And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (8 page)

To defend democracy? There is no such thing anymore. To preserve things as they were before the war? But it was the most complete disorder. There are no more parties or coherent ideologies. Only social discontent everywhere. Manipulated by capitalists? But they have nothing to gain from this war. They delayed it as long as they could; they are the authors of Munich. They accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia for fear of communism. And their interest in September 1939 was ‘to allow Hitler to save face,’ as one senior official said on August 30, 1939. They fear Stalin more than Hitler and now, here they are, at war with Hitler, not Stalin.
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Interviewed more than thirty years later, Sartre was still more radical: “In 1939, 1940, we were terrified of dying, suffering, for a cause
that disgusted us. That is, for a disgusting France, corrupt, inefficient, racist, anti-Semite, run by the rich for the rich—no one wanted to die for that, until, well, until we understood that the Nazis were worse.”
¹⁶

One man who might have hoped to be in uniform, given his self-image as a swashbuckling warrior, was André Malraux. His involvement in the Spanish war had boosted the celebrity he had garnered in the 1920s and 1930s, first as an adventurer who was arrested for stealing statues from Angkor Wat in Cambodia, then for his prizewinning book
La Condition humaine
. But in 1939, when he volunteered to join the French air force on the back of his running the Escadrille España, he was turned down on the not unreasonable grounds that he could not pilot a plane. He then offered to join a mechanized unit and was told to wait until contacted. The call finally came in April 1940, when he was ordered to join a tank regiment at Provins, fifty miles southeast of Paris. A man who had boasted the rank of
commandant
in Spain was now a modest private calling himself Georges Malraux. Two months later, the fact that he was not immediately identified as
André
Malraux, a renowned left-leaning anti-Fascist, probably saved him from long imprisonment.

On the political front, developments elsewhere in Europe were fast undermining hopes that France could avoid an open war with Germany. On September 17, 1939, as part of its understanding with Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and annexed one-third of its territory to Belarus and Ukraine. But neither France nor Britain was ready to declare war on Moscow. Then, on November 30, 1939, with its western flank secured by the nonaggression pact with Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Finnish resistance proved far greater than expected and, in the weeks that followed, Britain and France felt obliged to offer assistance. In practice, little of this arrived before the Soviet Union and Finland signed an armistice in March 1940.

For French rightists, obsessed more by Communism than Fascism, France’s failure to confront Moscow over Finland was unforgivable. This led Pierre Laval and another former prime minister, Pierre–Étienne Flandin, to oust Daladier’s government on March 19, although its replacement, headed by Paul Reynaud, brought little extra clarity. While Reynaud had for years demanded rapid French rearmament, he was nonetheless forced to give the job of minister of national defense and war to Daladier, the man widely blamed for
France’s military weakness. Reynaud at least understood that Berlin, not Moscow, was France’s principal foe. But he had no time to act on this. On April 9, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, with Denmark surrendering almost immediately. Norway put up a brave fight, prompting Reynaud to persuade Britain to join France in sending military reinforcements. By May 2, Germany had driven out the allied forces and seized Norway.

Was Paris ready for what would follow? Hardly. At the end of April, a Swiss journalist, Edmond Dubois, reported that the city’s nightlife still offered 105 movie houses, 25 theaters, 14 music halls and 21 cabarets. On May 8, the Paris Opera presented the world premiere of Milhaud’s new opera,
Médée
. And even two days later, when Hitler launched his offensive against western Europe, Parisians still presumed that the French army would stop him. But Germany swiftly occupied neutral Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands; then, instead of turning south, where most French and British troops were concentrated, the Wehrmacht launched a tank blitzkrieg through the supposedly unpassable mountains of the Ardennes. By entering France to the west of the Maginot Line but to the east of the main Allied emplacements, German armored divisions caught the French army command by surprise. And in doing so, they cut off the British Expeditionary Force, France’s northern army and some Belgian units. The disaster was marginally mitigated by Operation Dynamo, by which some 340,000 soldiers, including 140,000 French, were evacuated to Britain from Dunkirk between May 26 and June 4. But France was now forced to watch helplessly as the German army, supported by the Luftwaffe, advanced largely unopposed into France. On June 10, seeing an opportunity to profit from the German success, Italy declared war on France.

