When Paris Went Dark (10 page)

Seeing a German soldier in his field uniform for the first time must have been searing, for every memoir, journal, and commentary about the invasion mentions the experience in its first few pages. This was
visual, almost tactile proof that France was no longer in charge of its own destiny. With the division of the country in 1940 into Occupied and Unoccupied Zones, it would be more than two years before citizens in the latter areas would catch much sight of Germans other than in newsreels. But in northern France, and in Paris, there was an almost eerie preoccupation with the behavior, dress, and physical characteristics of this “other.” For several of those whose journals I have used in this work, their first sight of a German was not in Paris itself but in the small village or town in which the writers found themselves in June of 1940, having left Paris on the verge of the Occupation. There is something even more intimate about coming face-to-face with one’s nemesis in a rural village, on a country road, or on the streets of a provincial city.

Irène Némirovsky builds her story “Dolce,” part of
Suite Française,
around this very point. The Germans arrive in a village during Sunday mass, and their heavy boots can be heard as the communicants try to follow the sermon:

“Dolce” recounts in mesmerizing detail how the intimacy of country living enhanced the sense of being “occupied,” of having to make place where there was not much place to be made, where “accommodation” became unavoidable, and where one could fall into “collaboration” almost casually. Némirovsky wrote this piece almost contemporaneously with the events; she had left Paris (where she had seen her first Germans) to hide in Burgundy, where the French police would later arrest her.

Simone de Beauvoir, having joined the exodus, was in the Pays de la
Loire, a region southwest of Paris, when she saw her first Germans close-up:

She comments further on how their laughter, their clicking heels, their confidence, their near joy in victory made French humiliation manifest.

Jean Guéhenno, a literary critic and lycée instructor, witnessed his first Germans in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in central France: “I don’t want to comment here about these grey men that I have been passing in the streets. It’s an invasion of rats.”
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(This image, of course, presages by a half decade Albert Camus’s allegory,
The Plague.
) And another Parisian schoolteacher saw her first Germans in Moulins, a village in Burgundy:

The Parisian sisters Benoîte and Flora Groult (both would later become journalists and writers) produced a journal that gives us a day-by-day account of the rising anxiety as war news befuddled a waiting populace. Their parents had taken their two teenage daughters to Brittany in May, to a grandmother’s home, fearful for the young girls’ safety should the
Germans reach Paris. Settled in the quaint town of Concarneau, everyone listened assiduously to the radio. The French newscasters bragged frequently about the “enormous losses” incurred by the Germans, while the news the family was receiving from fleeing refugees and passing soldiers implied the opposite. As one of the sisters wrote: “How much longer can an army have ‘enormous losses’ without being bled to death?”
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The sisters wondered what would happen if the soldiers reached Paris while the family was in Brittany: Would they pillage the family’s apartment there, on Rue Vavin, in the 6th arrondissement?

Eventually, as the first Germans arrived in little Concarneau, and everyone ran to the town square to look them over. Wrote Flora, age fifteen: “I was in town; I saw them, on grey vehicles—camouflaged with branches, stiff, red, immobile, completely normal-looking men. Handsome for the most part, with stiff necks and identical equipment, impressive. They did indeed have the arrogant gaze of a victor, they were impassive, accomplishing their mission.”
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She notices, too, that town girls were flirting with the handsome German boys, climbing onto their trucks, teasing them with oranges. Flora was horrified, calling her peers “bitches in heat,” but the image is a strong one and indicates a fact: there was a sexual frisson that passed through many of the crowds that watched those handsome, virile young men take over town after town. The unspoken comparison with the demasculinized, defeated French army would remain fixed in the imaginations of most French people right up until the end of the war. (We will see, too, how the Groult sisters reacted to the new soldiers on the block, the Americans, when they helped liberate Paris in August of 1944.)

