When Paris Went Dark (35 page)

As food vanished, so did unfortunate Parisians: the German authorities were taking larger numbers of hostages; more and more posters were appearing that announced their executions in prisons near and within Paris. Jean Guéhenno noticed that in late 1943, he began hearing more frequently on his walks through the city the playing or singing of “La Marseillaise,” forbidden by both the Vichy government and the Germans. One day a paddy wagon of French prisoners drove by him and other passersby on the Boulevard Saint-Michel; from inside the van, they could hear the voices of the likely doomed prisoners, going who knows where, while belting out the world’s best-known anthem against the invader. The witnesses of this moving event dared not look at each other as they stopped and listened, but Guéhenno hoped that at least they had their fists clenched in their pockets.

In his high school classes at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Professor Guéhenno also began to notice that nerves were fraying among his young charges. There were no draft exemptions for students once they turned eighteen, but there was hope that the reputation of this excellent institution would protect them. But what would happen if they turned eighteen in the middle of the school year? Some of Guéhenno’s students would come by his home for his advice; others left surreptitiously to join the underground, returning secretly to talk over with their prof their activities and covert plans. On the other hand, there was a more obvious assertiveness from the young men who supported the Vichy regime. In early 1943, the État français had established a paramilitary force, the Milice française (French militia), which many young, unemployed, and/or strongly anti-Gaullist men had joined. It would count more than thirty thousand members by June of 1944, of whom only about half were active and armed. Guéhenno suspected that there were a few such right-wing
mouchards
(sneaks, or spies) in his class, too young still to join the Milice but obvious sympathizers. Guéhenno was eventually reported for his lack of respect for the Occupier and their French comrades, and was sent to teach middle-school as a punishment. Scenes like this must have been repeated throughout Paris as the German authorities and the Vichy government became increasingly nervous.

Parisians began to remark, too, that the “blond warriors,” who had become their ideal of the perfectly drilled and accoutred German soldier, had, for the most part, disappeared. Increasingly, very young and middle-aged reservists had replaced them. Less disciplined and fearful that they might be sent off to the Eastern Front, they tended to hang out in larger groups, to drink publicly and to excess, and be more physically impolite to Parisians. The “correctness” of the first year of the Occupation had been replaced with a surly apprehension that added to the city’s discomfiting atmosphere. One youngster remembered being on an overcrowded Métro train when three rather bedraggled soldiers, perhaps on leave from the front, entered the car he was in. One of his friends incautiously said in a loud voice: “Boy, they must have scraped
the bottom of the barrel for these guys!” Everyone laughed, and the Germans, abashed because they knew no French, joined them. The discipline, focus, and pride of the great Wehrmacht had begun to crack as the massive war on the Russian and Italian fronts and the devastating bombings of German cities took their toll on Nazi morale.

In the first half of 1943, the Wehrmacht’s surrender at Stalingrad, the final defeat in May of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa, the invasion of Italy by the Allies in July, and the relentlessness of Allied bombers targeting the factories and rail yards on the outskirts of Paris, all combined to raise both hope and anxiety in the capital. The liberation of Corsica in October of 1943 only made the anticipation more intense for those waiting for the continent to be invaded from the west. Where were the Allies? A repeated joke made the rounds: Stalin’s army finally crosses Germany, then France, until it reaches the English Channel. Taking up a loudspeaker, the leader of the USSR bellows across the Channel to the British and Americans: “You can come over now!”

That year—1943—may have been the most psychologically debilitating and demoralizing of the Occupation, for it offered hope that the war might end soon without diminishing the mystery of
how
the war would end. After intensive negotiations among the Communists, the Gaullists, and independent French patriot groups, the Resistance had finally been officially unified in May of 1943 under de Gaulle’s administrative umbrella as the Conseil national de la Résistance. The result was that resistance to German authority became bolder.
^*
This was of course a factor that might lead to eventual victory, but it was no boon for those caught in the gears of an increasingly violent guerrilla war. More and more hostages—the innocent and the unlucky as well as the perpetrators—were being arrested, tortured, and shot. And, French Jews—not just their immigrant coreligionists—were increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary roundups.

Albert Camus.
(© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Albert Camus had left Paris, where he was a journalist for
Paris-Soir,
in 1940, just a few days before the Germans arrived. Following his colleagues first to Clermont-Ferrand, then to Bordeaux, he searched for a means to get back to his native Algeria, away from a France where “life had become hell for the mind.”
¹⁰
Eventually, in January of 1941, he caught a ship from Marseille to North Africa, where he would remain until July of 1942, when he returned to France. During his stay in Algeria, he thought about “doing something” to resist the Vichy government then in control of Algeria, but mostly he wrote his great trilogy:
Caligula
(a play),
L’Étranger
(
The Stranger,
a novel), and
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
(
The Myth of Sisyphus
, a philosophical essay). The novel had passed German censorship (it was read and approved by Gerhard Heller,
who found the work apolitical and asocial and therefore of no interest to Nazi sensibilities). It was published openly in 1942, along with
The Myth of Sisyphus,
a treatise on the metaphysical absurdity of existence, specifically, the moral uselessness of suicide.
^*
Postwar, we can read these two morally rigorous books as excursuses on the war itself and the moral decisions it forced on even the most neutral citizen.

