When Paris Went Dark (44 page)

The political fractionalization of the new postwar Fourth Republic (1946–58) permitted the blossoming of dozens of organizations that thought they should at least be part of, if not write the history of, the Occupation and the Resistance. Labor and political deportees, former prisoners of war, Jewish organizations, groups of still influential ex-Vichy officials, Communists, anti-Gaullists, the many and various resistance groups—the list seemed endless—all demanded formal recognition, either in terms of memorialization or official recognition or financial compensation (pensions). Plaques began to appear on Parisian buildings as each society or association remembered its own. The Cold War, which began almost immediately after the end of World War II, further divided the country between those who were staunchly anti-Communist and those who supported a still vibrant French Communist Party and the left in general; and then there were the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. One would think that these important events, plus the massive rebuilding of France that was being financed by the Marshall Plan, would push the memory of the Occupation into the background. So did the presidents who followed de Gaulle in the Fifth Republic (1958–), hoping that his efforts at tying, once again, the success of the French during the war to his own person would neutralize the persistence of this collective memory. No such luck. Georges Pompidou (president from 1969 to 1972) was criticized for defending
his pardon of Paul Touvier, a notorious Vichy and Nazi sympathizer and leader of the despised Milice, the Vichy paramilitary arm. He implored his critics and others to get on with the work of modernizing France: “Are we going to keep the wounds of our national discord bleeding eternally? Has the time not come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, attacked one another, and even killed one another?”
⁴
The answer, in 1972, was “not yet.”

The next two presidents of the Fifth Republic—Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81) and François Mitterrand (1981–95)—both burned their political fingers whenever they endeavored to put memories to rest about the defeat of 1940 or the Vichy experiment or the Occupation or the Liberation. Who was to be remembered? Who had suffered the most? Who had been unjustly unmemorialized? Were the Gaullists more effective than the Communists at national union? What about the Vichy supporters who were patriots and anti-German? What was owed them? And the interrogation went on and on. Amnesties, the establishment of public holidays marking those years, constructions of memorials: all brought grief to French presidents who wanted to move into a new future, unburdened by a sordid past. The fact that the center-right—Gaullists—remained in executive and legislative power until 1981 exacerbated the divisions that still prevailed in French politics and culture. However, President François Mitterrand, the first leftist leader of France since the
Front populaire
of the 1930s, also was pierced by the arrows of those who still had grievances. To make matters worse for him (and for the resolution of the differences), before joining the Resistance Mitterrand had been a low-level member of the Pétain government. He was still friends with some former Vichy servants, and he insisted, until he left office in 1995, that a wreath in his name be laid annually at Pétain’s grave on the Île d’Yeu.
^*
When the full story of Mitterrand’s Vichy engagements became more widely
known with the publication in 1994 of a book approved by him, he would argue that he was a
maréchaliste,
not a
Pétainiste,
one of those exquisite distinctions that had become the hallmark of self-definition after the war, referring to the difference between those who admired the “victor of Verdun” for having saved France in 1917–18 (the “marshalists”) and those who had bought into being the principles of the “New Order,” created under the persona of Philippe Pétain.

