Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  With the blessing of the Propaganda Staffel, intellectual Henri Jeanson, who had been imprisoned during the drôle de guerre for his opposition to the war effort, took editorial control of the mass-circulation Paris Soir, starting with a vicious attack on Pétain and the government in Vichy. Due to paper shortage, Jeansson was limited to a two-page format with four pages twice a week. Disdaining his tabloid public, Jeanson soon persuaded the Germans to back his up-market daily Aujourd’hui, for which François Mauriac and publisher Bernard Grasset were happy to write – in Grasset’s case after he had returned to Paris from the safety of the Free Zone, protesting to author Alphonse de Châteaubriand that ‘however far back you go in both branches of my family, you will find neither a Jew nor a Jewess’.14

  Too big for his borrowed boots, Jeanson refused after six weeks to put his name to an editorial committing Aujourd’hui to open collaboration – and found himself back in La Santé prison. His replacement Georges Suarez had written anti-German books before the war, but had no problem changing sides and serving German interests so well that he was among the first intellectuals tried and shot for treason after the Liberation. Released from prison, Jeanson was denounced for having written an article justifying the assassination in 1938 of a German embassy counsellor by Herschel Grynszpan, which triggered off the violence in Germany known as Kristallnacht. Summoned to Weber’s office to account for this and other anti-Hitler articles written years before, which had been brought to the Germans’ attention by his old enemies, he landed again in La Santé. Thomas Kernan commented, ‘[He] disappeared into the limbo reserved for renegades, suspect in their own world and thus of no further use to the masters they were ready to serve.’15

  The second Paris paper to resume publication was Le Matin, whose conservative proprietor had no trouble following the shifting priorities of the Propaganda Staffel, one day attacking the Americans, the next praising President Roosevelt and constant only in its hatred of the English. Out of respect for its alliance with Moscow, the German administration authorised L’Humanité to reappear, but under the title La France au Travail, edited by de Châteaubriand, the tenor of whose editorials was saccharinely pro-German: ‘It is particularly comforting in these times of misfortune to see numerous Paris workers striking up friendships with German soldiers.’16

  As one door closes … Jean Luchaire, managing editor of Le Matin, persuaded Weber to back a new daily Les Nouveaux Temps – a clone of the pre-war Le Temps, right down to the typefaces used. Luchaire’s method of doing business with ladies was on the large couch in his office. While employed as his secretary, future film star Simone Signoret spent most of her time buying flowers for German actresses entertained there and taking phone calls from Abetz’s wife and Achenbach. She also:

  watched a whole raft of ladies passing through the padded door [of Luchaire’s office] in the winter of 1940, some because their husbands were prisoners and they wanted them back – one even returned with her husband a few weeks later to say thank you – and others because they needed a quick permit for some commercial enterprise.17

  In November the respectable right-wing L’Oeuvre was taken over by Marcel Déat, a député who boasted that he was ‘leader of the French who refused to die for Danzig’. Further right, Le Cri du Peuple was subsidised by Abetz to the tune of 250,000 francs a month. Its editor was ex-metalworker Jacques Doriot, the charismatic former No. 2 of the PCF, who had lectured in the USSR, backed Stalin against Trotsky and even visited China for the party before turning his coat to lead the far-right Parti Populaire Français (PPF). Far from biting the hand that fed him, Doriot praised Laval, the New Order and collaboration with as much energy as his 45,000 followers beat up gays. Similarly, in December 1940 editor-in-chief Pierre Brisson wrote in Le Figaro that Pétain’s priority for moral revival was ‘worthy of one of the most decisive tests in our history’. He could hardly do otherwise, since the Vichy regime would subsidise his paper to the tune of 2 million francs in 1941 alone. The most infamous occupation rag, Au Pilori, was anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic and hawked on the streets by malcontents who had previously sold the monarchist paper Action Française.18 Its sales rose to 50,000 copies per issue by the end of 1941.

  German propaganda had five main themes: it vaunted a mythical partnership between France and Germany, was generally pro-New Order and anti-English, was anti-democracy – especially American democracy – and it was of course anti-Semitic.

