When Paris Went Dark (3 page)

Arrondissements of Paris

My sources include diaries, memoirs, essays, newspaper articles, histories, letters, films (fictional and documentary), archives, interviews, photographs, maps, novels, songs, paintings, drawings, and anything else that helped me understand what it was like to “live the Occupation.” My hope was to create a framework for understanding the heartbeat, the intangible rhythms, of life during a period of sustained urban anxiety. As a consequence, I have been obliged to bring a mixture of interpretive strategies to bear: close reading—often between the
lines—of texts, drawing conclusions that others have been perhaps too cautious to make, and using archival and historical data for purposes other than establishing or repeating facts. This is a work of reasonable interpretation, of reasonable judgments that I trust will enable readers to question assumptions, bromides, and received theories about what happens when a city is “occupied” by strangers, armed or not.

I do not claim the mantle of historian but rather of storyteller and guide; I have perused with care what others have written and have teased out stories that have always been there but had settled under the dust of memory and history. I have plumbed the extraordinary archival work done by others and done some of my own, always looking for fissures in texts that allow for a richer reading of a traumatic period in European history. Here are the famous and unknown voices of adolescents and adults, Germans and French, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, visitors and residents, collaborators and patriots, novelists and historians, journalists and diarists, the still living and the gone. Some appear repeatedly, some occasionally, and some only once. I have interviewed men and women who lived in Paris at the time. They offered anecdotes that became bright tiles in a vibrant mosaic that reveals more clearly how a familiar and beloved city became, even temporarily, threatening and uncanny. As one person raised in Paris during this period answered when I asked if her parents ever discussed the Occupation: “It [the memory of the Occupation] was like a secret garden whose gates were always closed to us.”
When Paris Went Dark
makes an effort to look over that garden’s walls.

“The Last Time I Saw Paris,” written in 1940 by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern and played frequently on the radio late that year, summed up not only the nostalgia that the world had already developed for the City of Light but also the effects that the Occupation itself must have been having on Parisians themselves:

Paris is the primary protagonist of this narrative. A city is unable to speak for itself, but we can take from the written and oral memories of others how it was changed by, how it adapted to, and how it survived the German Occupation of 1940–44. This book brings those memories, real and imagined, back to light, offering a narrative that, in the best of worlds, Paris herself might tell.

Paris is and always has been obsessed with itself—its place within France, within Europe, within the world, and within the imaginations of those who have visited it or who want to. As a consequence, even though the city has in modern times survived siege, civil disorder, and military occupation, the French, and especially the Parisians, retain a magical belief that the City of Light is impervious to destruction. Exceptions to this fantasy cause bewilderment and generally incoherent or confused responses. When, in the last year of the First World War, German artillery, in the guise of Krupp’s gigantic howitzer, Big Bertha, began dropping enormous shells on the city with considerable destructive force, the first reaction was outrage. Earlier, rather ineffectual bombing at night from zeppelins, and even from the more accurate Gotha aircraft, had inured the Parisians to occasional disruption from above. In the first quarter of 1918, when the Germans made their last great attempt at a breakthrough to reach the French capital, more than two hundred bombs had been dropped from aircraft on Paris in order to break the city’s morale.

But the most terrifying bombardments appeared out of nowhere and capriciously peppered the city beginning in late March of that year. The 260-pound shells seemed to fall most often on the quiet streets of the comfortable 7th arrondissement: the Rue du Bac, the Rue
Barbet-de-Jouy, and the Rue de Vaugirard. (It was later discovered that the Germans were using Notre-Dame Cathedral as their major orienting target; thus many of Big Bertha’s shells landed in the city’s center.) Where were they coming from? There were no airplanes, no air raid alarms; they were just falling from the sky. No artillery shell was known to travel more than twenty-five miles or so, and the German army was almost a hundred miles away.

The population was much more disoriented by these mysterious bombardments than they had been by the air raids; and when it was discovered that the shells were indeed coming from more than seventy miles away, Parisians suddenly felt a vulnerability they had not felt since the early days of the war.
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And then on Good Friday, one of the gigantic shells landed atop one of Paris’s oldest churches, Saint-Gervais, in the Marais. More than 150 worshippers, including foreign dignitaries, were killed or injured. A historian of Big Bertha’s late–World War I impact writes:

Even after the cause was discovered, and the French were able to target the howitzer and the rail tracks needed to move it, Parisians would remember that distinct feeling of helplessness.

In fact, for some time before the war ended, French military leaders had begun planning how to dupe German reconnaissance airmen who, in a time without radar or any sort of sophisticated night vision equipment, had to use rail tracks, reflections off the river, and the lights of Paris to find their targets and guide their new and powerful artillery.
By 1917 the French army had already begun looking for an area near Paris that, from the air, might be mistaken for the capital. They found one such site northwest of the city, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the Seine makes a deep loop on its way to the English Channel, similar to the well-known curve that it creates as it passes through Paris. False train stations, tracks, and streetlights were constructed; plans were made to enhance this
faux
Paris, but the end of the war interrupted them and they were but desultorily continued for a few years afterward. Yet only two decades later, the fanciful idea of constructing another Paris as a protection for one of the world’s most famous cityscapes would be reborn. For in occupying the capital of France, the Germans themselves would try to invent a
faux
Paris, one that would serve as an example of Nazi benevolence while, behind the facade, they pillaged a grand treasure house.

