B006NTJT4U EBOK
Page 41
In one of Maupassant’s stories about the occupation of 1871 two friends try to recreate a semblance of normality by going on a fishing expedition which ends badly because the Germans take them to be spies. In the Occupation of 1940–4, fishing again allowed men to retreat from the public sphere into private leisure. Hunting was banned in the Occupied Zone, and the confiscation of carrier pigeons put an end to a traditionally popular pastime in the north-east. Fishing, however, was still possible. Never had the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, one of Paris’s biggest stores, sold more fishing tackle. One morning in August 1941, Jean Guéhenno, taking the first metro at 5.30 a.m., in order to secure a good place in the queue for an Ausweis (he was unsuccessful since there were already 300 people when he arrived), watched as the carriages filled up with fishermen who descended at Châtelet station to take up their places on the banks of the Seine.60
Fishing rods sometimes assumed political significance since carrying two rods (‘deux gaules’) could be a coded reference to de Gaulle. Such gestures could hardly be characterized as resistance, but they were part of a developing culture of opposition and irreverence. There was a rich seam of Occupation jokes. Three early jokes are among the best-known:
The definition of collaboration: ‘Give me your watch and I’ll tell you the time.’61
Hitler, desperate to get across the Channel, promises the Grand Rabbi of Berlin he will abandon anti-Semitic measures if he is told how Moses succeeded in crossing the Red Sea. The reply comes that Moses’s magic wand could be found in … the British Museum.62
On the return of Napoleon II’s remains in December 1940: the Parisians say they prefer coal to ashes.63
A 1941 joke:
Hitler telephones Mussolini after the failure of Italy’s attack on Greece:
‘Benito, aren’t you in Athens yet?’
‘I can’t hear you, Adolf.’
‘I said, aren’t you in Athens yet?’
‘I can’t hear you. You must be ringing from a long way—presumably London.’
A later joke:
Did you know the Marshal was dead?
No. Since when?
Three months ago, but his entourage have hidden it from him.64
Many Occupation jokes were collected in 1945 in a book with the title ‘Resistance through Humour’.65 Although the term ‘resistance’ seems excessive, jokes were certainly seen as subversive by the authorities: two peasants from a village near Draguignan were prosecuted for naming their horse ‘Darlan’.66 Before Pétain’s visit to Marseilles in December 1940 the police arrested a bookseller whose window contained portraits of Pétain and Darlan surrounded by piles of Hugo’s Les Misérables.67 Displaying portraits of Darlan and Laval with the word ‘vendu’ (‘sold out’) underneath was a common form of not so innocent humour. One can track the progress of jokes in the journals of the period, an ever-thickening thread of dissent, creating complicity where there had previously been only suspicion.
Responding to the Germans
Whatever their private views of the Germans, inhabitants of the Occupied Zone had to construct codes of conduct towards them. On his first visit to the German Institute in Paris, Chardonne spotted Giraudoux in a corridor: ‘each of us averted his eyes like two men meeting in a brothel’.68 But familiarity blunted embarrassment. As Fabre-Luce described these Institute occasions, ‘when the French and Germans meet on an equal footing, they start by displaying coldness and end in cordiality’.69 These were at least encounters by choice, but François Mauriac’s son, Claude, described the difficulties of having a German officer billeted in the family house:
Yesterday the Captain came into the salon to present himself to my parents. Young, with a fairly sympathetic manner, distinguished, with a great desire to be correct. But he does not speak our language and we do not speak his. There is such an abyss between us … Catherine (who is Alsatian) serves as interpreter. The conversation languishes. Everyone makes an effort and tries to bring out the few words they know. He is certainly no less embarrassed than us, clicking his heels and bowing at everything … He dares not take his leave. We don’t like to give him the leave to do so. The minutes drag … We meet again after dinner. One cannot tell him to go. One has at least to make the gesture of inviting him to sit down. But he takes the gesture at face value. Does he feel obliged to stay or does he prefer this embarrassed tête-à-tête to the solitude of his frozen room? He sits down and stays … To try and look at ease I turn on the radio: never have the English stations been more arrogant. With strained smiles on both sides, we finish by finding a neutral station and stay with it.70
This nervous testing of the waters was characteristic of the early days of Occupation. People who did not have such proximity forced upon them could try to ignore the Germans, who were kept separate from the French as much as possible. Certain restaurants, brothels, and cinemas (Soldatenkino) were reserved for exclusive German use. But the Germans also brought a mass of vexatious regulations which they enforced with efficiency, not to say officiousness: people were fined for not crossing the road at proper crossings, cyclists were stopped for riding three abreast, pedestrians had to step off the pavements to let Germans pass. The Germans were suspicious of French hygiene, and tried to impose their own standards where their soldiers were affected.71 In the larger cities, they found French women to be excessively made-up and were shocked by the sight of so many blacks.72
As well as an irritation, the German presence also became a habit, as Sartre observed of Paris:
Clearly the immense majority of the population abstained from any contact with the German army. But one must not forget that the occupation was part of daily life … We pressed against the Germans in the metro, we bumped into them in the dark evening … In the long run a sort of shameful and indefinable solidarity developed between the Parisians and these soldiers who were so similar, in the end, to French soldiers. A solidarity which was not accompanied by sympathy … At the start, the sight of the Germans was offensive to us, and then, little by little, we learnt not to notice them, they took on an institutional appearance. What completed the process of making them inoffensive was their ignorance of our language… They were more like the furniture than they were like men.
