by Paul Kix
German military vehicles.
A cadre of German soldiers seemed to have made the La Rochefoucauld house their own, judging from the armored cars and trucks parked at odd angles. But this wasn’t even the worst news: On closer inspection, the family saw that the chateau’s roof was missing.
My God, Robert thought, trying to absorb it all.
The children clustered together in the driveway, gawking. Then, unsure what else to do, the family made its way to the front door.
When they opened it, Consuelo and her children saw the same stone staircase rising from the entryway to the front hall. But passing above them were German officers, who barely acknowledged their arrival. The Nazis had indeed requisitioned Villeneuve, just as they would other homes and municipal buildings, hoping that the houses and schools and offices might serve as command posts for the French Occupation, or as forward bases for Germany’s upcoming battle with Britain. From the Germans’ apathetic looks, the family saw that the chateau was no longer theirs. “There was absolutely nothing we could do against it,” Robert later said.
Consuelo told her children not to acknowledge the officers, to show them that they were impermanent and therefore unremarkable: Robert would not sketch in any journal who these Germans were, what they looked like, or which one led them. But he and his siblings did record the broad outlines of the arrangement. The Nazis begrudgingly made room for the family. They soon redistributed themselves across one half of the house, so the La Rochefoucaulds could have the other. On the first floor, the officers chose the great room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the magnificent manicured gardens, and the dining room, which seated twenty. The family took the salon—where they had once entertained visiting dignitaries and had debated Hitler’s rise to power—and the living room, cozy with chairs, rows of books, and, above the fireplace, the family crest, which depicted a beautiful woman with a witch’s tail—which in earlier times instructed La Rochefoucauld to live fully and enjoy all of life’s delights. The second and third floors—the bedrooms and playrooms for the children, and utility rooms for the staff of twelve—were divided similarly: Nazis on one side, the family on the other. Robert still had his own room, a grand chamber with fifteen-foot ceilings, a private bathroom, and fireplace. But he couldn’t stand the heavy clacking echo of German boots going up and down the second and third floors’ stone staircase. The noise seemed to almost taunt him.
The family and Germans did not eat together. The La Rochefoucaulds set up a new dining room in the salon. They shared the grand spiral staircase because they had to, but the family and its staff never spoke to the Germans, and the Germans only spoke to Consuelo, once they learned she was the matriarch and local head of the Red Cross.
Consuelo’s relationship with these occupying officers was, to put it mildly, difficult. In little time they settled on a nickname for her: the Terrible Countess.
It is easy to understand why. First, Consuelo had built this house. When she and Olivier were married after the Great War, a plump girl who was more confident than pretty, she looked at the ruins of what remained of the La Rochefoucauld estate and told her husband she would prefer it if the rebuilt chateau no longer faced east-west, as it had for centuries, but north-south. That way the windows could take in more sunlight. Olivier obeyed his young wife’s wishes and brick by brick a neoclassical marvel emerged, one that indeed glowed with natural light. Now, twenty years later, the Germans were sullying the chateau, German soldiers who played to type, too, always loud, always shouting Ja!, parking up to seven bulky tanks in her yard and then endlessly cleaning them, meeting in her house, meeting in a tent they set up outside her house, their decorum gauche regardless of where they went, the sort of people who literally found it appropriate to write on her walls.
Then there was the damage to the roof. And though Consuelo learned that a British bomb, and not a German one, had missed the bridge it aimed for a half mile distant during the fight for France and instead flattened the fourth floor of the chateau, she resented that the Nazis hadn’t offered to close the gaping hole above them, especially as the summer became late fall and the temperature turned cold. The Villeneuve staff had to put a tarp over the roof’s remnants, but that did little good. When it rained, water still flowed down the stairwell. Winter nights chilled everyone, brutal hours that required multiple layers of clothing. The bomb had set off a fire that momentarily spread on the second floor, which destroyed the central heating system. Now, before the children went to bed, they had to warm a brick over a wood-fired oven and then rub the brick over their sheets, which heated their beds just enough so they might fall asleep.
Finally, there was Olivier. The family found out that he had been arrested by German forces near Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a commune in Lorraine in northeastern France, on June 27, five days after the armistice. He was now imprisoned in the sinister-sounding Oflag XVII-A, a POW camp for French officers in eastern Austria known as “little Siberia.” He was allowed to write two letters home every month, which had been censored by guards. What little Consuelo gleaned of her husband’s true experience at the camp infuriated her further.