Meanwhile, back in Paris: “I’ve just seen one,” murmured a stunned maid to her employer, who had run to see why her servant had cried out. “He came into the courtyard, Madame, looked around, and then walked out.”
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Nervous citizens gazed at nervous invaders. A German tank commander described what he saw:

The Germans’ precision and efficiency awed Paris. The invaders swept through the city on that Friday morning in mid-June with all the efficiency for which the new Germany had become known. Official and unofficial histories of the period state, or strongly imply, that the German bureaucracy had indeed run a network of spies inside Paris before the war, taking careful notes of buildings, apartments, crossroads, transport, and Métro stations. “They knew where everything was” was a sentence repeated by the stunned Parisian spectator. Their assumption of the spaces of the city was breathtaking. They knew which crossroads were crucial, which buildings were to be immediately requisitioned; they knew where important archives were to be found, which art galleries were Jewish-owned, which museums still had important collections; they had dozens of signs already painted, with black borders, directing traffic in the German language. They set up traffic police at every major intersection and moved with confidence into government buildings. They organized military parades around the Arc de Triomphe, using all twelve of Haussmann’s radiating avenues as staging grounds. They set up bands and orchestras in key places—the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées, in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, and in the Jardin des Tuileries—to entertain both their troops and curious Parisians. Still and motion pictures were put to immediate use; scaffolding for cameramen and photographers was set up on the Place de la Concorde to record the spectacle of German officers and troops coming and going in the great eighteenth-century
palaces that border the northern side of that plaza: the Hôtel de Crillon (still perhaps Paris’s most prestigious hotel) and the Hôtel de la Marine (until recently, the Ministry of the Navy). They showed off their technological sophistication by having three small Messerschmitt reconnaissance planes land in the Place de la Concorde itself; one even carried the general in command of Paris during the first days of the Occupation.

German directions on the Place de la Concorde. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

The Battle of France was still going on elsewhere. So the Germans immediately sent motorized loudspeakers throughout the city, repeating the admonitions of thousands of previously distributed leaflets: “You have been completely betrayed. There is no longer any
efficacious resistance you can mount against German-Italian military superiority. [It is useless] to continue the struggle.… Think of your poor children, of your unfortunate wives. Demand that your government end this struggle that has no hope of success.”
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Despite their apprehension, such large crowds of citizens surrounded German traffic controllers, soldiers on assignment, and their vehicles that orders had to be given to the public to allow the Wehrmacht to perform its jobs so that newly occupied Paris might return to normal as soon as possible.

Wehrmacht on the Place de la Concorde.
(Bundesarchiv)

The Nazi hierarchy wanted the Occupation to appear almost seamless, not only to influence world opinion but also to give the impression to the English and Russians that the Third Reich could be a flexible and compassionate European ally. “Keep Paris Paris,” the order, both implied and specific, rolled out from the propaganda office in Berlin. Tourism was immediately encouraged, and the city was soon filled with busloads of wide-eyed, curious German troops wishing that they had been assigned to this sensual, beautiful oasis. Even those who had
never been to either city realized that Berlin was no Paris; it was too far east, too isolated, too Prussian. Vienna could compare in some ways with Paris, but it shared its influence with Budapest, in the barely unified remains of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It, too, was in the east, too far away from the mercantile giants of England, France, and Holland to be but an attractive shadow of Paris. And Hitler knew this, too: one of his generals would ask him in late 1941 what his first impressions of France’s capital had been; the Führer answered, “I was very happy to think that there was at least one city in the Reich that was superior to Paris from the point of view of taste—I mean, Vienna. At present Berlin doesn’t exist, but one day she’ll be more beautiful than Paris.” He went on about how he had saved Paris and would have no compunction about destroying Moscow or Leningrad. “On the whole,” he concluded, “Paris remains one of the jewels of Europe.”
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This attitude would dominate the early Occupation. The “correct” military investment of Paris was to be an example of the Reich’s respect for Europe’s non-Bolshevik civilization. The Germans would present themselves immediately, and up to the end, as the protectors of this architectural gem. They were not barbarians but rather the shield against those who would undermine centuries of tradition. As if blessed by the gods, Paris continued to benefit from a magnificent spring that year. Even nature seemed to welcome the new regime.

In an article, “Tourists in Uniform,” published in the magazine
L’Illustration
a couple of months after the arrival of the Germans, we read one version of the early Parisian reactions to their occupiers: