When Paris Went Dark (14 page)

Article 43 of the regulations enacted at the Hague Convention of 1907 states succinctly: “The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and [civil life], while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.”
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Such benign language assumes that all occupying forces see their primary duty as maintaining a semblance of antebellum everyday life. Yet it suggests that the occupier might well read in the innocuous phrase “as far as possible” a loophole that would permit him to do whatever he wants. Also, there is no reference in this article to the notion of time: How long is an occupation? Can it go on forever? Is it an implied temporary state, or is it open-ended? One of the cruelest impositions on an occupied nation is the idea that time is also an enemy, a heretofore anodyne phenomenon that becomes a
patient, insatiable consumer of hope. A military occupation is no longer just the temporary appropriation of sovereignty.
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Initially polite, the Occupation authorities in Paris became more and more exigent. The newly returned population noticed immediately that many of the city’s elite hotels and luxurious private residences had been confiscated by the Germans—for the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Gestapo, the Foreign Office, the propaganda ministry, and so on—and that whole sections of the city were closed off to the casual pedestrian. Next they became aware of yellow signs affixed to the shop windows of all Jewish-owned enterprises.
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The Germans wanted the residents to know which businesses were Jewish-controlled in the hope that “proper” French people would not shop there. Later, these yellow notices would be replaced with red ones announcing the presence of an “Aryan manager,” that is, someone selected by the authorities who had paid for the rights to the establishment’s management and profits. Strictly enforced food rationing began within weeks, revealing, though no one knew it then, a German strategy: to use the bounty of French agriculture to feed the armies of the Reich and to reduce the French to a minimal caloric intake. Eventually, Parisians had to accept hunger as a price for staying on the Seine.

Accounts of the months following the first surprise of the Occupation mix self-disgust and political despair to create an almost palpable despondency. It was one thing to see German soldiers in expected places—before major buildings, monuments, crossroads—but quite another to run into them on side streets or in one’s favorite café. They seemed to have come out of nowhere, silently, to infest the city. For every Parisian who had welcomed them with surprise and respect there
were now a dozen who felt bereaved, lost, forgotten. How had Paris, the heart and brain of France, been so effortlessly occupied? No counterattacks, no street-to-street fighting, not even a sign of a fruitless but symbolic resistance. How could this have happened in Paris, of all cities? Jean Guéhenno, in his
Journal des années noires
(Diary of the Dark Years), describes his return to Paris once the Armistice allowed him to leave the French army. He found Paris saddened and bleak, not the place a few had described as relieved, even happy, to see the Germans. He lived near the Bois de Boulogne, on the western side of Paris; almost offhandedly he noticed that something was not quite right, though there were no signs of Germans in the neighborhood. Then he figured it out: birds were no longer singing on those hot September days. Had they, too, fled?

Sites of the Occupation

Though physical resistance to the enemy was almost nonexistent, verbal and graphic expressions of anger or of a stubborn refusal to accept the obvious were soon present—and often humorous. Graffiti, flyers, and small tracts glued to lampposts almost immediately began to
appear. Many of these first expressions of discontent were from the hands and imaginations of adolescents, delighted to have a patriotic reason to cause mischief. In his sad biography of the young Communist Guy Môquet, later to be executed as a hostage at the age of seventeen, Pierre-Louis Basse describes the exhilaration of teenage resistance: “[After] the surrender and the arrival of the Germans in Paris… the working-class youth of the 17th and 18th arrondissements wasted no time in playing cat-and-mouse with the French and German authorities.”
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Mimeograph machines became precious and were hidden imaginatively all over the city; their stencils were inserted into the pumps of bicycles coolly ridden past the authorities.
Papillons
(butterflies)—small, toilet-paper-thin documents—were dropped from rooftops, bridges, and speeding bikes onto Germans and Parisians alike. There is an ingenious contraption on view at the Musée de la Résistance nationale in Champigny-sur-Marne that was designed to project these
papillons
from balconies and rooftops long after the perpetrator had left the area. The machine is constructed of a mousetrap weighted down by a tin can with a hole in its bottom; the can is filled with water, and as the leaking liquid lightens the can, the gadget pops the container of messages on the other end into the air. To the great amusement of the young
résistants,
bits of anti-Nazi propaganda would fall like snowflakes onto the heads of a German marching band or foot patrol.

