As if by some bizarre natural law governing the climate in years that preface a cataclysm, as in 1870 and 1914, the spring of 1940 was a beautiful one. Parisians relaxed in the trottoir cafés, listening to the strains of “J’attendrai” and dreaming of the previous year’s holidays. There were art shows in the Grand Palais, racing had resumed at Auteuil (it had been suspended on the outbreak of war) and soccer matches took place between Tommies and poilus in the suburbs. With Hitler apparently hesitating to attack the mighty Maginot Line, much of the fear of the previous winter had dissipated—to be replaced by the dread malady of ennui, particularly insidious within the dank casemates of the Line. The poilus of 1940 (according to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one) took to looting vacated Alsatian farmhouses instead. Morale at the front during the drôle de guerre was low, but it was excellent in Paris. Films like Renoir’s classic La Règle du jeu, deemed “depressing, morbid and immoral,” were banned, but the Casino de Paris had reopened with a sparkling new show, radiating optimism and unreality, with Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier. Traffic in the city was agreeably light; on the Rue de Rivoli you could buy flags of all nations—including a swastika, just in case. Paris had meatless days (though, in the Maginot Line, soldiers were consuming something like seven times the rations of the Wehrmacht), and sugarless days and liquorless days too; luxury chocolates were no longer available, and the pâtisseries closed three days a week (though inventive confectioners sold boxes of sweets shaped like gasmasks). But none of this made too much difference to Parisian gastronomy. Certainly few Parisians were hungry.
COLLAPSE
On 10 May Hitler struck in the West. The Dutch capitulated on the 14th, the Belgians two weeks later. By the 13th, the Panzers—striking through the supposedly impassable Ardennes—had pushed across the Meuse at Sedan, and were thrusting deep into France. Though this put them less than 200 kilometres from Paris, it was remarkable for how long nothing but disquieting rumours reached the capital. By and large, outside government circles, life therefore went on as usual. In good part the lack of alarm was because Paris had been spared the ruthless bombing that had flattened Warsaw and Rotterdam. The theatres remained open (at least until 20 May, the day the Panzers actually reached the Channel). The restaurants were full.
Operating out of the Hôtel Continental, the Censor was as all powerful as twenty-five years previously. The “official spokesman,” a Colonel Thomas whose closely cropped hair, moustache and pince-nez reminded one British war correspondent of the unfortunate Dreyfus, had a staff of flinty women who wore small imitation scissors in their hats. On the 13th a few items of bad news got past Colonel Thomas, but not enough to arouse anxiety. On the 14th, Arthur Koestler, then a stateless refugee in France, picked up L’Epoque in a train and read the following declaration: “The spirit of the heroic days of 1916 has returned; yesterday, in reconquering an outer fort of Sedan, our troops have shown a bravery worthy of the glorious days of Douaumont.” Shaken, he rushed to tell his friend Joliot-Curie, the scientist, “They are at Sedan.” “Sedan? You are dreaming … I did not know you were such a paniquard.” But when Koestler walked out into the street from Joliot-Curie’s laboratory, he saw the latest edition of Paris-Midi with the words “We Have Evacuated Sedan” splashed across the front page. “That,” recalled Koestler, “was the moment when the chair under us broke down.”
It was not until the 16th, however, that alarm began to grow among Parisians. By then cars with number plates from areas ever closer to Paris were appearing in the city. Amid an atmosphere of incredulity mixed with panic, the two-month-old Reynaud government discussed leaving the capital, as in 1914. Then Reynaud’s resolve hardened and he declared that they “ought to remain in Paris, no matter how intense the bombing might be”—only to add, somewhat delphically, that the government “should, however, take care not to fall into the enemy’s hands.” Some Ministers—almost ignoring the approaching Wehrmacht—expressed the fear that, if Paris were abandoned, the Communists would seize power.
On the 16th, Winston Churchill, who had been Prime Minister for less than a week, flew to Paris to find out what was happening. There followed his historic meeting in the Quai d’Orsay, that same building where less than twenty years previously the victorious Allies had drafted the Peace Treaty for the defeated Germans to sign. Present were Reynaud, Daladier (now Minister of National Defence) and the French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin. “Everybody was standing,” Churchill recalled in his memoirs.
At no time did we sit down around a table. Utter dejection was written on every face. In front of Gamelin on a student’s easel was a map, about two yards square, with a black line purporting to show the Allied front. In this line there was drawn a small but sinister bulge at Sedan.
Churchill asked Gamelin: “Where is the strategic reserve?” Then,
breaking into French, which I used indifferently (in every sense): “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?”
General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of the head and a shrug, said: “Aucune.”
There was another long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d’Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheel-barrows of archives on to them.
It was 1914 all over again. But this time there was no Galliéni in Paris; and the French army was not the army of 1914.
