And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (57 page)

What remained of the Vichy regime also imploded. Since 1943, Vichy itself had become an increasingly gloomy and empty town, with only a handful of countries keeping embassies there. Still believing Pétain could be useful to them, the Germans did not want the marshal to fall into Allied hands and, on August 17, they ordered him to prepare to leave. He was eager to appear to be standing up to the Germans, who went along with the fiction for two days. Then,
on the morning of August 20, after making a final radio broadcast, Pétain and his entourage were driven to Belfort, still in France but beside Alsace and Lorraine, the French provinces annexed by Germany in 1940. Once there, he wrote a protest letter to Hitler, recalling his pledge never to leave France.

Laval was also in Belfort, sent there under arrest after he had held talks with the prewar Radical leader Édouard Herriot about reconvening the National Assembly. Other Vichy politicians, including Fernand de Brinon, Pétain’s former man in Paris, were summoned to Berlin for talks on forming a new government. Then, starting on September 8, the entire Vichy circus was moved to Sigmaringen, in southwest Germany. Pétain refused to name a government in exile, but he allowed Brinon to become head of a “French Governmental Delegation,” which included such notorious Fascists as the
milice
leader Darnand; Marcel Déat, the editor of
L’Oeuvre
and the leader of the rightist Rassemblement National Populaire; and Jean Luchaire, Abetz’s close friend and the founding editor of
Les Nouveaux Temps
.

In October 1944, Céline also arrived in Sigmaringen, where he acted as an informal court doctor until he obtained German permission to travel to Denmark in March 1945. An actor friend of Céline’s, Robert Le Vigan, was also there, although writers and journalists were more numerous, including Lucien Rebatet and Paul Marion, Henriot’s predecessor as Vichy’s minister of information and propaganda. Jacques Doriot, the Fascist politician, also set up his own French-language radio and newspaper in Mainau, thirty miles to the south, although he was killed by Allied aircraft while driving to Sigmaringen on February 22, 1945. Ignored equally by Paris and Berlin, the “republic” of Sigmaringen lasted until French troops took the town in April 1945.

Even after the Normandy landings, though, the cultural life of Paris proved resilient. Claudel’s
Le Soulier de satin
and Sartre’s
Huis clos
continued to draw crowds. Work went ahead on new movies, including
Les Enfants du paradis
. The Berlin Philharmonic was among the German orchestras performing in Paris, while Wehrmacht officers filled the boxes at the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique. Between D-Day and the liberation, for instance, there were twenty-seven performances of opera and ballet at the Paris Opera, with the house closing its doors only after a performance of Glück’s
Alceste
on August 8. Publishers complained about the shortage of paper, but
they still produced new books. Only the art market had gone off the boil: much of the best art, sold by Parisian families or looted from Jews, had already been acquired by Germans who, with the obvious exceptions of Hitler and Göring, now also had less money to invest in paintings. Like most Parisians, artists and writers—or their wives—had learned the tricks of staying alive, using ration cards and the black market to obtain food and fuel, although both were in short supply. Journals kept by writers nonetheless mentioned lunches and dinners in good restaurants and brasseries. Sartre, Beauvoir, Leiris and their fellow partygoers also appear to have had no difficulty finding wine for their
fiestas
in the spring of 1944. And, of course, Florence Gould continued to treat her guests with the best of everything.

In early August, it was still unclear when Paris would be freed. General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, preferred to advance toward the northeast and, in any event, did not favor a prolonged siege of the city if the Germans chose to make a stand. In contrast, de Gaulle saw the early liberation of Paris as essential to establishing the legitimacy of his provisional government and blocking American plans to create an Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (for which a new currency had already been printed).

In the end, two unexpected developments played into his hands. General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Greater Paris, began an orderly retreat of some twenty thousand soldiers and eighty tanks from the city. Seeing trucks full of troops heading for eastern France, Parisians finally dared to defy the occupiers. The first sign of revolt came on August 15 with a strike by the Paris police, which, until then, had disgraced itself by rounding up Jews and arresting
résistants
. The strike spread to
métro
and postal workers and prompted the FFI’s Paris leader, Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, to prepare for armed action.

The Germans, however, had not given up. Early in August, the Germans loaded art from the Jeu de Paume into five railcars destined for Berlin, although the resistance succeeded in preventing the train from leaving. On August 15, the last train carrying Jewish deportees left Paris unimpeded for the east. On August 16, thirty-five young
résistants
were caught and executed in the Bois de Boulogne. On that same day, though,
Je suis partout
was published for the last time,
prompting Galtier-Boissière to rename it
Je suis parti
—“I have left”—instead of “I am everywhere.”

By August 19, an insurrection was under way, with sporadic attacks launched against German armored units and as many as six hundred barricades eventually thrown up across city streets. The German forces took up defensive positions inside the Luxembourg Gardens, in the place de la Concorde and Tuileries Gardens, at the Porte Maillot, around the Arc de Triomphe and beside the École Militaire. To this day, many buildings in these districts carry the scars of shells fired by German tanks, while hundreds of marble plaques mark the places were young FFI fighters died.