We know from several sources written during the Occupation that there was an often warm relationship between many of France’s most talented citizens and the better-educated German occupiers. The upper echelons of society, if they were not Jewish, enjoyed a comfortable life, even though they could not get every foodstuff they wanted or have their drivers pick them up every morning. What we know less about is how difficult materially the Occupation was for the middle-of-the-road Parisian. There was more illness, to be sure, more malnutrition,
but there was never starvation, nor were there massive roundups of average citizens.
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Still, the city did change measurably in the first year of the Occupation. For example, the cinema had never been so popular, yet before too long, lights would be turned up in the auditorium when Nazi newsreels were shown, to intimidate those who would laugh or hoot at them. Cafés, one of the few places where one could go for predictable warmth (churches having turned off their furnaces for lack of coal soon after the first harsh winter of 1940–41), were often frequented by Germans, in uniform and not. Cafés were also one of the few places one could go for a bit of privacy. From the seventeenth century onward, they had attracted police spies precisely because of their reputations for enabling private conversation about dissidence and revolt. The same pertained during the Occupation: real and potential resisters used them as mail drops and as places to hold discreet discussions about tactics. Care was taken, for one might be seated next to a German soldier or bureaucrat or, worse, a French collaborator and thus be seen or heard. This newly “uncanny” atmosphere persisted elsewhere, too. Streets that had been previously anodyne, e.g., Rue de Rivoli, Rue des Saussaies, Boulevard Raspail, even the Champs-Élysées, acquired a sinister aura because of official German presence. The same was true for certain quarters, such as the 3rd, 4th, 8th, and 20th arrondissements, known to be filled with “foreigners”—i.e., recent immigrants and expatriates—which were likely to be raided unpredictably.

The more expensive quarters, areas where many Germans had seized apartments and homes, notably in the 8th and 16th arrondissements and in Neuilly, had almost taken on the air of a neighborhood in Hamburg or Munich. In historian Cécile Desprairies’s census of private and public buildings “acquisitioned” by the Germans, a good third of her six-hundred-plus pages cover only three arrondissements: the 8th, 16th, and 17th, still today the most coveted of neighborhoods, while only about forty pages cover the Latin Quarter’s less affluent, more
crowded 5th and 6th arrondissements.
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Interestingly, for the nervous Parisian, the Left Bank (which included the Saint-Germain area, Montparnasse, and the Latin Quarter) was believed to be “safer” than the Right Bank, where the largest number of Jews, eastern European immigrants, and German personnel lived. This was more of an instinct than a fact. In his idiosyncratic memoir-cum-novel,
Rue des Maléfices
(published in English as
Paris Noir;
1954), petty crook Jacques Yonnet describes how he, a spy for the Resistance, managed to stay one step ahead of the authorities by losing himself in the labyrinthine streets and neighborhoods of the Latin Quarter. Bars and cafés were his meeting places, his “offices,” even though he was fully aware of the presence of collaborators; one just had to be careful. The presence on the Left Bank of many lycées, several universities—notably, the Sorbonne and its various institutes—and such
grandes écoles
as the École normale supérieure and the École libre des sciences politiques (now the Institut d’études politiques de Paris) meant that there were thousands of young people in the area eager to establish their independence from any dominant ideology. This sense of shelter was mostly an illusion, yet the Left Bank retained its aura of safety from oppressive authority, of a “less German” Paris, throughout the Occupation.

In general, the architectural integrity of Paris was not nearly as marked by the Occupation as were the physical and affective qualities of living in the city. A large swath of the area around the
grands boulevards,
between the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Avenue de la République, was closed even to bicycle traffic. Other major avenues were barred or heavily guarded, but most remained accessible to Parisians, at least on foot. Few sites were renamed, though the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt did become the Théâtre de la Cité, and some street names
were
déjudaïsées—
that is, “de-Jewed.” Métro stops kept their original names, though many were closed either for reasons of security or to serve as air raid shelters (
abris
) or storage facilities. As noted, the Germans constructed many ugly concrete bunkers and other defensive structures around their encampments and headquarters. There were even plans to build a new German embassy on the Place de la Concorde, but apparently Hitler never approved them. The Occupier did raze many of the shanties that surrounded Paris (where the poorest of the poor lived), in the zones created by Haussmann’s annexations of 1860. There was also substantial destruction by air raids in the near suburbs, where most of Paris’s industry and railroad yards were located. But the capital’s built environment was mostly left untouched by wary Occupation authorities. This fact reinforced the uncanniness: Paris looked the same, but it “had left the Seine.” The
ville des lumières
had become the
ville éteinte
(the extinguished city). It was a darker city—gray and brown, not to mention
noir
(black), were required adjectives to describe the absence of ambient light.