Given all this, it wasn’t really a surprise to see Consuelo act out against the Germans. On one occasion, a Nazi officer, who was a member of the German cavalry and an aristocrat, wanted to pay his respects to Madame La Rochefoucauld, whose name traveled far in noble circles. When he arrived at Villeneuve, he walked up the steps, took off his gloves, and approached Consuelo, who waited at the entry, all stocky frame and suspicious gaze. He gripped her hand in his and kissed it, but before he could tell her it was a pleasure to stay in this grand home, she slapped him across the face. The Terrible Countess would not be wooed by any German. For a moment, no one knew how to respond. Then the officers, only half joking, told Consuelo a welcome like that put her at risk of deportation.
Robert was his mother’s son. The fact that the Nazi officers were a few rooms away only increased his talk about how much he hated them, those Boche. He was brash enough, would say these epithets just loud enough, that even Consuelo had to shush him. But Robert seemed not to care. His olive complexion reddened with indignant righteousness when he listened to Charles de Gaulle’s speeches, and even after the German high command in Paris banned the French from turning on the BBC, Robert did it in secret. He never wanted to miss the general’s daily message. Oftentimes, to evangelize, he would travel across Soissons to the estate of his cousin, Guy de Pennart, who was his age and shared, roughly, his temperament. Guy and Robert talked about how they were going to join the British and fight on. “I was convinced that we had to continue the war at all costs,” Robert later said.
He was seventeen by the fall of 1940 and had graduated from high school. He wanted to join de Gaulle but wasn’t sure how. One didn’t “enlist” in the Resistance. Even a well-connected young man like Robert didn’t know the underground routes that could get him to London. So he enrolled at an agricultural college in Paris, ostensibly to become a gentleman farmer like his father, but, more likely, he went to meet people who might help him reach de Gaulle.
These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out, their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.
So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans, and despised Vichy, a spa town in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all my friends and I could talk about.”
Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument t
o the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution.” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.
For Robert, the family’s legacy had followed him everywhere throughout his childhood, inescapable: He was baptized beneath a stained-glass mural of the brother priests’ martyrdom; taught in school about the aphorisms in François VI’s Maxims; raised by a father who’d received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military commendation. Greatness was expected of him, and the expectation shadowed his days. Now, with the Germans living in the chateau, it was as if the portraits that hung on the walls darkened when Robert passed them, judging him and asking what he would do to rid the country of its occupiers and write his own chapter in the family history. To reclaim the France that his family had helped mold—that’s what mattered. “I firmly believed that . . . honor commanded us to continue the fight,” he said.
But Robert felt something beyond familial pressure. In his travels around Paris or on frequent stops home—he split his weeks between the city and Villeneuve—he grew genuinely angry at his defeated countrymen. He felt cheated. His life, his limitless young life, was suddenly defined by terms he did not set and did not approve of.
What galled him was that few people seemed to think as he did. He found that a lot of people in Paris and in Soissons were relieved the war was over, even if it meant the country was no longer theirs. The prewar pacifism had gelled into a postwar defeatism. Fractured France was experiencing an “intellectual and moral anesthesia,” in the words of one prefect. It was bizarre. Robert had the sense that the ubiquitous German soldiers who hopped onto the Métro or sipped coffee in a café were already part of a passé scenery for the natives.
Other people got the same sense. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the hatred of the Germans and the grudges held against them “assumed a rather abstract air” for the vast majority of French, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, because “the occupation was a daily affair.” The Germans were everywhere, after all, asking for directions or eating dinner. And even if Parisians hated them as much as Robert de La Rochefoucauld did, calling them dirty names beneath their breath, Sartre argued that “a kind of shameful, indefinable solidarity [soon] established itself between the Parisians and these troopers who were, in the end, so similar to the French soldiers . . .
“The concept of enemy,” Sartre continued, “is only entirely firm and clear when the enemy is separated from us by a wall of fire.”
Even at Villeneuve, Robert witnessed the ease with which the perception of the Germans could be colored in warmer hues. Robert’s younger sister, Yolaine, returned from boarding school for a holiday, and sat in the salon one afternoon listening to a German officer play the piano in the next room. He was an excellent pianist. Yolaine dared not smile as she sat there, for fear of what her mother or older brother might say if they walked past, but her serene young face showed how much she enjoyed the German’s performance. “He was playing very, very well,” she admitted years later.