On one occasion, Sartre saw a car knock over a German colonel, and ten French bystanders ran to help:
They hated the occupier, I am sure; and among them, there were undoubtedly some future resistance fighters who fired on the Germans on that same street two years later … But was the man lying under the car an occupier? What should one have done? The concept of an enemy is only clear and fixed if the enemy is separated from us by the barrier of gunfire.73
In smaller communities, the Germans inevitably became part of the rhythms of local life. As Richard Cobb observes, in the notebooks of the Breton novelist Louis Guilloux, describing life in Saint-Brieuc, the Germans become ‘so familiar as to be taken as a matter of course, unaccompanied by expressions of anger, indignation or surprise’: the French policeman raises his hat in greeting to the German policeman standing on the step; a friend whom Guilloux visits is giving a young German officer a French lesson which is interrupted for a friendly argument about the outcome of the war; a beach in July is so crowded with swimmers that it is impossible to distinguish French swimmers from German ones; French children know which Germans are likely to be a soft touch for sweets.74 In such communities, ‘the Germans’ inevitably became individuals. People quickly learnt to distinguish the differences between army officers, the Feldgendarmerie (nicknamed ‘bulldogs’ because of their chains worn around the neck), the female auxiliaries (nicknamed ‘grey mice’ because of the colour of their uniforms).
Familiarity might salve the wound of occupation, but the Germans knew they were not popular. As early as August 1940 a German army report on public opinion in thirteen départements noted that the ‘exemplary, amiable and helpful behaviour of the German soldiers towards the population has aroused little sympathy’.75 The tone of these arm
y reports remained consistently pessimistic. In early June 1941 it was noted that ‘even Britain’s hostile acts against France do not change the population’s attitude’; a month later, that the German invasion of the Soviet Union had not made the French more favourably disposed towards Germany. Even Professor Grimm whose pro-collaboration lecture tour was such a success, observed in June 1941: ‘My friends tell me that the climate has never been so bad … The French rejoice at the fact that British planes are attacking their cities… The French who are well-disposed to us despair of their compatriots.’76
How did people manifest their hostility to the Germans? Charles Rist observed of Paris in November 1940: ‘People pass by the Germans without seeing them. They are surrounded by silence. Silence in the trains, in the metro, in the street. Each keeps his thoughts to himself. And yet one senses the hostility.’ Paris was christened by the Germans ‘Stadt ohne Blick’.77 People tried to express disapproval and retain dignity while avoiding overt provocation. The Paris Métro was one site of enforced proximity where people improvised their responses. Jacques Biélinky, ultimately to perish in Sobibor, noted one day that a German soldier had politely offered his seat in the metro: ‘I accepted with thanks’. Two weeks later he saw a ‘pleasant-looking’ German smile at a child sitting opposite on his mother’s knee. The woman looked away brusquely. Galtier-Boissière reported: ‘In the metro a very young German with a gentle face gets up to offer his seat to Charlotte. She refuses. The soldier, disconcerted, offers it to me. I refuse. The poor man does not know how to get out of this ridiculous situation and he remains standing, all embarrassed, next to this empty seat which no one wants.’ Guéhenno summed up the situation in February 1943: ‘when you get on the metro we squeeze closer to each other to make you a place. You are untouchable. I lower my head so that you don’t see my eyes, to deny you the joy of an exchanged glance. You are in the middle of us, like an object, in a circle of silence and ice.’ The German writer Felix Hartlaub, on the receiving end of this silence, noted the ‘arctic’ climate in June 1941.78
From the beginning of the Occupation, however, the Germans also faced more active opposition than this. The first months of Occupation in Bordeaux— not a city with a heroic reputation—witnessed many anti-German incidents:
9 August 1940: a Gendarme was arrested for saying that it was ‘painful to have to salute these Germans pigs’. He had been denounced to the authorities by a Swiss man who overheard the remark.
14 August: in the early hours of the morning a German marine was shot dead in Royan. The culprit was never identified, and Royan had to pay a fine of 3 million francs.
23 August: in the Olympia cinema, German newsreels of Hitler caused hilarity among the audience. The Germans ordered future newsreels to be shown with the lights on.
27 August: a Polish Jew, Israel Leizer Karp, was executed for shouting insults at a passing German column.
28 August: in the early hours, shots were fired at a German patrol. The culprits were not found, but the local police were informed that in future such incidents would cause severe reprisals.
28 August: an 18-year-old sailor was found slashing German posters in the Place des Quinconces. He was sentenced to three months in prison for sabotage.