Jacques Chirac became Paris’s first popularly elected mayor.
^*
He was a classic French pol, integrated fully into the Gaullist ideology, and not known as an imaginative or especially articulate representative of French ideals. But between July 18, 1986 (he was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995), and January 18, 2007 (he was the Fifth’s Republic’s fifth president from 1995 to 2007), he made eleven major speeches about Paris during the Occupation, about the French responsibility for Vichy excesses, and about France having forgotten, for a brief period, its traditions as the nation of
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.
We have seen how, in 1986, as mayor of Paris, at the site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver (which had been razed in 1959), he insisted that “in that summer of 1942, our capital knew the weight and the straits of a foreign occupation but had not yet taken the complete measure of the horrible ideology that subtended it.… France had still not completely sensed to what point the Nazi order was perversely and insanely criminal.”
⁵
Still seeking forgiveness for the nation for its irresponsibility in failing to protect the most vulnerable of its citizens and residents, Chirac nonetheless was forthright in remembering the horror of the Grande Rafle. After he assumed the presidency, Chirac brought a clear and focused light to the rhetorical and political obfuscation that had attenuated Parisian memory of the excesses of the Vichy government. On Sunday, July 16, 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, President Chirac spoke with a vigor that shattered the Gaullist legend, which had sought to subsume all requited suffering and courageous resistance under the Cross of Lorraine. The scene was again the former site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where a statue was being dedicated that represented the thousands of Jews who had been temporarily imprisoned within its walls. Chirac began his remarks with his major theme: “There are, in the life of a nation, moments that wound its memory as well as the idea that one has of one’s country.”
⁶
For those who had fought with each other for a half century over the ownership of the legacies of 1940–45 France, these words must have brought a sudden silence. Reassuring not only the Jewish members of the audience but also, by extension, many of the immigrants who had arrived since the war, Chirac insisted that Parisians—in fact, all French citizens—must “recognize the mistakes of the past—and especially those committed by the [Vichy] state. Nothing must block out the dismal hours of our history if we are to defend a certain idea of humanity, of liberty, and of dignity. In so doing, we struggle against those dark forces that are constantly at work. This ceaseless combat is mine as much as it is yours.”
⁷
No other speech by a French politician did more to erase the ambiguity of the Mitterrand years and, in effect, undermine the internecine squabbles that were still going on (many of the
résistants
and Vichy supporters were still alive and quite active; we must not forget how young they were in the 1940s). In one of the most important addresses given by a French statesman in the twentieth century, Chirac resurrected the ghost of the Occupation in order to put it to rest. His speech did not bring complete closure to the continuing confusion and arguments about who was responsible for the worst excesses of the Occupation, but it did move the debate toward more trenchant, and thus more transparent, arguments.

Jacques Chirac.
(Jean-Régis Roustan / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Nicolas Sarkozy was born in 1955, the first Fifth Republic president to have been born after the war. Insensitive to, because he was essentially ignorant of, the querulous arguments about the Occupation that had bedeviled his Fifth Republic predecessors, Sarkozy nonetheless chose, as early as 2006, to use in his campaign the example of a youth named Guy Môquet—“a young man of seventeen who gave his life to France; this is an example not of the past but for our future.”
⁸
Immediately, leftist politicians, including former Communists, attacked the arrogance of a politician from the right using a Communist youth to support his run for office. But more significant is that Sarkozy and his staff did not appear to be aware of the complicated story of this young man from the 17th arrondissement. He had been caught up, at the age of sixteen, in the Nazi frenzy following the assassination in broad daylight of two German officers, one in the Métro station at Barbès-Rochechouart in August of 1941 and the other, a
Feldkommandant,
in the streets of Nantes in October of that year. Immediately, Hitler had ordered fifty hostages shot for each German killed; after much negotiation between the Vichy government and the Germans, the ratio of ten
hostages per assassinated German was agreed upon. Soon after this agreement, at a camp run by the French government near the Breton town of Châteaubriant, twenty-seven young men, Communists, for the most part, were executed. The Germans felt that the execution of Communists would send a clear signal to the French that their most important enemy was internal and not the Occupiers.

For reasons that are still unclear, among the selected victims was the youngster from Paris, barely seventeen. It was his letter home a few hours before his execution that Sarkozy would read in his campaign. The problem is that though Môquet had certainly “resisted,” it was not against the Germans but against the Vichy government. In fact, the
lycéen
had been arrested in October of 1940, while the Communist Party was following orders from the USSR not to fight the German Occupiers, for they were allies. Guy and his young Communist buddies had been posting tags and stickers all over his neighborhood demanding that his father, a Communist deputy arrested after the Soviet-German treaty, be released from prison; the Vichy government, dead set against Communism, had arrested not only deputies but also many party members. Earlier, too, even under the Third Republic, Guy and his friends had been protesting against French support for Finland in its short war with Russia (during the fall and winter of 1939–40). The point is that Guy was not demonstrating against the German authorities but against the governments of his own country.

But Minister Sarkozy, later President Sarkozy, persisted. His first edict as president, aimed at marking his commitment to unite France under the banner of collective patriotism and duty to the Republic, instructed high school teachers in France to recite Môquet’s last letter to his mother in their classrooms on October 22. Ridicule, political correctness, old memories, and partisan opposition combined not only to revive memories that many thought had been put to rest, but also to remind everyone that those memories would never stay buried. Slowly, the edict was forgotten.
^*