Churchill returned to London grimly aware of what the future would hold. Reynaud, a brave little man surrounded by defeatists, spoke that night on the radio, admitting to the French public that the Germans had managed to create “a broad pocket, south of the Meuse,” but “we filled in plenty [of such pockets] in 1918, as those of you who fought in the last war will not have forgotten!” Like French leaders before him, Reynaud led public prayers to Sainte Geneviève at Notre-Dame on 19 May and the following week the saviour saint’s relics were borne through the streets in solemn procession. But in the meantime the city underwent one of the most startling transformations in its history—from maelstrom to mausoleum in a matter of days, with two-thirds of its residents departing in every manner of transport.
On 3 June, Paris was bombed for the first time. More than 250 civilians were killed. By the 8th, the sound of distant cannon had become almost continuous. For the third time in seventy years, Paris was a city under siege. “The restaurants emptied,” said Alfred Fabre-Luce. “The Ritz, abandoned by its last clients, resembled a palace in a spa on the day the baths closed down.” On the 10th, French radio announced, “The Government is compelled to leave the capital for imperative military reasons. The Prime Minister is on his way to the armies.” At midnight, the car containing Reynaud and his newly appointed Under-Secretary for National Defence, a Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, left for the future seat of government at Tours. Behind them an endless stream of refugees poured out along the Boulevard Raspail. Ilya Ehrenburg, who—as a correspondent representing Hitler’s Russian ally—remained in the city, watched as “An old man laboriously pushed a handcart loaded with pillows on which huddled a small girl and a little dog that howled piteously.”
Up to now, the French government had been insisting in Gambettaesque terms that it would fight in front of Paris and behind Paris, and as recently as that weekend it had announced that the capital had been placed “in a state of defence.” Every fifty metres down the Champs-Elysées buses had been positioned diagonally in order to thwart German airborne troops. Then on the night of the 11th Gamelin’s successor, General Maxime Weygand, declared Paris an “open city.” That Paris should have capitulated without a struggle, while Warsaw, London, Leningrad and Stalingrad chose to face battle and be devastated, has ever since remained a contentious matter. But by 11 June there would have been little military advantage gained in fighting for Paris. Even so, her abandonment destroyed what was left of French morale. André Maurois recalls being warned, on 10 June, that Paris would not be defended: “At that moment I knew everything was over. France deprived of Paris would become a
body without a head. The war had been lost.”
As the German army reached the outskirts of Paris, rain fell on the city after the long weeks of blue skies—“Göring’s weather,” the hard-pressed fighter pilots of the RAF called it. Early on the morning of 14 June, an officer on the staff of General von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, a Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. Hans Speidel,* received two French officers who came under flag of truce to deliver up the capital. Hours later, units of the German 87th Infantry Division, led by an anti-tank gun detachment which went on to occupy the Hôtel de Ville and the Invalides, made a bloodless and orderly entry into a dazed Paris.
* Four years and a few weeks later, Speidel, now a lieutenant-general, was defending Paris against the Americans and Free French as Chief of Staff, Army Group B. After ending the war in a Gestapo prison camp, he returned to Paris in 1951 to negotiate the rearmament of Federal Germany. In 1957 he was in Paris again, as the first German Commander of Allied Land Forces in Europe.
Age Seven
1940–1969
* * *
DE GAULLE
The development of Paris from Philippe Auguste to the present
Click here to see a larger image.
NINETEEN
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The Occupation
For over four years, Paris had been on the conscience of the free world. Suddenly she became the loadstone as well. So long as the great city seemed to be asleep, captive and stupefied, everyone was agreed upon her formidable absence. But … Paris was about to reappear. How many things could change!
CHARLES DE GAULLE, MEÈMOIRES DE GUERRE, ii, P. 289
SUMMER 1940
Paris now enters a dark night, the darkest, longest fifty months of all her long existence. Neither the Tsar’s entry in 1815 nor the Prussians’ in 1871 inflicted the humiliation—and the prolonged pain—that she would suffer between 1940 and 1944. The light of la ville lumière would truly be extinguished. Even with the euphoric moment of la Libération of August 1944 the darkness would not end. Out of the pit there would follow the bitter period of épuration, the savaging of one Frenchman, one group of Frenchmen, by another—a merciless civil conflict that would add thousands more victims to the large number of war casualties. Worse, it would leave wounds still very much unhealed two generations later. Over the first part of the scene two rival figures loom, facing each other like hostile queens on the chessboard: Marshal Pétain versus the man dubbed by Winston Churchill “the Constable of France,” Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle. Though at first a brave but insignificant piece on the chessboard of war, the Constable would eventually triumph, bringing a certain order and opening the path to a grand renouvellement of France. Nevertheless, his epoch—his second coming—too would end with one of the worst and most startling explosions Paris had yet seen: les événements of May 1968.