2 September: the German telephone cable linking La Rochelle to Royan was cut. The culprit, 19-year-old Pierre Roche, was shot by the Germans on 7 September.79
Similar incidents occurred throughout the Occupied Zone in the first months after the Armistice.80 But they petered out at the end of the year because, without any organized Resistance movement to give them a purpose, they were futile, dangerous, and led nowhere. The booing of German newsreels, however, remained a major irritation for the Occupation authorities. Turning up the lights only caused people to arrive at the cinema after the newsreels were over. In the first months of the Occupation, there was also a lot of anti-German graffiti. In one week of January 1941, the Paris police counted 400 handwritten anti-German stickers on walls.81
There were some early instances of collective opposition to the Germans. The funerals of Allied pilots who had been shot down gave people an opportunity to manifest their feelings. In Lanester in Britanny some 2,000 people gathered in December 1941, apparently spontaneously, for the funeral of three British pilots; 5,000 gathered in Rennes in April 1941. Twenty-one demonstrations of this kind have been recorded between August 1940 and November 1942.82 Usually they passed off without incident—unlike the famous demonstration that occurred in Paris on 11 November 1940. On that day several thousand students assembled at the place de l’Étoile in Paris, singing the Marseillaise and shouting ‘Long live de Gaulle’. News of this event spread throughout France, but the severity of the German reaction surprised the participants, and discouraged any repetition. On 14 July 1941, 488 people in the Paris suburbs were stopped by police for gathering illegally or wearing patriotic colours.83 On 11 November 1941, however, the whole country was quiet.
Not all anti-German gestures were spontaneous and uncoordinated. When de Gaulle from London called on the population to show hostility to the Germans by staying at home between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. (3 p.m. and 4 p.m. in the Occupied Zone) on 1 January 1941, the appeal was quite well observed in the North, less so in the South.84 One observer wrote: ‘for a week everyone I meet has only spoken about this hour of protest against the invader’.85 In Quimper the street was crowded at 2.55 p.m. and deserted five minutes later.86 On Joan of Arc day, 11 May 1941, de Gaulle asked people to be silently present in the streets between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., again with some success.87 In March 1941, the BBC called on people to draw Vs for victory on walls. This idea caught on and the prefecture of Paris counted 1,000 Vs on 7 April 1941. In Montpellier the prefect complained that the extent of such defacement had become ‘disagreeable to the eye’. To undermine this campaign, the Germans started putting up their own V posters in Paris. This ‘battle of the Vs’ was significant enough to be noted by several diarists of the period.88
One should not exaggerate the importance of these gestures. Only after the Resistance imposed itself as a realistic alternative to Vichy did people start to believe they could change their situation. Before this, they followed events in the outside world, and desired a British victory, but without seeing how they could contribute to it. One observer wrote: ‘France is like a not very well off tourist who visits a casino and watches the roulette being played without playing himself. Now he watches the English game, now the Russian.’89
In the first eighteen months of Occupation the Germans were more concerned about maintaining the discipline of their own troops than responding to opposition from the French population. A German report in October 1940 observed that the amount of sabotage was ‘neither particularly high, nor particularly preoccupying for the troops’.90 Especially in the early days of the Occupation, Goebbels’s main concern was that the German public might have too favourable a view of France. He ordered that ‘papers must not paint Paris in too attractive a way’.91 France remained a privileged posting for most German soldiers throughout the Occupation. As one of them wrote: ‘the charm of Paris is difficult to deny. It bewitches even those least sensitive to it.’ Even the military authorities, although aware of the unpopularity of the Germans in France, accepted that this caused them few problems. An army report in August 1941 noted: ‘the French adapt themselves to the requirements of the occupying powers and behave in a correct manner’.92
The Sociology of Opinion: Notables and Peasants
Were there significant differences in the attitudes of different social groups towards Vichy and the Germans? Prefects’ reports provide only the most general answers to this question. Early in 1941, the prefect of the Lot noted that collaboration was supported by the bourgeoisie; the peasants showed no open hostility; and the workers were against it. In December of the same year, the prefect of the Limoges region reported: ‘Very striking hostility to the government from most workers, small farmers, small shopkeepers and artisans; unreserved suppo
rt from big business and big shopkeepers, magistrates and notables.’93
The French term notable, which has no sociological precision, describes figures of local influence such as landowners, doctors, vets, lawyers, and pharmacists. Some were figures of social importance who felt that republican democracy had displaced them from rightful positions of leadership. But in other cases the social status of notable was conferred by election: in the Nord, with its strong tradition of municipal pride, many Socialist mayors had been in office for so long that they had become the notables of the region.
For at least two years, Vichy enjoyed considerable support from notables. They staffed its institutions as they had those of the Republic, acting as mayors, sitting on commissions administratives, providing the local cadres of the Peasant Corporation or the Secours national. They were not all from the right. In the Loiret the different kinds of notables who served Vichy included a royalist aristocrat who saw an opportunity to eliminate the influence of an anticlerical institutrice; a Socialist instituteur who in 1941 agreed to become mayor of one of the four largest towns in the département; and the moderate conservative doctor who served as mayor of Orleans from 1940 to 1944.94 In the Nord, as we have seen, most Socialist mayors remained in office, although they had to bring some conservatives into their municipal councils. In some départements, the cadres of the Legion came from the Radical Party. This improved the local image of an organization that was frequently viewed as sectarian and intolerantly right-wing.95