When Paris Went Dark

For my wife, Betty, whose love and wisdom have sheltered and nurtured me since we first met at Mont Saint-Michel many years ago;

and

For my dear son, Michael, and his loving wife, Heidi, who gave us Edith and Griffin, truly grand children, with gratitude for their love and laughter;

and

For my brother Tim, and in memory of our brother Steedy

September 3:
France and Great Britain declare war on Germany

September 5:
United States announces its neutrality

Winter 1939–40:
“Phony war” (
drôle de guerre
); Russo-Finnish War

April:
Anglo-Russian expedition to Norway; Germany occupies Norway

April 3:
Prison sentences for former French Communist deputies

May 10:
Beginning of German western offensive; Winston Churchill named prime minister of Great Britain

May 15:
French prime minister Paul Reynaud informs Churchill by phone: “We’ve lost the battle”

May 18:
Reynaud announces appointment of Maréchal Philippe Pétain as vice president of Council of Ministers

May 25:
Charles de Gaulle given battlefield promotion to brigadier general

May 28:
Belgium capitulates, to surprise of Allies

June 4:
End of evacuation of Allied troops begun on May 24 from Dunkirk

June 5:
Retreating French soldiers begin to appear in Paris; Reynaud names de Gaulle undersecretary for war and national defense

June 10:
French government leaves Paris; Italy declares war on France and Great Britain

June 12:
Paris officially declared “open”; US ambassador William Bullitt essentially “mayor” of Paris with prefect of police Roger Langeron

June 14:
First German troops enter Paris

June 16:
Reynaud resigns as prime minister

June 17:
Pétain named president of Council of Ministers; requests an armistice

June 18:
First radio speech to France by de Gaulle from London

June 22:
Armistice signed at Compiègne

June 25:
Armistice officially begins

June 28:
Hitler’s only visit to Paris; British government recognizes de Gaulle as head of the “Free French”

June 1940–November 1942:
Göring will visit Paris and the Jeu de Paume museum twenty-five times during this period

July 3:
Great Britain attacks and devastates French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria

July 11–12:
Third Republic votes itself out of existence; a new État français is established, with Pétain as its chief executive and Pierre Laval as vice president of the Council of Ministers and his designated successor

July 17:
Vichy passes law that forbids employment for those not born of French parents

July 22:
Vichy examines post-1927 naturalizations of five hundred thousand French citizens

August 7:
Alsace-Lorraine officially annexed to Germany

August 8:
Beginning of Battle of Britain

August 13:
Vichy abolishes anti-Semitism laws, dissolves “secret societies,” aimed principally at Freemasonry; Germans forbid Jews to reenter Occupied Zone

September 12:
First German announcement of hostage policy (hostages will be imprisoned or executed if violent actions are taken against German personnel)

September 17:
First rationing of essential food products in Paris announced; appearance of
cartes de rationnement

September 27:
Jewish-owned shops must carry yellow signs bearing the words
ENTREPRISE JUIVE
(eleven thousand complied by late November); census of Jews by French police (under German orders) begins

October 3:
First German edict against Jews in occupied France; first Gaullist tags discovered on Parisian walls

October 5:
First roundup of French Communists in Paris, by Vichy police

October 12:
Hitler postpones indefinitely the invasion of England

October 18:
Publication of Vichy edict of October 3–4 forbidding Jewish ownership and management of enterprises and excluding Jews from the army and professions

October 22:
Hitler and Pierre Laval meet for first time at Montoire, in France

October 24:
Pétain and Hitler meet at Montoire, their only meeting

October 30:
Pétain’s “path of collaboration” speech

November 5:
Roosevelt reelected for a third term

November 11
Lycéens
demonstrate in Paris

December 13:
Pétain fires Pierre Laval; Admiral François Darlan will be his successor

December 15:
Ashes of Duke of Reichstadt (the King of Rome, a.k.a. Napoleon II) brought to Paris from Vienna

February:
Arrest of members of first important resistance group, known as the Musée de l’Homme network because most members worked at that institution; six would be executed in early 1942

February 14:
Veit Harlan’s strongly anti-Semitic film,
Le Juif Süss,
opens in Paris cinemas

March 29:
Creation by Vichy government of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, aimed at coordinating repression of Jews in France

April 26:
Third Vichy law regarding Jews forbids them from trading their possessions with Aryans; Jewish bank accounts frozen

May 8:
Ordinance listing professions forbidden to Jews is enacted

May 14:
First
rafle
(roundup) of Parisian Jews (ca. 3,700, mostly Polish) is conducted

June 21:
Exclusion of Jewish students from universities and other professional schools