  Weber was interested also in the quality magazines, for motives that combined profit and their usefulness as propaganda vehicles. In this shady area, the publisher of Confidences – a romantic confessions magazine – was invited by Sonderführer Weber to hand over 60 per cent of his shares in return for permission to publish. His refusal was followed by the appearance of a clone under the title Votre Coeur. Managing editor of L’Illustration, René Baschet, was an avid follower of Pétain and had no problem getting paper and permission to print after his second edition carried a photo-reportage of the Mers el-Kebir incident. Obliged nevertheless to accept from Weber an in-house censor who vetted every line of text and every picture, Baschet eventually sold out under pressure to parties unknown for much less than his magazine had been worth. The most popular woman’s magazine Marie Claire had enjoyed a circulation of 2 million copies per issue. Its management’s refusal to sell out saw another clone called Pour Elle on the streets within weeks.19

  After its brief hiatus during the invasion, the French film industry was beginning a boom, with audiences avid for escapist themes. Production soon outstripped that of the Reich. Despite a decree of 9 September 1940 regulating the film business and the setting up of a state organising committee on 2 December, no less than 225 feature films and 400 shorts and cartoons were produced during the occupation.20

  NOTES

  1. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 3, p. 241.

  2. Burrin, Living with Defeat, pp. 204–5.

  3. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 255.

  4. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 3, pp. 122–3.

  5. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 1, pp. 95–6.

  6. Ibid., p. 11.

  7. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains, p. 158.

  8. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 92.

  9. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains, p. 147.

  10. L.H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (London: MacMillan, 1995), p. 157.

  11. L. Steinberg in 1940: La Défaite, p. 549.

  12. Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 253.

  13. Kernan, France, pp. 34–8.

  14. Quoted in Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 29.

  15. Kernan, France, pp. 28-29.

  16. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 64.

  17. Ibid., p. 50.

  18. Kernan, France, pp. 27–32.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 164.

  10

  OF BREAD AND CIRCUSES

  On 28 June 1940, de Gaulle was recognised as head of the fledgling Free French forces by Churchill. So, by 2 July, when Laval was appointed successor to Pétain, the main actors in France’s tragedy were on the stage of history. Three weeks later came an unmistakable signal from Vichy. In one of the many volte-faces of post-war France, the chief prosecutor at Pétain’s trial in 1945 was the first to volunteer for service on the three-man Commission for Denaturalisation, which began on 22 July to revoke French citizenship granted to foreign-born citizens. Coming out of retirement specially, André Mornet showed his capacity for hard work by revoking nationality from 15,154 persons, including 6,307 Jews, for whom the result was deportation and almost certain death.1

  Many cases were brought to the notice of the police and the commission by letters of denunciation from neighbours, business competitors and the simply mad, like the woman whose New Year greetings to de Brinon concluded: ‘I would beg you to excuse me from taking fizzy drinks the Jews put the powder from invisible diamonds in its unforgivable it cuts all the fibre of the intestines and the doctors say it’s a natural death.’2 Saner letters were often
signed, ‘A French patriot or An honest Frenchwoman’.

  Paris was still a ghost city of 1.8 million inhabitants instead of the normal 5 million. Few vehicles apart from German ones were on the streets and the café terraces were deserted. In an attempt to bring things back to normal, the Germans ordered the national railway system the SNCF to run refugee specials, and were informed that the best it could manage was to transport 100,000 people per week, at which rate it would take half a year to bring everyone back. Yet by 8 August – the day on which de Gaulle was condemned to death in absentia by a court martial – 500,000 returned Parisians were queuing for the coupons necessary since 3 August for their ration of sugar, bread and pasta, and then queuing again to buy these essentials. Few of them cared that the Masonic orders had been dissolved by decree on 2 August and their assets seized by the state. Police trying to lay hands on the membership lists were for the most part frustrated to find they had been sent out of the country well in advance.