The principal victim—as well as the arena—of the Nazi Occupation was, of course, Paris. In August 1944 it was only by a hair’s breadth that she would escape dreadful, if not total, destruction. The story of the Occupation is so unredeemingly terrible that an Anglo-Saxon historian writing about the glories of la ville lumière is faced with difficulties, when trying to encapsulate what is the unhappiest period in all her 2,000 years’ history. How, anyway, can an Anglo-Saxon begin to comprehend the pressures and stresses imposed on both collaborators and members of the Resistance—we who, thank God, were never occupied? Does our lack of experience entitle us to pass judgement: “It couldn’t have happened here”? I often wonder which of us would have been collaborators—the Drieu la Rochelles, the Brasillachs, or even a Sartre or a Cocteau? Or which of us would have joined the maquis in the Welsh mountains? What might we have done, especially in those early days of no hope, when Germany seemed certain to emerge triumphant? Smugly we think Drancy and the deportations of the Jews couldn’t happen here, but can we be sure? Before consigning them to the lowest circle of collabo hell, it is also worth remembering that men like Céline and Darnand had all fought bravely in the First World War, before that pacificism which it generated led them to take the wrong turning. Even Pierre Laval at the post-war trial proved to be a man of laudable courage as he faced the inevitable death sentence. Events were just too big for them—including the old Marshal, at the head of it all in Vichy.
On 17 June 1940 William Shirer revisited Paris from a triumphant Berlin just three days after the German entry. He felt an ache in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the familiar but empty streets, which he had loved “as you love a woman”:
I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits.
… First shock: the streets are utterly deserted, the shops closed, the shutters down tight over all the windows. It was the emptiness that got you … [All] had fled—the patrons, the garçons, the customers …
Going round the Place de l’Opéra, he noted,
For the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone garçon was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them …
… I have a feeling that what we’re seeing here in Paris is the complete breakdown of French society—a collapse of the army, of government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe.
The following day, he observed that there was already “open fraternizing” between German troops and Parisians. He added that two newspapers had appeared the day before in Paris, La Victoire—“as life’s irony would have it”—and Le Matin: the latter “has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament!”
Momentarily Hitler lost his nerve before Dunkirk and—in a profound error of judgement—issued his controversial “halt order,” which was to save the British Expeditionary Force. The “Miracle of Dunkirk” came to pass, and 337,000 men (including 110,000 French) were evacuated by sea. For the Germans the campaign to conquer France now became largely a matter of marching, a pursuit down the highways. On 22 June France was forced to agree to a humiliating armistice. The brilliant six weeks’ Blitzkrieg had cost the Germans no more than 27,074 killed. Contrary to the received image, the French army, or at least parts of it, had fought bravely, and had lost in killed alone 100,000 men. But one million prisoners-of-war had been taken, and they would remain in miserable conditions, sometimes exploited as slave labourers, in Germany for the next five years.
What was so shattering for Paris, and it was to set the tone for the ensuing four years of Occupation, was the sheer speed of the German takeover. It was the end of centuries of tradition: Paris the fortress had suddenly become the “open city.” But life in the capital returned to a semblance of normality with parallel speed. The refugees began to come back. At the entry of the Germans, the Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, reckoned that the total population had sunk to 700,000, or a quarter of its pre-war total. The fashionable western arrondissements were all but empty. Then, three weeks later, and under pressure from the Germans, some 300,000 returned. Exhaustion shows in photographs of a working-class family trudging home on foot, wheeling a worn-out grandmother in a child’s pram. There were others who, in the privacy of their homes, found a way out rather than face what the future would bring; one of these was an eminent neurosurgeon who, having seen the Germans arrive on the Champs-Elysées, injected himself with strychnine.
Over the course of his ten-day visit that June, William Shirer noted a marked change. Whereas on the 17th he had recorded the streets “utterly deserted,” by the 23rd he found that the Rotonde and the Dôme restaurants in Montparnasse were:
as jammed with crackpots as ever, and in front of us a large table full of middle-aged French women of the bourgeoisie, apparently recovering from their daze, because their anger was rising at the way the little gamines (elles sont françaises, après tout!) were picking up the German soldiers …
Almost immediately one of the city’s most chic bordels, encouraged by the atmosphere of “business as usual,” put up a sign announcing that “The house will reopen at three o’clock.” W. H. Smith on the Rue de Rivoli became a German bookshop. The theatres and cinemas opened their doors again; famous restaurants like Maxim’s, the Grand Véfour and Fouquet’s went on as before for their new clientele; racing resumed at Auteuil with the terraces crammed with binocular-bearing officers—the Kommandant taking over the President’s box. Haute couture regained its former eminence, with Coco Chanel swiftly going to ground in the Ritz with a German officer, from which she seldom emerged until the war was over.
Seven Ages of Paris Page 50