Complicating the retreat of the French army was the exodus of millions of civilians, first from Belgium, then from northern France and finally from Paris and all major cities in the center of the country. Over a period of barely four weeks, some eight to ten million people fled south. These included many of France’s cultural lights, not only Jews like Milhaud, the playwright Tristan Bernard and the philosopher Henri Bergson, but also Colette, Drieu La Rochelle and many other literary figures. Gaston Gallimard and Paulhan, accompanied by their wives, quickly left Normandy and found refuge at the home of a poet friend near Carcassonne, in the far south. In her novel
Suite française
, written in 1942 and not published until 2004, Irène
Némirovsky provided a gripping description of the exodus. She was already with her family in Issy-l’Évêque when it occurred, but using other testimonies and her own imagination, she put together her story of rich and poor scrambling desperately and often selfishly for their lives. Early in her book, capturing the mood of the wealthy bourgeoisie, an art collector expresses his incredulity at everything happening around him: “I cannot bear this chaos, these outbursts of hatred, the repulsive spectacle of war. I shall withdraw to a tranquil spot, in the countryside, and live on the bit of money I have left until everyone comes to their senses.”
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Initially what set off the flight was fear that the Germans would act as everyone believed they had done in occupied French territories during World War I—that is, pillaging, raping and killing indiscriminately. Once people began to flee, panic accelerated the process. If a neighbor or the baker or, still worse, the local mayor was seen piling belongings into his car, it was hard not to follow his example. This process was multiplied a thousand times in Paris, above all when ministries were seen filling trucks with documents and furniture, which were then carried off into the night in convoys. On June 10, President Albert Lebrun, Prime Minister Reynaud, President of the Senate Jules Jeanneney and much of the Chamber of Deputies slipped out of town before dawn or in the evening, after dark. Accompanying Reynaud in his car was the newly promoted General de Gaulle, who four days earlier had been named undersecretary of war. That night, the government reassembled in Orléans.

Signs that Paris was closing down were everywhere. June 10 was also the day that the senior high school examinations called the
baccalauréat
were due to start. Beauvoir went to the Lycée Camille Sée, where she taught, to discover that
le bac
had been canceled. “I returned to the Latin Quarter and found students of the Lycée Henri IV, all having a good laugh; for many of these youths, it was like a holiday, an exam day without exams and with disorder and free time. They walked along the rue Soufflot in a cheerful mood, they seemed to be amusing themselves enormously.”
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That very evening, Beauvoir herself joined the exodus south. Michel Francini, still only nineteen but already a music-hall performer, said he left the city only after Reynaud called on Parisians to flee, on June 12. “If I hadn’t heard Reynaud on the radio, I’d have stayed,” he said decades later. Instead, he was given a taste of the fear and confusion gripping much of the country: “I had an exodus of thirteen days. I knew my father
had gone to Agen, but it’s five hundred miles away. So I left not knowing where I was going. I walked for miles, I’d see a train, get on it and sometimes find it was going the wrong way. I arrived in Agen on the eve of my father leaving for Pau. The Italians were bombing us, too,” he recalled. “All the time, people were saying, ‘The Germans are coming, the Germans are just behind us.’ I was starving, I had just a bit of bread. I went to a farm and asked for some water and was refused. They wanted to sell it to me for two francs.”
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It seems unlikely that fugitives were enormously consoled by
chansonniers
like Tino Rossi, who caught the mood with “Quand tu reverras ton village” (When You Next See Your Village) and “Le Petit refugié” (The Little Refugee).

Almost everyone faced chaos. Once the fighting reached northern France, escape by train became impossible. Those with cars or trucks were usually the first to leave, but they were soon slowed down by traffic jams or bomb craters. Those with horse-drawn carts or bicycles were then followed by people on foot, many of them pushing heavily laden prams. As they passed through empty villages, abandoned dogs and cats met them, scrounging for food. In some places, patients from psychiatric hospitals could be seen wandering about in a daze. And all along, there was both the fear and the reality of strafings by Stuka and Messerschmitt fighter planes, which by then were unchallenged in the air. Every attack sent people tumbling from their cars or dropping their bicycles as they sought protection in ditches; many were killed or wounded. Solidarity was in short supply. A few improvised field hospitals were set up, there were cases when villagers gave food and water to passing refugees, but more often the instinct for survival ruled. The lucky travelers headed toward provincial homes where family or friends waited to receive them. Most found themselves hungry and homeless, refugees in their own country. French soldiers whose units had disintegrated were left roaming the countryside in shock, not knowing where to find their families. Foreigners who had escaped internment camps understood only that they had to head south.