June 22:
Operation Barbarossa: German invasion of USSR

July 16:
Jews excluded from legal profession

July 22:
All Jewish bank accounts seized; vaults, safe-deposit boxes opened

August 8:
Jews excluded from medical professions

August 13:
Jews forbidden to have radios

August 14:
French Communist Party outlawed; manifestations against Occupation begin to appear

August 20–23:
Second
rafle
of Parisian Jews (4,300 arrested on German orders) takes place, in 11th arrondissement

August 21 and 28:
First German serviceman, Alfons Moser, assassinated in a public place: “Colonel Fabien,” a
résistant,
kills him at the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro stop; thirteen hostages executed at Mont-Valérien, outside Paris, where there would be many such executions over the next four years

August 29:
First Free French (Gaullist) agent, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, shot by Germans at Mont-Valérien

September 5:
Opening of exhibition
Le Juif et la France
(will run until June of 1942)

November 21:
Bomb explodes in a Left Bank bookstore that features German publications; probably set by Tommy Elek of the Manouchian Group

December 8:
United States declares war on Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy)

December 10:
Jews not allowed to change domicile; word J
UIF
or J
UIVE
must be stamped in red on ID cards

December 15:
Germans arrest 743 affluent French Jews in Paris

January 20:
Clandestine publication of Vercors’s
Silence of the Sea

February:
Relegation of Jews to last Métro cars; Jews forbidden to leave home between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.

March 1:
Opening of
Le Bolchévisme contre l’Europe
exhibition in Paris

March 3–4:
Allies bomb Boulogne-Billancourt, suburb of Paris where Renault factory is located

March 27:
First deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz from Drancy

April 18:
Pétain reappoints Laval as vice president of the Council of Ministers—in effect, the prime minister

May:
Drancy, outside Paris, becomes a major collecting point for deportation to Auschwitz; more than five hundred hostages have been shot since Moser’s assassination in August of 1941; Jews forbidden to possess bicycles

May 5:
SS general Reinhard Heydrich visits Paris to introduce SS general Carl Oberg to the Occupation authorities; police matters removed from army control and put under German police control; French police put under German command

May 15:
Arno Breker (Hitler’s favorite sculptor) exhibition opens at l’Orangerie in Paris

June 25:
Thousands of Jews sent from Drancy to Auschwitz; also ten thousand from Unoccupied Zone delivered to Nazis

June:
La Relève,
a call by the Vichy government for volunteers to work in Germany in exchange for French prisoners of war (three workers for one prisoner); weak response

End June:
Adolf Eichmann in Paris to coordinate “final solution” there

July 16–17:
Grande Rafle
(27,000 foreign Jews sought; 13,200 rounded up)

July 21–25:
Arrest of Jewish orphans (of deported, escaped parents)

July 28:
Camus’s
The Stranger
(
L’Étranger
) appears

August:
Jews forbidden to have telephones

August 6:
Inauguration of Paris’s new Musée d’Art Moderne

August 26:
Arrest of 6,600 foreign Jews in Unoccupied Zone

September 14:
Beginning of Battle of Stalingrad

November 11:
Germans occupy
Zone libre
(Unoccupied Zone) after Allied invasion of North Africa

November 27:
French navy sabotages its fleet in the port of Toulon

January 11:
Thirty Métro stations closed

January 30:
Milice française established (right-wing militia of Vichy government)

February 2:
Surrender of German marshal Friedrich von Paulus and his armies at Stalingrad

February 16:
Vichy establishes Service du travail obligatoire (STO), obligatory draft of young workers for Germany

April 4:
Outskirts of Paris heavily bombed

May 27:
Establishment of the Conseil national de la Résistance, organized under Gaullist leadership; most resistance groups had theretofore acted independently

June 21:
Arrest of Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s chief negotiator with all resistance groups; he would die after having been extensively tortured

June 25:
Sartre’s massive philosophical work
Being and Nothingness
appears

July:
About six hundred examples of
art dégénéré
burned in Jeu de Paume garden

November:
Arrest of the Manouchian Group, a resistance network

December 15:
All French citizens must have
cartes d’identité

February:
Trial of Manouchian Group; twenty-two executed

March 8:
Berr family arrested

March 27:
Hélène Berr deported on her birthday

April 26:
Pétain visits Paris for first—and last—time as
chef de l’État français

June 6:
Allies invade Normandy

July:
Operation Valkyrie (assassination plot against Hitler by dissident elements of German army)

August 17:
Laval’s last Council of Ministers meeting at the Hôtel Matignon in Paris; SS officer Alois Brunner leaves Drancy on a
train with fifty-one deportees; 1,386 Jews at Drancy survived after Brunner’s departure (of 75,700 Jews deported from France, 97 percent died in Auschwitz and other camps)

August 19–25:
Battle for liberation of Paris

August 22:
De Gaulle’s first meeting with his Council of Ministers in Paris