François Hollande, the current president of France, paid attention to his predecessors’
faux
pas. He has returned to the less divisive memories of the Occupation, those surrounding the rounding up, imprisonment, deportation, and murder of Jews. Speaking at two Parisian sites early in his presidency—at the place where the Vélodrome d’Hiver once stood and at a new museum at the Cité de la Muette, in Drancy—he took up Jacques Chirac’s charge to the French nation to take responsibility for what happened: the État français had been a major player in the French Shoah. On July 22, 2012, he emphasized that “this crime took place here, in our capital, in our streets, in the courtyards of our buildings, in our stairways, on our school playgrounds.” The French government had betrayed Jewish confidence that “the country of the great Revolution and City of Light would be a safe haven for them.”
⁹
At Drancy two months later, he stated that “our work is no longer about establishing the truth. Today, our work is to transmit.… Transmission: there resides the future of remembering.”
¹⁰
Even if one has to insist on how treacherously the French government had acted against those seeking protection in France, it was better than trying to figure out who was most responsible for the crimes and for their punishment.

In his second essay on the Occupation, “Paris Under the Occupation” (1945), Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth century’s most famous philosopher, tried to capture what it was like to live cheek by jowl with one’s oppressor.
^*
“A thousand times in these last four years, French have seen serried rows of bottles of Saint-Emilion or Meursault in the grocers’ windows. Approaching, tantalized, they found a notice saying ‘dummy display.’ So it was with Paris: it was merely a dummy display.”
¹¹
He offers that Parisians had lived only in the past or present in the early 1940s, for their future had been stolen from them. Camus’s
The Plague
would echo another of his themes: “France… had forgotten Paris.… Paris was no longer the capital of France.”
¹²
But the Occupation had done more than diminish the spirit of the city’s citizens; the very nature of the built environment had changed: “Everything was hollow and empty: the Louvre had no paintings, the Chamber no deputies, the Senate no senators and the Lycée Montaigne no pupils.” Earlier, Sartre describes even more specifically the architecture of the city:

In the spring of 2008, the estimable Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), located in the Marais, announced and opened an exhibition entitled
Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca.
Few who saw the handsome posters recognized the name of Zucca, a somewhat talented Italian-Frenchman who had passed away in 1973. But what did strike Parisians and tourists were the vibrant photographs featured in the show, depicting a colorful Paris basking in the light of the Occupation. The BHVP had bought from the Zucca family the thousands of photographs that he had taken between the 1930s and his death. Included in that collection were about six thousand shots, mostly of Paris under the Occupation; of those, about one thousand were in color. Color film was still a nascent technology and a rare commercial commodity in the early 1940s; it was an expensive and delicate technology, used primarily by the military and the propaganda ministry to project the actions of the Wehrmacht and other arms of the military. That a French photographer, André Zucca, had had access to it was exceptional.

Zucca, a Germanophile probably on the right wing of French politics, had been the only French person hired by the German magazine
Signal
as its photographic correspondent.
^*
None of the images in the 2008 exhibition ever appeared in the magazine, but the fact that Zucca had been given a press pass, access to a supply of film, and freedom to snap away wherever he wanted meant that he was able to provide us with a rich record of certain aspects of daily life in occupied Paris. Not surprisingly, the exhibition immediately brought back into the open the same questions that had been bedeviling Parisian politics since the Liberation. Whose view of the Occupation is the correct one? Were not those fifteen hundred nights of Paris’s agony the
années noires
(the dark years), a period that it had valiantly emerged from? The colored brilliance of hundreds of photographs showing Paris as a tourist site in the 1940s, with Germans and Parisians in casual contact, was immediately criticized in the media. One city official referred to the “indecency” of the photographs, arguing that they represented “mundane revisionism.”
¹⁴
Pierre Assouline, novelist and biographer, wrote in
Le Monde:
“In this exhibition, it is never made clear… that all these photos are a matter of propaganda.”
¹⁵
Editorials appeared on the right and on the left; Zucca’s descendants argued with each other in public (the son referring to his father as a collaborator and anti-Semite); the librarians and curators at the BHVP went public with their own internecine squabbles; bureaucrats working for the city of Paris spoke publicly about their dissensions. Finally a compromise was reached: the title of the exhibition (but not the catalog, which had already been printed
^*
)
would be changed from
Les Parisiens
… to
Des Parisiens sous l’Occupation.
Changing one letter enabled the offensive direct article to become a partitive one, from “[The] Parisians” to “
Some
Parisians.” And a separate flyer was handed out to all viewers at the entry booth stating that these photographs had been shot by a man with strong connections to and some ideological agreement with the Occupier. The show was quite successful, but the brouhaha over its interpretation, sixty-four years after the Germans had left, revealed how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.