In July of 1942, on his doctor’s orders that he spend time in the mountains of France, Camus left for the mother country. He traveled immediately to the Vivarais region’s high plateaus, south of Lyon, where he could breathe more easily and where he and his wife could find healthier food than had been available in Algeria. In January of 1943, the twenty-nine-year-old author finally reached France’s publishing capital, where he was feted. Both
The Stranger
and
The Myth of Sisyphus
had drawn much attention—some negative, but mostly positive—and made Camus a star on the French literary scene. Suffering from recurrent tuberculosis, however, he soon left the city and spent much time in the mountains, where he worked on several versions of his major novel,
The Plague
(
La Peste
), finally published in 1947. Later in 1943, Camus returned to Paris, where he would remain until the Liberation. This time, he actively joined the Resistance (although, as he emphasized then and after the war, he never carried a gun) and edited the most influential clandestine newspaper,
Combat,
until after the end of the war.
^*

In Paris, he took up residence in the Rue Chomel off the Boulevard Raspail, in the 6th arrondissement, just a block or two from the Lutétia hotel, headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service, the Abwehr. From that small apartment, he stayed in contact with a host of acquaintances from Picasso to Simone de Beauvoir, wrote stunning editorials for
Combat,
and completed the final version of
The Plague.

The novel is presented to the reader as a diary kept by a medical doctor as he lives through the sudden arrival—and, eventually, the sudden departure—of bubonic plague in Oran, a major port city in Algeria. Through this allegory, Camus analyzes what it is like to live in a beloved familiar city that has become unfamiliar by virtue of the massive presence of a foreign host—in this case, rats carrying a devastating bacillus. It would be too simplistic to merely equate the gray vermin that spread the plague in Oran with the gray-uniformed Germans who occupied Paris—Camus’s vision of occupation and of the quarantined citizens’ reaction to that situation is much more subtle—but that has not kept generations of French readers and others from using it as a convenient fable for a morally complicated time.

In the novel, Camus repeatedly suggests that there are two major sentiments shared by those living through a plague and those under military occupation in a city: notions of exile and solitude. At first, after the shock of a deadly invasion, some residents seek to flee their theretofore comfortable environment. Those who stay soon find the city quarantined, cut off from the rest of the world; consequently there develops a fear of being forgotten by the outside, healthier world. As more of their fellow citizens die, survivors identify a variety of causes for what is happening to them and invent the most flimsy reasons why they will not succumb, too. Confidence in the medical profession weakens, as does belief in religion and social relationships, all previously trusted means of confronting and vanquishing an unexpected imposition on one’s life. Death and illness make few exceptions among a wary, then terrified, city, and in silent persistence, a notion of being out of place crawls deeply into the thoughts and actions of the residents of Oran:

Camus’s sensitivity to what it must feel like to make a life under enemy occupation is uncannily perceptive—especially for someone who did not live in Paris during most of the war.

In Oran, Camus describes a mundane, boring, unattractive city, even though it is situated beside one of the most beautiful seas of the world; a city that is French, but not really; Arab, yet not quite; sophisticated, but only in its own eyes; caught amid many cultures, histories, religions, ethnic groups, and classes:

Oran might be passionless, banal, and modern—the antithesis of Paris—yet Camus understands how the mundane and the exceptional are bound together when a foreign host invades.

The longer the “plague” lasts, the more solitary, the more “exiled,” the citizens feel. Who will help us? Where are they? Parisians had given up on their spiritual mentors—bishops, priests, preachers—who only mouthed platitudes; they had given up on the Resistance, which was, if anything, making things more difficult (ten hostages for every German killed). They had given up on the Allies. When, for God’s sake, would they open the second front? Had France been overlooked or forgotten because of its attachment to the Vichy regime? Like the citizens of Oran, Parisians felt that such uncertainty had become almost as harmful as the plague itself.

Camus worried in his notes about what to call his novel, and at one point he almost threw away its present one: “Don’t put ‘the plague’ in the title. Something like ‘the prisoners.’ ”
¹⁴
Further on, he considers titling the book “Journal of the Separation” and “Diary of the Separated Man,” for he wanted to present a topography of apprehension, where helpless citizens of a vibrant city are threatened with the loss of solidarity. Camus was almost certainly thinking of occupied Paris as he wrote, both when he lived in the provinces and in the city itself. He was fascinated with the ways in which individuals react morally to sudden or swift changes in their environments and to moments when the comfort of habit is taken away. For him, the new philosophical response to the horrors of an absurd world, Existentialism, was indeed about situational ethics: we are placed in situations—physical and psychological—that force us to act or compel us not to act, both of which are inescapably moral choices. There is no such thing as an “innocent” choice, or, for that matter,
not choosing
, which was itself a
choice. Using the plague as his dominant metaphor, Camus exquisitely suggested that a nation needs a firmer commitment to justice and fraternity than France had had in 1940 to withstand such an attack.

“No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made up of plague and the emotions shared by all. Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these.”
¹⁵
The phrase “exile and deprivation” sums up not only Camus’s major theme—the effects of a “plague”—but also the general psychological and physical situation of most Parisians by the third year of the Occupation. Paris was, after all, still their city, but the Occupiers’ wear and tear on its environment and on the residents’ bodies and minds had made it less a place of solace than an unreadable facade. Were Parisians having the same reaction to a changed Paris that Hitler had felt when he first met its stony indifference? Though Camus was actively engaged in the Resistance for the rest of the war, his sense of solitude and loneliness in an Occupied Paris never completely abated; he, too, despite his assertive philosophy, felt himself an outsider in the damp grayness of northern France.