  One of the ways in which a society defines itself is by excluding alien elements: in the USSR, the bourgeoisie and foreigners; in Germany, Jews, freemasons, gypsies and ‘deviants’ such as homosexuals. Vichy’s exclusion laws were aimed at immigrants, communists and Jews, who had nothing to do with the defeat. On 13 August, while Stabsmusikmeister Rupf conducted a public concert on the parvis in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, Pétain announced in a policy speech that all secret societies were to be made illegal. So eager to please its new masters was the important Félix Potin company that it sacked a Jewish manageress after forty-two years’ loyal service before the new legislation was enacted, from fear that ‘the Germans will seize our business … if we keep Jews in our senior management’.3

  Two weeks later, on 27 August, Pétain’s dream of a mass return to the land was announced by posters everywhere featuring grizzled old peasants bequeathing the family plough to their sons, with slogans such as ‘This is a fine weapon, my son. Use it to fight the good fight.’4 Grants were available for families choosing to return to farming. The catch was that they had to have at least one child and the expectation of more. They also had to undertake to remain farmers for at least ten years. With only 1,561 couples signing up, the result was a crushing blow to Pétain’s hopes.

  Propaganda photographs of senior officials and politicians shaking gnarled peasant hands and presenting medals could not obscure the fact that life on the land had never been so grindingly hard for 100 years or more. Even richer farmers who possessed tractors had no fuel for them. Some were converted to run from gazogène generators that produced a fuel gas from burning charcoal. On large farms, rusted steam traction engines were hauled out of barns and fired up, but on smaller properties the farmer and his wife had to work with horses or oxen to pull the plough, the harrow and the old-fashioned reaper. Even binder twine for tying the sheaves of cut corn was nearly impossible to obtain. Grandmothers rescued their distaffs and spinning wheels from the barn and went back to spinning and weaving the wool from their flocks. Farmers overhauled oil presses that had not been used since cheap groundnut oil began to be imported from the colonies and once again crushed their own poppy and rape seed to produce cooking oil.

  Two days before the end of the month an apparently innocuous organisation was set up. The Légion Française des Combattants sounded like a harmless old comrades’ association, but its offspring would turn out to be far from harmless.

  What was the Church doing all this time? If some individual priests were actively relieving grief and hardship, their superiors were mostly in wait-and-see mode. General Weygand was a devout Catholic and Pétain, as a pillar of law and order, appealed to the right-wing Catholic hierarchy. The Archbishop in France’s second city – a former pupil of Charles de Gaulle’s father named Cardinal Gerlier – declared in Lyons, ‘Pétain is France and France is Pétain’. In gratitude, Vichy passed a law on 4 September repealing the anti-clerical Religious Associations Law of 1903 and returning Church properties not already sold off by the state. Bells pealed and priests were free to go about in public clad in traditional cassocks.

  Earthly communications were also slowly getting easier. The major northern industrial city of Lille had suffered such damage to lines and switching centres that only twelve telephones remained connected, all in local government offices. By the end of August 640 subscribers had been re-connected. Written communication with loved ones across the Demarcation Line was permitted, but only on thirteen-line pre-printed postcards reading:

  At … … on (date)… /… is in good health / tired / slightly, badly / ill / wounded / killed / prisoner. … has died / is without news of … The family … is well / needs food / money / news / baggage … is back at… / works at … will return to school in … / has been received / to go to … on (date) … With love / kisses (signature).5

  More sophisticated reading material was also subject to German censorship. The first ‘Otto List’ of banned authors – named not after Abetz, but an eponymous Nazi professor – appeared on 27 August listing hundreds of books, including translations of works by German and Austrian authors such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Sigmund Freud. Bookshop owners had to hand over every copy for destruction by French police.

  Censorship of new works was less intrusive. Even before the one-sided ‘Convention’ of 28 September laying down the guidelines, no sane publisher wished to annoy the government or the Germans. On 8 November – his 30th birthday – francophile linguist Gerhard Heller arrived in Paris to take up his posting with the Propaganda Staffel, running the Referat Schrifttum, censoring books submitted by French publishers. He was to spend the next weeks reading day and night to work his way through the backlog and issuing a bon à tirage authorising publication in most cases.