It was no easy task to hate your neighbor all the time. That was the simple truth of 1940. And the Germans made their embrace all the more inviting because they’d been ordered to treat the French with dignity. Hitler didn’t want another Poland, a country he had torched whose people he had either killed or more or less enslaved. Such tactics took a lot of bureaucratic upkeep, and Germany still had Britain to defeat. So every Nazi in France was commanded to show a stiff disciplined courteousness to the natives. Robert saw this at Villeneuve, where the German officers treated the Terrible Countess with a respect she did not reciprocate. (In fact, that they never deported his mother can be read to a certain extent as an exercise in decorous patience.) One saw this treatment extended to other families as they resettled after the exodus: PUT YOUR TRUST IN THE GERMAN SOLDIER, signs read. The Nazis gave French communities beef to eat, even if it was sometimes meat that the Germans had looted during the summer. Parisians like Robert saw Nazis offering their seats to elderly madames on the Métro, and on the street watched as these officers tipped their caps to the French police. In August, one German army report on public opinion in thirteen French departments noted the “exemplary, amiable and helpful behavior of the German soldiers . . .”
Some French, like Robert, remained wary: That same report said German kindness had “aroused little sympathy” among certain natives; and young women in Chartres, who had heard terrible stories from the First World War, had taken to smearing their vaginas with Dijon mustard, “to sting the Germans when they rape,” one Frenchwoman noted in her diary. But on the whole, the German Occupation went over relatively seamlessly for Christian France. By October 1940, it seemed not at all strange for Marshal Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old president of France’s provisional government and hero of the Great War, to meet with Hitler in Montoire, about eighty miles southwest of Paris. There, the two agreed to formalize their alliance, shaking hands before a waiting press corps while Pétain later announced in a radio broadcast: “It is in the spirit of honor, and to maintain the unity of France . . . that I enter today upon the path of collaboration.”
Though Pétain refused to join the side of the Germans in their slog of a fight against the British, he did agree to the Nazis’ administrative and civil aims. The country, in short, would begin to turn Fascist. “The Armistice . . . is not peace, and France is held by many obligations with respect to the winner,” Pétain said. To strengthen itself, France must “extinguish” all divergent opinions.
Pétain’s collaboration speech outraged Robert even as it silenced him. He thought it was “the war’s biggest catastrophe,” but his mother quieted him. With that threat about divergent opinions, “There could be consequences,” she said. She had lost her husband and wasn’t about to lose a son to a German prison. So Robert traveled back to Paris for school, careful but resolved to live a life in opposition to what he saw around him.
CHAPTER 3
He was still a boy, only seventeen, not even of military age, but he understood better than most the darkening afternoon that foretold France’s particularly long night. Robert saw a country that was falling apart.
He saw it first in the newspapers. Many new dailies and weeklies emerged with a collaborationist viewpoint, sometimes even more extreme than what Pétain promoted. Some Paris editors considered Hitler a man who would unite all of Europe; others likened the Nazis to French Revolutionaries, using war to impose a new ideology on the continent. There were political differences among the collaborators; some were socialists, and others pacifists who saw fascism as a way to keep the peace. One paper began publishing nothing but denunciations of Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. Another editor, Robert Brasillach, of the Fascist Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), praised “Germany’s spirit of eternal youth” while calling the French Republic “a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge.” But even august public
ations with long histories changed with the times: The Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF (a literary magazine much like The New Yorker), received a new editor in December 1940, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an acclaimed novelist and World War I veteran who had become a Fascist. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, could not believe his good fortune. “There are three great powers in France: Communism, the big banks and the NRF,” he said. The magazine veered hard right.
At the same time, Robert also noticed the Germans begin to bombard the radio and newsreels with propaganda. Hitler was portrayed as the strong man, a more beneficent Napoléon even, with the people he ruled laughing over their improved lives. Robert found it disgusting, in no small part because he had witnessed this warped reality before, in Austria in 1938 at boarding school. He had even met Hitler there.
It was in the Bavarian Alps, hiking with a priest and some boys from the Marist boarding school he attended outside Salzburg. The priests had introduced their pupils to the German youth organizations Hitler favored and, at the time, Robert loved them, because they promoted hiking at the expense of algebra. He didn’t know much about the German chancellor then, aside from the fact that everyone talked about him, but he knew it was a big deal for the priest to take the boys to Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat, perched high above the market town of Berchtesgaden. When they reached it they saw a gently sloping hill on which sat a massive compound: a main residence as large as a French chateau and, to the right, a smaller guest house. The estate was the first home Hitler called his own and where he spent “the finest hours of my life,” he once said. “It was there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.”