter of Pétain or, more exactly, of Laval. And it was Laval who, ignoring Pétain’s objections, named him in January 1944 to be Vichy’s minister for information and propaganda.

Henriot’s real power, however, came from his oratory, whether at public meetings or in his daily “editorials” on Radio-Paris. Responding
to him on Radio-Londres was Pierre Dac, an actor and broadcaster, who warned that Henriot’s tomb would carry the inscription
DIED FOR HITLER, SHOT BY THE FRENCH
. It happened sooner than Dac expected. Early on the morning of June 28, 1944, a group of
résistants
dressed as
miliciens
murdered him in his apartment in the Information Ministry in Paris. Henriot was the most prominent Vichy official to be killed by the resistance and, as such, was given a state funeral in Notre-Dame, conducted by none other than the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard. To avenge Henriot, the
milice
picked an easy target. Georges Mandel, the Jewish politician who had served as the Popular Front’s interior minister, was already being held in Buchenwald. The Germans returned him to Paris and delivered him to the
milice
. On July 7, he was murdered in the Fontainebleau forest. Two weeks earlier, another prominent Jew, Jean Zay, who was education minister in the Popular Front, was taken from a French jail by the
milice
and also murdered.

From early 1944, Parisians, too, felt the war coming closer. Allied bombers, which regularly attacked factories and railroad connections in the Paris suburbs, occasionally missed their targets; the movie studios at Boulogne-Billancourt were hit and badly damaged. Further, with some stray bombs striking residential neighborhoods, Parisians grew used to spending nights in basements or
métro
stations. Operas, plays, movies and concerts were frequently interrupted by air-raid alerts and, because of electricity cuts, no movies were shown on Tuesdays.

On April 26, 1944, Pétain paid his only wartime visit to the city to express solidarity with Parisians after several days of heavy bombing; he was heartily cheered by a crowd of some ten thousand Parisians when he spoke from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. After a stirring rendering of “La Marseillaise,” sung in public in Paris for the first time since 1940, Pétain attended a special mass in Notre-Dame given by Cardinal Suhard. For all too brief a moment, the old man could again imagine himself as a symbol of national unity. But two days later, the Nazis forced him to broadcast a message praising Germany for defending Europe against Communism. He also criticized the resistance and told the French that “it is in your interest to maintain a correct and loyal attitude toward the occupying troops.” The following month, large crowds welcomed him when he visited four cities formerly in the occupied zone—Nancy, Rouen, Épinal and Dijon—for the first time in four years. But it was too late for
Pétain to distance himself from Laval; in the eyes of their enemies in France and abroad, they remained the two pillars upon which Vichy rested.

On June 6, barely six weeks after Pétain visited Paris, American, British and Canadian troops began landing along a bleak and sparsely populated stretch of the Normandy coastline. Simultaneously, resistance groups were mobilized. Now known uniformly as the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI, they set about sabotaging power supplies, bridges and communications networks to disrupt German efforts to send reinforcements. When the first Allied parachutists landed behind the German lines, the resistance was also well placed to provide intelligence on enemy military movements. But it took the Allies seven weeks to gain control of Normandy and Brittany.

During much of June, the Americans fought their way up the Cotentin Peninsula before capturing the strategic port of Cherbourg. To the east, British and Canadian forces struggled until late July to take Caen, although in the process they held down German armored divisions—and also largely destroyed the city; for the first time since 1940, there were large numbers of French civilian casualties. Finally, Allied forces broke out of their enlarged beachhead on July 25 and began moving east at speed. One week later, France’s 2nd Armored Division, under General Philippe Leclerc, landed in Normandy and joined the Allies.

Meanwhile, German troops summoned from the south to cut off the Allied advance carried out two particularly shocking acts of reprisal: on June 9, a day after the maquis had killed forty German soldiers, units of the 2nd SS Panzer Division
Das Reich
hanged ninety-five men from lampposts in Tulle in the Corrèze; the following day, about eighty miles to the north, after a report that a German officer was being held hostage, German troops entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, rounded up the population, shot 190 men and then burned 247 women and 205 children to death in the local church. Word of the Oradour massacre stunned France, prompting
Les Lettres Françaises
to put out a special issue denouncing the killings. It also strengthened the determination of the resistance, which played an important role in liberating small towns and harassing German units after the Allies landed along the Riviera on August 15.

Thanks to the BBC, Paris was able to follow developments on the war front, learning, for example, of the Normandy landings at the same time as they were announced in London. “Numerous fleets and
11,000
planes have participated in the operations,” Jünger noted professionally in his journal. “This, no doubt, is the start of the great offensive that will mark this day in history. I was nonetheless surprised because there had been so many predictions about it. But why this place, this moment? This will be debated for centuries to come.”
³
Galtier-Boissière was more excited, writing, “At last, that’s it! The landings began this morning in Normandy. There is talk of parachute landings near Rouen. In the street, the faces of passersby display a sweet joy.”
⁴

With the end of the occupation in sight, artists and writers active in the intellectual resistance began preparing their professions for after the liberation. The Front National du Théâtre, which until then had dwelled mainly on denouncing collaborationist authors and actors in
La Scène Française
, created a twenty-five-member Comité du Théâtre charged with purging and reorganizing French theater after the liberation. Among its members were Sartre, the playwright Armand Salacrou and the actor Pierre Dux, who would run the Comédie Française after the liberation and again in the 1970s. This front and other groups also drew up lists of those of their peers who had betrayed France—and their profession—by collaborating with the enemy. Some groups even planned
comités d’épuration—
purge committees—to judge traitors.

A good number of collaborationists, however, knowing what awaited them, were already far from Paris. Among the first to leave, just eleven days after D-Day, was Céline, who fled to Germany. Others waited until Allied troops had fought their way out of Normandy and were moving north. Some traveled with the first German convoys to evacuate the city. “Good” Germans also packed their bags. Gerhard Heller left Paris at dawn on August 14. That same evening, Jünger checked out of the Hôtel Raphaël. He noted, “Sudden departure at nightfall. I left my room in order, I left a bouquet of flowers on the desk and distributed some tips. Unfortunately, I forgot some irreplaceable letters in the drawer of a wardrobe.”
⁵