When Paris Went Dark (7 page)

Soon the contents of the jar were bubbling away over a low flame. Taking the sieve, the merchant poured the pot’s contents into another container, and there, nestled in the mesh, was his diamond reserve, the gems sparkling as if they had never been covered with animal fat and salve. The grateful merchant selected the brightest, largest diamond from the pile and handed it to his speechless host. “Take this one for your dear wife.”

Most stories of fast and permanent exits were not to have such happy endings. The great majority of those fleeing before the Blitzkrieg were women and children, for most men had been drafted; many were already in POW camps or in hiding. Those who had obtained leave from conscription because of important civilian jobs were advised to flee rather than be sent off to work in Germany. Scenes of babies, toddlers, and teenagers clinging to their parents, or of grandparents sitting on the family’s cart or in a packed automobile, filled the population with a self-perpetuating panic. A journalist wrote that “houses emptied themselves of women and children, burdened with luggage, who ran toward the Métro. Families piled in and on their automobiles packages, bags, luggage, and mattresses,
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even birdcages…!”
¹⁵

With Germany not yet at war with the United States, the American ambassador to France, William Bullitt, and Roger Langeron, the prefect of police, became in effect “mayors” of the bewildered city during the few hectic days between the government’s retreat to the Loire Valley and the arrival of the Wehrmacht. Bullitt had already refused Roosevelt’s suggestion that he follow the government to Bordeaux. This loyalty (though it would freeze his own career in the diplomatic service) ensured trusted communication as the diplomat and the police chief tried to figure out how to keep peace in a city filled with leaderless
and retreating French soldiers, savvy but worried Jewish citizens, frightened eastern European refugees, stubborn French patriots, and antsy looters. One of the best eyewitness accounts we have of those few days comes from Langeron’s diary, published in 1945. It gives a week-by-week account of the ways in which the French police “accommodated” themselves to the German presence. Strongly positive when it came to his department, the diary nevertheless reveals the frustration of not knowing how to turn over a major metropolis peacefully to a confident invader. Langeron opens his diary with a sardonic description of the government’s strained justifications for leaving Paris. It was June 10, 1940, only four days before the first German soldiers would enter the city. Across from his desk at headquarters sat a man he much admired, Georges Mandel, the recently named minister of the interior and thus his immediate superior. The sky over the city remained heavy with the acrid smoke from burning mountains of files and dossiers and from munitions and fuel depots. Ash could be seen floating in the mild winds that swept over a peaceful Île de la Cité, site of the Préfecture de police. A chagrined Mandel officially informed his friend that the country’s government was moving south toward the Loire, abandoning the capital. He reminded the police chief that his task was to “retain order” should the Germans arrive before either an armistice or an improbable French victory. Langeron respected, even admired, Mandel, but he observed in his journal, with a dab of black humor, that this was the twelfth minister of the interior under whom he had served since his appointment in 1934.

Having already taken careful notice from his office window of the thousands of refugees heading southward, like the government, Langeron recognized the possibility of urban chaos. The predictable environment that a police chief covets was disintegrating before his very eyes. The police were responsible for ensuring that the city was supplied with food, that its utility services and public and private transportation were maintained, that access to clinics and hospitals remained unencumbered, and that laws were enforced. Traffic, snarled by thousands of confused refugees and retreating French soldiers, must remain orderly; looting had to be controlled; those left behind had to
be monitored. Though confident that he and his cohort were primed for these tasks, a nervous Langeron continued to resent that the government had abandoned Paris. It was one thing to lose a city in honorable battle; it was quite another to desert the nation’s capital in a panic. To forsake Paris was to forsake the whole French empire. He had received little intelligence about the German advance, even less about their plans for Paris, other than what he could glean from his own patrols and from information coming in from outposts in the near countryside. The military command of the city was as clueless as he. He could call on no precedent, no instructions, no guidance about how to prepare for transferring administrative and police powers to the Occupation authorities.

Confusion reigned at the highest military levels. Policemen were given rifles to carry; city buses were ordered to block main arteries; plans for bombing bridges were bruited about. General Pierre Héring, commander of Paris, told the police prefects of the region on June 11 that “the capital would be defended to the last,” but a day earlier, General Weygand, supreme military commander, had announced that “Paris [will be] an Open City. In order that Paris preserve its character as an Open City it is my intention to avoid any defensive organization around the city on the belt of the old fortifications or on that of the ancient forts.”
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We can only imagine how frustrating these contradictory messages from the military authority were for the average Parisian eager for usable information—not to mention for those responsible for civil order. Such confusion was amplified by the fact that posters informing Parisians of the proclamation of an “open city” would not appear on walls until June 13, only a few hours before the first Germans would appear on the arteries of the metropolis.