  With Abetz’ backing, Sonderführer Heller passed almost every work submitted to his office, and was proud that, despite all the other materials in short supply or unobtainable, paper was never lacking for books by approved authors. His low-profile censorship was accepted even by best-sellers like Antoine de St-Exupéry and Albert Camus – who cut a chapter on Kafka from his first popular success Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

  Heller recalled being sent with a colleague to the Presses Universitaires de France to order managing director Paul Angoulvent to dump all his Jewish authors. Making the point that this was no request, the other officer took his pistol out of its holster and laid it on the desk, causing Angoulvent to go white as a sheet.6 Heller was more subtle, as when ordering the publishing house Mercure de France to withdraw and destroy all copies of Georges Duhamel’s book Lieu d’Asile. Off the record, he told managing director Jacques Bernard to hide some copies wrapped up and labelled ‘Property of Lt Heller’, so that when the time came, he could republish it without problems. Aware that the heart problems which had earned him the Paris posting would be no protection from being sent to the Russian front, Heller knew he was treading a dangerous path.

  Despite the censorship, the annual output of literary, art and scientific books published 1941–44 was no less than it had been pre-1939. Included were 300 translations from German, a speciality of the Aryanised publishers Nathan and Calmann-Lévy. The figure for 1943 was the highest in the world, with the French total of 9,348 books beating US publishing’s figure by more than 1,000 and UK output by 2,000. The reason? What else could one do when obliged by the curfew to stay at home night after night in that pre-television age?

  The books most people were interested in were their new ration books. Curiously, the English word ‘tickets’ was used for the small squares that had to be cut out and collected by butcher, baker and greengrocer when selling the specified amount of food to each customer – while in Britain they were called by the French word ‘coupons’.

  Entitlement varied with age, sex and work. Category C covered farmhands and others doing heavy manual work, with other workers in Category T. Category A covered all other adults between 21 and 70, while those over 70 were Category V. Infants were E, but children from 3 to 21 were
graded J1, J2 or J3. Babies were entitled to milk and the old received a larger bread ration. The average adult received 350g of bread per day, 350g of meat per week and a monthly allowance of 500g of sugar, 300g of coffee and 140g of cheese. Although rations for babies and young children were supposed to be adequate, records show that boys maturing in 1944 were 7cm shorter than those of 1935, while girls were 11cm shorter than their older sisters. Teeth especially suffered.7

  As in Britain during the war, the rich could still sate their hunger in restaurants. For low-income workers and the unemployed, a chain of state canteens was opened in towns, similar to the British Restaurants across the Channel. These rescos offering balanced three-course meals with wine for 8 to 16 francs were patronised by as many as 200,000 Parisians. At the other end of the market, journalist and gastronome Jean Galtier-Boissière was paying 100 francs a head to entertain his friends to oysters and beef with a good cheeseboard and wine. Alas, by 2 August 1941 he would lament in his diary having to pay 650 francs for three friends and himself to enjoy fresh sole followed by slices of mutton. He estimated that restaurant prices quadrupled in the two years from December 1940 and were ten times as high by the beginning of 1944. A contemporary joke told of a madman released after thirty years in an asylum. Appalled at the wartime menu in a restaurant, he asks for special treatment and is given lobster, mutton chops and chips, a cheeseboard and pastry to finish with. The bill comes to 1,250 francs. Aghast, he tenders in payment the only money he had on him when locked up. It is a single golden louis d’or. The waiter bows and returns with change of 2,000 francs.

  The value of gold had increased even more than that of food, but there were some things money could not buy. When Goering dined at Maxim’s, he was given a table by the orchestra while the favourite table of the Duke of Windsor and the Aga Khan was kept vacant for their return. He enjoyed the food enough to rule that the restaurant should be closed to all except high-ranking German officers, but lost interest in the idea once Eagle Day had come and gone without the destruction of the RAF. Released from internment, one politician’s British wife hired Fouquet’s for her celebration banquet – after which the gentlemen repaired to the cloakroom, to toast each other in black-market whisky, while she finished her meal with a Craven A cigarette ‘traded’ for food by her compatriots still behind bars in the St-Denis barracks.