As the Wehrmacht encircled the French army in the north and headed south, it took some two million prisoners, among them Sartre, Messiaen, Desnos, Anouilh, Brasillach and the country’s future president François Mitterrand. The German army was ill-prepared to handle so many prisoners and, in the confusion, many escaped, including Desnos and Anouilh. Others were taken to Germany
and spent the next five years as prisoners of war. Sartre, Messiaen and Brasillach, however, were released in 1941; Mitterrand escaped later the same year. But there were also many fatalities. Around 100,000 French soldiers and civilians died in the fall of France, among them Paul Nizan, an admired writer who had left the French Communist Party to protest the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and was killed in the fighting. Another was Saint-Pol-Roux, a seventy-nine-year-old Symbolist poet who died as a result of a common rather than a political crime: a drunken German soldier burst into his home near Brest, killed his servant, raped his daughter and assaulted Roux so viciously that he died in a hospital a few hours later. To the south of Paris, the Germans caught up with Malraux’s tank unit and, after a short battle, he was wounded and captured. He was fortunate not to be shipped to Germany and managed to escape four months later with the help of his brother Roland. Aragon, who won medals for bravery, avoided capture when he found a place among French troops evacuated to England from Dunkirk. Many of these were quickly sent back to France in the hope that they could still resist the German advance. But after Aragon’s unit landed in Brest, it was soon overwhelmed. He escaped and slowly made his way southeast until he again met up with his Russian-born wife, the writer Elsa Triolet.

Saint-Exupéry, whose 1931 novel
Vol de Nuit
(Night Flight) made him famous as both a writer and an aviator, saw the war from the air. Injuries sustained in earlier plane crashes prevented him from becoming a fighter pilot, so instead he was assigned to an air force reconnaissance unit based at Orconte, about 130 miles east of Paris. When the Battle of France erupted, the Luftwaffe quickly won air supremacy, just as German tanks dominated the land war. Saint-Exupéry’s squadron suffered badly. In
Pilote de guerre
, published in the United States as
Flight to Arras
, he recalled that France had only fifty three-man air reconnaissance crews and that, of twenty-three in his Group 2-33, seventeen had vanished by the end of May 1940. In military terms, this was disastrous, since the French army had almost no firsthand information of the whereabouts and movements of the Wehrmacht. Saint-Exupéry’s description of the country’s mood was still more somber: “Throughout the closing days of the campaign, one impression dominated all others, an impression of absurdity. Everything was cracking up all round us. Everything was caving in. The collapse was so entire that death itself seemed to us absurd.
Death, in such a tumult, had ceased to count.” After France’s defeat, he was demobilized in Algeria and returned to France to be reunited with his beautiful Salvadoran wife, Consuelo.

Other cultural figures also ended up in the south of France. Much of the movie industry, notably Jewish producers, headed to Nice and Marseille, home to film studios, and to Cannes, with its many comfortable hotels. Others with money in their pockets went to Alpine resorts, like Megève. Paul Derval, who ran Les Folies Bergère, arrived in Biarritz to find the singer Mistinguett and the actresses Elvire Popesco and Suzanne Flon. Guitry opted for Dax, in southwestern France, although unlike Provence, where Matisse, Bonnard and Chagall sought refuge, that region was soon occupied by German forces. Only a few writers chose to stay in Paris, among them the eccentric conservative Paul Léautaud, who refused to abandon his beloved dogs and cats. He watched as the city quickly emptied, noting that even the Louvre was unguarded. A few days later, he wrote in his
Journal littéraire:
“I am completely indifferent to the defeat, as indifferent as I was when I first saw a German soldier the other morning.” One simple reason was that, as a convinced anti-Semite, he believed that a British victory would be equivalent to a Jewish victory. Another writer, Marcel Jouhandeau, who would have liked to have left, stayed at the insistence of his domineering wife, Elise. As a result, he provided an eyewitness account of the fall of Paris. On June 10, he wrote: “It seems that everyone is leaving on a long journey and here we are, alone in an ocean of abandoned homes. Those who will arrive speak a different language. We will understand it no better than that of birds and domestic animals.”
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On June 13, General Pierre Héring declared Paris an open city, saving it from further bombardment. At six a.m. on June 14, with Paris already in German hands, Jouhandeau noted almost casually, “When I cross Avenue Malakoff, I find myself before some German non-commissioned officers photographing Luna Park.”
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