To finally declare Paris an open city was a political rather than a
military decision. Such a decision made sense militarily; politically less so unless we understand the obsessive concerns of the army, the Catholic Church, the industrialist cadre, and the conservative right wing about the Communists (and the Socialists, whom they believed to be Communists in sheep’s wool). Should the city be left to its own defenses, even under army control, it could quickly institute another Commune-type government, as it had after the long Prussian siege in 1870, and could instigate thereby another civil war, making France even more vulnerable to German intervention. On June 12, Langeron learned from French military headquarters about the open-city declaration. Not having been notified in time to prepare his officers, he saw the pronouncement as yet another feckless decision made by a timorous government in order to cover its own retreat. The three conditions that the Germans had imposed so that Paris might remain “open” were blunt: no destruction of bridges, no looting, and the population must remain indoors for forty-eight hours. Easier said than done. How was Langeron supposed to control remnants of the French army that might want to resist, or angry Parisians, or agents provocateurs, or citizens who needed milk, bread, and other necessities? What if German units were fired, stoned, or spat on? What if Parisians took to the streets to form human barricades to forestall the military occupation of their city? What if civil war broke out between those who were satisfied with the Armistice and those who despised the Nazis? What about the tens of thousands of refugees from Nazi Germany and eastern Europe? How would they react? These thoughts kept Langeron nervously awake as he tried to make sense of an unprecedented event.

The government itself having decamped on June 10, the rest of the city was now in full flight. One historian has put it succinctly: “The entire social fabric to which people were accustomed, all the points of reference on which they had been socialized to depend, suddenly collapsed without warning in a way they could not understand.”
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The citizens would return, especially after the Armistice went into effect on June 25, but slowly, and they would return abashed. The hangover from this mass exit would affect the relationship between the Occupying forces and the Parisians for months to come. On returning
to Paris, after having joined the exodus, the pro-German writer and publisher Jean de la Hire described what he saw, when, too late to venture into the streets after curfew, he had to spend the night in the train station:

A number of small merchants who had not fled told him that they had had no option: they couldn’t leave their businesses or their families. They had lived through worse; this, too, would pass.

During the last two weeks of June, meeting in Bordeaux, with the German army closing in on that city, the French government watched as events unfolded almost surreally. The first stunner: Churchill and his cabinet offered, if France would not sign an armistice with the Germans, to form a political union between Great Britain and France. De Gaulle phoned Reynaud from Paris and read him the agreement proposed by Churchill’s government:

Reynaud was ecstatic, but by then the forces in favor of an armistice had taken control of the cabinet, and Maréchal Pétain was asked by President Albert Lebrun to form a new government on June 17. The next day the Maréchal inexplicably announced on national radio that an armistice was already in effect (though he had not yet negotiated with the Germans) and ordered French troops to lay down their arms. The result was even more chaos in the ranks, for although many French soldiers followed his instructions, many did not, unsure who was in charge of the government. The Germans, of course, were delighted, and they drove into towns waving white flags to broadcast that the Battle of France was over. One of my sources told me that the Germans would enter a town, call the next town’s city hall, and ask if they were going to defend it. If the answer was no, the German officer would respond: “Good. We’ll be there within the hour.” On June 18, a few days before the signing of an armistice, Hitler met in Rome with Mussolini about the next steps regarding France. Il Duce demanded that Italy be permitted to occupy the Rhône Valley, Marseille, even Corsica. But Hitler was firm, for he recognized that the French must be kept from falling into Britain’s arms and that the French Mediterranean fleet must not join the Royal Navy. He needed “to secure… a French government functioning on French territory. This would be far preferable to a situation in which the French might reject the German proposals and flee abroad to London [as de Gaulle had already done] to continue the war from there.”
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Poor Pétain thought he might still have some leverage with the Germans, but given his eagerness to stop the hemorrhaging of his own armed forces, in the end, on June 22, at Compiègne, only fifty miles northeast of Paris, the Third Republic signed an agreement that in effect divided France into multiple zones. Hitler was ecstatic; in one of the most frequently shown film clips of the war, he is seen doing a little jig outside the railcar where the Armistice had been signed—the same railcar where the Germans had acceeded to a similar armistice in November of 1918. Two days later, an Italian-French armistice was signed.

Less than three weeks later, France’s Third Republic cravenly voted itself out of existence and installed in its place yet another quasi-fascist regime in Europe, only twenty-two miles from Great Britain:

The Armistice, as we have seen, divided France into several occupied and unoccupied regions and was unique in Nazi Germany’s relations with other occupied nations. No other conquered nation was permitted to have its own sovereign territory after a Nazi victory.

For rather mundane reasons—because it was a spa town that had a plethora of hotel rooms and superb rail connections with most of France—Vichy, almost at the geographical center of France, became the seat of the new État français, successor to the legislatively abolished Third Republic. The name of this dowager city would forever be associated with that new state, the word
Vichy
still evoking memories of national shame, guilt, and anger. It is difficult to explain to someone
who does not intimately know French culture how even such rather mundane terms as
eau de Vichy
and
vichyssois
still retain just a hint of the odor of a repellent government. But as France seemed to be dissolving under the German Blitzkrieg, the Armistice was welcomed by most as God-sent, especially when incarnated in the person of the “victor of Verdun,” Maréchal Philippe Pétain. His reputation was impeccable.
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He vigorously requested that his government be located in Paris, or at least in nearby Versailles, but Hitler refused this request, and the État français would remain in the backwater of Vichy for the duration.