On a clear morning, April 26, 1937, the citizens of a small Basque town in northern Spain and their neighbors from the countryside were doing what they habitually did on Mondays: shopping, bargaining, and exchanging gossip in an open-air market. When a low, droning sound first entered their consciousness, theirs was not the automatic response that would soon become common throughout Europe—to look toward the skies for danger. Rather, they looked around to find the source of that loud, unfamiliar mechanical noise. Before they could protect themselves, warplanes from the Luftwaffe and the Italian air force began indiscriminately dropping concussive firebombs and splinter bombs on the town. After five raids, the allies of Franco’s army had left Guernica three-quarters devastated and had killed between four hundred and one thousand civilians. (Historians still debate the final figures.) News of the event and its aftermath, thanks to a trenchant article by George Steer of the
New York Times,
flashed around the world. Steer’s piece made one especially salient point, unrecognized then as being predictive: the bombing was meant to demoralize the populace, for the little town had no military value. For the first time,
indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations was a reality, whereas before it had been but a theoretical assumption. “In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history.”
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The Spanish Civil War, particularly the bombing of Madrid and Barcelona, along with the devastation of Guernica, forced museum curators and protectors of all cultural treasures to think about how to protect their patrimony from arbitrary destruction. It also warned military commanders that they should pay more attention to protecting their cities from the air. After Guernica, the bombing of Madrid, and with the destruction of two great cities in 1939 and 1940 (Warsaw and Rotterdam), Europeans were learning from relentlessly replayed newsreels that war was no longer a matter just between armies
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and that their historical confidence in the general impregnability of large metropolises had been misplaced. During the First World War, most of the casualties were soldiers; but it became clear this time around that civilians would not be spared the fury of combat. This new type of warfare was erasing the boundaries, as fragile as they had been, between the battlefield and the home. Indeed, the phrase “home front” would soon become a cliché.

The Occupation of Paris during the Second World War has provided us with a rich array of photographs, many of which have been repeatedly reproduced. Often, they provide unintentionally ironic commentary on the complexities of urban life when a foreign enemy threatens a familiar city. A photograph of curators emptying the Louvre in 1938 only two years before the Germans arrived does just that. A nation’s material culture has always been the target of opposing nations and peoples, and this period in French and German history was no exception.
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The protection of national treasures had begun in Paris in the late 1930s: sandbags were used to surround public statues, monuments, churches, and other buildings; many public statues were dismantled and put in safe places; precious stained-glass windows were covered with wire or removed. Found more often than not in the centers of its cities, Europe’s great museums—the National Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, Paris’s Louvre, Leningrad’s Hermitage, the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, to name only the best known—were like sitting ducks, vulnerable to bombardment, fire, and air attack, so they had to be emptied as thoroughly as possible. Soon their walls were denuded. And there was another threat: looting. It was an open secret that the Reich sought to repatriate any painting or sculpture that it felt belonged to Germany—any work that had been itself looted over centuries of war or even sold legally. Small groups of German curators and art historians had fanned out all over Europe in the late 1930s, using their academic credentials to discover what museums held that might be called Germanic. The Third Reich was primed to reveal what it believed to be the lies and fantasies of provenance.

Sequestering Medusa.
(© Ministère de la Culture / Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

Géricault,
The Raft of the Medusa.
(Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

A first glance at the photograph shows a group of men struggling to pull a very large canvas through a door of the museum. On closer investigation, we see that the painting is none other than Théodore Géricault’s mammoth
Le Radeau de la Méduse
(
The Raft of the Medusa
), painted in 1819 and exhibited in the Salon of that year. Much has been said about the relationship between this painting’s subject—a terrible shipwreck—and the dark, romantic style of its fabrication. It shocked many who saw it, both artists and the public, and amazed many as well because of its forthright depiction of communal solidarity at its weakest point. Some wrote then, and have argued since, that the painting was Géricault’s critique of the failure of the Napoleonic experiment, which was followed by the hasty reinstallation of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815. Others have seen it as a dour commentary on the slave trade, which France did not abolish in its overseas colonies until 1849: “Much has been read into this painting: an allegory for a wounded France, the fatherland at the moment of its mortal failure, the disarray of a lost generation.… But aside from these political meanings, is not ‘The Raft’ above all a representation of horror?”
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This magnificent canvas, one of the largest in the Louvre, had hung on the museum’s walls for more than a hundred years as a reminder of moral, political, and personal despair and humiliation.
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The Louvre denuded.
(© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The photograph of the complicated attempt at removing the painting captures, predictively, what the next four years of the German Occupation of Paris would entail. Here we see the curators of France’s national museum methodically trying to remove and hide an artwork that had represented the French nation at another political low point. Themes of the Occupation are present in the painting: a sense of abandonment; false hope for succor; struggles among fellow sufferers; the implacability of the enemy (in this case, the ocean, thirst, and hunger); the betrayal of nature itself; death and humiliation. The Louvre’s curators would be more successful at protecting the nation’s patrimony (they moved Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
all over France to keep it out of German hands) than would the Third Republic at protecting the nation’s geographical, military, and political integrity. Like the Parisians who would soon follow it in their exodus before the arrival of the Germans, Géricault’s canvas would seek refuge in unfamiliar and restricted spaces, in this case, some dusty room in an even dustier château. Yet more hauntingly, the sequestering of this great canvas was itself a terrifying revelation and prophecy of what was to come.