In his memoir,
Un Petit Parisien
(A Little Parisian Boy), the journalist Dominique Jamet describes coming of age during the Occupation and how buffeted his life was between the ages of six and eleven. He especially remembers how quickly Paris had become another city:

The city could be perceived in ways impossible since the end of Haussmannization; the original ideas behind the reconstruction of
Paris, to project it as an imperial city, with attempts through a coordinated architecture to imply that Paris would never end, that it was eternal. This Paris could be glimpsed again during the Occupation. There are many references to a changed Paris, to one where sounds previously smothered under loud urban noises could be heard, where one could walk more safely because only bicycles clogged the streets, where walking itself imposed a new rhythm of urban consciousness. It is a bit ironic that Paris—hungry, tired, and embarrassed by its shortages—could still nevertheless show its “bones.” Its original beauty remained and provided occasional solace for those enmeshed in a strange, sinister environment.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, cities were increasingly being described as threatening, the blame going to the ravages of industrialism. No longer places to seek unfettered fortune, they became, in novels and essays of the period, sites of unhealthiness, physical danger, political instability, and immorality. And one of the most commonly cited reasons for these phenomena was the absence of light at night. Such lack of illumination was characteristic of most cities, and few offered as much vibrancy in the midnight shadows as the French capital. Paris had defined its very modernity, attractiveness, and pleasure in terms of the safety of its well-lit streets and boulevards. To live, then, in a newly darkened Paris, a city that had been known for its taming of nighttime, was unnatural and disorienting to both visitors and inhabitants. The unreliability of electricity and the need for defensive measures meant that streetlights were intermittent at best, absent most of the time. The headlights of the few automobiles running at night were covered with a blue material that let only a strip of light through. A constant darkness meant that one had to learn anew how to navigate familiar streets and neighborhoods. Tentativeness became a habit; everyone had a story about how someone had tripped, fallen into a hole dug by a construction crew, or bumped into someone while negotiating the murky streets. One writer described to a friend what it was like to look out a window and see not the Parisian glow but the much smaller, indiscriminately bouncing beams of flashlights (less frequent after batteries became impossible to obtain). He wrote: “You
cannot imagine the little streets of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, Les Gobelins, the Canal Saint-Martin, the Bastille neighborhood, without any light except that of the moon! You can walk for hours without meeting anyone.… Despite the darkness and the disorientation I’m afraid of experiencing this evening in places that were so familiar to me, I still feel my way, though carefully.”
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One day in his studio on the Left Bank’s Rue des Grands-Augustins, the fretful Picasso noticed that his flashlight was gone. He flew into a rage, accusing his secretary, visitors, and servants of having misplaced it or, worse, filched it. He stormed around the apartment for hours, fuming and refusing to see visitors or to paint. He stopped speaking to any of those who lived around him. For Picasso, to lose a flashlight was to have to admit how much he and others had to depend on the device, not only to get around outside but also to get around inside. A flashlight was not just a tool, it was an embarrassing necessity, as important to living in occupied Paris as a bicycle. The day was one of the most tense his entourage had ever experienced, but the next was better: Picasso had found the missing flashlight right where he had left it.

Another urban characteristic, the cacophony of daily urban engagement—passersby, hawkers, street minstrels and performers, construction work, and especially traffic noise—was severely diminished during the Occupation. The patina of urban noise affords the urban dweller another sort of anonymity, a sensory cocoon that provides a feeling of protection from the interjection of unwelcome sounds. Urbanists often ignore inhabitants’ aural engagement with their city, but it is as important in how we negotiate a city’s complexities as our senses of sight and touch. Writers of the period, such as Colette, emphasize how quiet Paris became during these years. Sometimes the silence brought benefits, when pleasant sounds—birdsong, music—were able to reach Parisians’ ears. And there are many mentions of how clearly radio broadcasts could be heard (especially problematic for those listening to the BBC). But mostly, the new silence in such a vital capital must have been confusing and intermittently frightening. Police sirens were more menacing, airplane engines meant danger, a shout or scream provoked a more nervous response.