The days that followed were both chaotic and theatrical. Communist Party posters called for an uprising, using the World War I slang for a German: “For every Parisian, a Boche.” During lulls in the fighting, ordinary Parisians brought food and drink to those manning the barricades, then scurried away to safety when battles erupted. “What I liked about the resistance was to be among people whom I didn’t know, who were not from my circle, who were from all sectors of life,” recalled Annie Ubersfeld, then a young
résistante
. “I was pleased to meet people who were different.”
⁶
One morning, the painter Françoise Gilot bicycled from her home in Neuilly to visit her new lover. But Picasso was not in his studio, so she headed back along the Left Bank of the Seine. Beside the National Assembly, she came across a German tank with its cannon pointing at her. “Either they’ll shoot and I’ll probably die or they don’t shoot,” she recounted many years later. “So I must not stop. I went on cycling and I took the pont de la Concorde and they didn’t shoot and I thought, ‘Phew, that was a close one.’ ”
⁷

Sartre and Beauvoir had left Paris in mid-July for a three-week vacation, but they were back in the city before the insurrection began (prompting some wits to remark later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police). In her memoir
La Force de l’âge
, Beauvoir gave a good idea of how life went on amid death:

Fighting had resumed. The morning seemed calm; on the banks of the Seine, you could see fishermen throwing out lines and some young men sunbathing in their swimsuits; but the FFI were hiding behind the balustrades of the embankments, Zette told me, others in nearby buildings, others in the place Saint-Michel on the steps of the underground station. A German truck passed beneath the window; two young soldiers, both very blond, stood upright holding submachine guns; twenty meters away, death lay in wait for them. One felt like shouting, Beware! There was a burst of gunfire and they fell.
⁸

While Beauvoir saw young soldiers, many of the Germans left in Paris were old and neither equipped nor willing to fight. “I was watching from the sixth floor,” Francini remembered. “I saw a German, he was about fifty. His car had broken down. He was pushing his car alone and people were shouting insults at him. French flags were flying. He was sweating with fear. I felt sorry for him.”
⁹
Some German tanks were even abandoned in the middle of streets when their crews ran out of ammunition.

Guéhenno saw two German soldiers stationed alone on a bridge. “With grenades hanging from their belts, submachine guns in hand, they were terrified, awaiting inevitable death,”
¹⁰
he wrote in his journal, adding, “What were they doing there, on rue Manin, in the middle of this crowd that neither hated nor loved them but thought only of killing them? In the evening, around eight o’clock, they died.”
¹¹
Guéhenno concluded that he lacked the soul of a warrior, since he could not celebrate their deaths. “But,” he wrote, “I cannot forget all the crimes of the past five years committed by these stupid soldiers. All my heart is with those young boys of Paris who are fighting almost without guns, they’re the ones I pity.”
¹²
Three days later, on August 23, his friend B. telephoned him with a less romantic view of the insurrection: “All this fighting in Paris to create the illusion that we alone are recovering our freedom when it is clear that we owe this to others, to the armies that are arriving, all this, in his view, is pointless, a lie and a waste of lives.” But Guéhenno had a more nuanced view: “The life of an idea—of freedom—cannot be the same in the minds of the masses as it is in the critical brains of people like my friend B. … and myself. The history of peoples is built on such illusions.”
¹³

Certainly, a feeling of revolution was in the air. Newspaper stands selling
Je suis partout
and
Au Pilori
one day were offering
Combat
and
Libération
the next. The Comité de la Presse Clandestine had been preparing for this moment for months and, as staffs fled collaborationist newspapers, their buildings and presses were taken over by resistance newspapers.
Combat
, for instance, shared the presses
of
Pariser Zeitung
, the Wehrmacht’s newspaper, with
Franc-Tireur
and
Défense de la France
. Also back on the streets were the Communist Party daily
L’Humanité
, which by the end of 1944 had a circulation of close to 300,000, as well as
Le Figaro
, the conservative daily that had stopped publishing in Lyon when the city was occupied twenty-two months earlier.
Les Lettres Françaises
published its first “aboveground” issue on September 9; during the insurrection itself, Éluard and Seghers distributed old copies of the monthly around the Left Bank.

With fighting continuing across Paris, the new daily press provided a breathless blow-by-blow account of resistance heroism. Edited by Albert Camus and Pascal Pia,
Combat’s
first nonclandestine issue came out on August 21 with the headline “The Insurrection Leads the Republic to Triumph in Paris—Allied Troops Are Six Kilometers from the Capital.” Later in the day, Camus was heard on Radio Liberté, a Paris station occupied by the resistance, reading the text of a
Combat
editorial, “De la résistance à la révolution” (From Resistance to Revolution). Assuming the right to speak on behalf of the French, it said, “Having started by resistance, they want to finish with revolution.”
¹⁴
Not unreasonably, it was a good moment for dreams. Indeed, Camus’s contributions to
Combat
during the days before liberation were less reportages than philosophical essays laced with poetic images.

Camus also commissioned Sartre to provide a street-eye view of the insurrection. On August 28, three days after the liberation,
Combat
published the first of his seven reports under the series title of “Un Promeneur dans Paris insurgé” (A Walker in Insurgent Paris). Written in lively journalistic language, with Sartre’s personal experience seemingly as important as this turning point in history, the articles evoked the confusion and uncertainty experienced by most civilians, who might be lining up for bread one moment and cowering in doorways the next. Sartre wrote, “There is a geography of insurrection: in certain areas, they have been fighting relentlessly for four days; in others (Montparnasse, for instance), everything is almost disturbingly calm.” He went on: “A few people venture all the way to the boulevard Saint-Germain and come back disappointed: the flag with the swastika is still flying over the Seine.” Sartre the playwright also observed himself on stage. “Then, suddenly, that Wednesday, the BBC announced that Paris had been freed. A friend and I listened to the news flat on our stomachs
because heavy gunfire was just then hammering our building: we couldn’t help finding the announcement somewhat surprising, even annoying. Paris had been freed, but we could not leave our building, because the rue de Seine, where I lived, was still blocked.”

It seems likely that Beauvoir and Leiris contributed extensively to these articles
^*
since Sartre spent much of the insurrection inside the Comédie Française, the improvised headquarters for the Comité National du Théâtre, the theater world’s tiny resistance group. Still, with his byline prominently displayed on the front page of
Combat
, Sartre could start reinventing himself as Sartre
le grand résistant
.