French and Germans, Germans and French

3 Paris Collaborationism: French and Germans

Le soldatenéme, dit-il … y a pas bon. Les Fridolins, ils sont un peu trop fortiches pour moi …⁷

… Tout à l’heure, un Boche m’a demandé son chemin dans la rue. Il voulait aller à l’Etoile. Je l’ai envoyé à la Bastille …⁸

(Jean Dutourd, Au Bon Beurre)

fei te pas de movesan on va iberleiben de-chir set letre, orvor …⁹(Message addressed to his nineteen-year-old son in the Southern Zone by a Polish Jew on his departure from Drancy)

(Henri Amouroux, Les Passions et les haines)

It would be tempting – and not necessarily inaccurate – to describe an occupation regime in the crude and simple terms of exploiters and exploited, and, certainly, from the autumn of 1942 and the spring of 1943, Franco-German relations, under the pressure of increasing need, took on more and more that simple and ancient relationship. But, especially at the start, in the unbelievable (as much to the astonished victors as to the shattered French) outcome of May/June 1940, the two-way relationship was often much more complicated, more sophisticated, and, indeed, politer than that. There existed, on both sides, ties of friendship that had been created in the interwar years; and, finding themselves, almost overnight, in control of the complicated administration of a capital city – an event for which they had never planned (they had brought along an ageing, well-tried blueprint for a military administration of the Lille area), the Germans sought out in the first place those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen whom they already knew. A German railway engineer would seek out his opposite number, a German detective would have contacts in the police judiciaire, a German army medical officer would know some of the pontifes of Boucicaut, Bichat, Broussais and Lariboisière. Abetz, of course, had formed an enveloping pattern of relationships in the French literary world and in le Tout-Paris. One of the young university graduates who was all at once to find himself in charge of Paris publishing had written a thesis on a French literary theme and had spent several years as a lecteur d’allemand in the University of Toulouse. He embarked on his new task with a sense of personal excitement, for it offered him a unique opportunity to come into close personal contact – sometimes daily – with all the leading figures of the Parisian literary scene. To see him merely as a censor, the obedient instrument of the Propaganda staffel, would be to oversimplify a relationship that was much more personal and vital. He wanted to get to know as many novelists and poets as possible, and to publish as many of their works as he could. In both aims, he was extraordinarily successful; and at the end of an idyllic four-year stay in the French capital – a city that he loved – he could look back to a publishers’ list of enormous distinction and variety. His concern throughout had not been to patronize as wide a range as possible of novels in order to illustrate the intelligence and moderation of the German cultural authorities – though the sheer variety of his list would have given much weight to such an interpretation – but to see into print the works of a host of authors whom he admired and liked.

Indeed, some of the well-educated young men in their late twenties and early thirties who all at once found themselves in positions of limitless authority in July 1940 were often sought out by French teenagers of both sexes, not because they were powerful and could exercise patronage, but because they were good-looking, fair and charming. Montherlant was not the only Frenchman to succumb to a sexual attraction for the well-groomed, blue-eyed victors. So many of these young Germans carried with them the mystery pertaining to foreigners, the physical representatives of a new race of heroes, and the fascination associated with total victory (and total humiliation). The French system had failed, so let us try to find out about the German system that had been crowned with such prestigious success. Courir au-devant du vainqueur is a reaction not necessarily as mean and as calculating as it sounds, and such admiration could be genuine, even if starry-eyed. And of course the recipients of such adulation were not just dumb instruments of Goebbels or Ley; they, too, were young and susceptible, and, as all would recall, Paris in the summer of 1940 was alluringly beautiful (so was Paris in the summer of 1944).

The collaborationists, technically traitors (and often punished as such) were not always the dupes, nor the servile instruments, of the Germans, even though they were bound to compete among themselves for German favour, because without the Germans, they would not have amounted to very much, would indeed have been nothing. But there were limits – depending on the individual – beyond which many could not be pushed. Paquis, for instance, emerges from his memoirs, written in Fresnes while he awaited execution, as quite a plucky little fellow, often involved in monumental rows with his German superiors, as well as a disarming humourist. Men of such total and creeping servility as de Brinon or Benoist-Méchin were rare, even in ultracollaborationist ranks.

In fact, it was seldom a one-way relationship. The Germans, too, could be fooled (though their anger would be extremely dangerous). Above all, they too had their personal motivations and vested interests, especially in secure employment under the occupation regime. Those holding down temporary, or semipermanent, jobs in delectable Paris were, of course, the object of intense jealousy and even hostility on the part of those who found themselves engaged in the dreadful war in the East. No one in Paris (or elsewhere in France) could feel entirely safe from the dreaded threat of a posting to the East. So they needed to exaggerate the importance of the various empires that they had created for themselves within the chaos of competing Paris administrations; and this meant inflating the importance of their French clients, who in this respect, especially from 1943 onwards, were in the process of becoming their associates, if not their masters. Abetz could no more dispense with Luchaire than Luchaire with Abetz; and one could point to a similar two-way relationship right down the scale of administrative hierarchies. The French had their respective patrons, but these had to convince Berlin (and Berlin spoke with a great many voices) that their protégés were worth patronizing and offered more than just the negative value of keeping someone else – less desirable – out. Only Sauckel and the Gestapo did not need to seek out French cooperation; but even the Gestapo would have been largely ineffective had it been deprived of the willing services of its spare rib, le Gestapo français.

Ultimately, all those who had succeeded in holding onto quite delightful posts in the French capital had to persuade increasingly hard-pressed higher authorities in Berlin that a French policy of some sort was worthwhile and that the French were worth wooing. Indeed, agreeable posts elsewhere had to be justified to superiors, posts in Dijon, Toulouse, Montauban, Bordeaux. The officer in charge of relations with the Bordeaux press told his friends among the journalists that nothing could have upset him more than to have to leave the city, especially if it were to go east; Lille was not much sought after, but even it was infinitely better than the Russian Front. At quite a humble level, in the case of Haefs – the limpetlike official who had attached himself to Radio Paris, following it, like a rejected suitor, from Paris to Nancy, thence to Belfort and Sigmaringen – could no doubt be reproduced over and over again. For Haefs, there had to be a Radio Paris, however useless it might be once it had set up tent in Germany, because it was the alibi that protected him from the Eastern Front.

Whatever directives came down from the various competing feudatories in Berlin – and there was a wide and constantly shifting variety of French (or anti-French) policies – at Paris level relations between occupants and occupés were obscured, twisted and complicated by all sorts of nuances of personal relationships, ranging from complete mutual trust to a jarring acrimony. Paquis always seems to have been difficult to handle, and he was by no means the only Paris collaborationist who had succeeded in persuading himself that he was a French patriot – what is more a Lorrainer (he was actually of lower-middle-class origin from the Vosges) – and that the Germans had some rather unpleasant national characteristics. For Paquis, one sometimes feels, the Germans were not really worthy of Hitler, and they fell short of the Nazi ideal. Céline was to end up lumping all Germans with the extensive ragbag of his other hate-figures. Ultimately, collaborationism would be subjected to a multiplicity of Franco-German likes and dislikes. Such and such a collaborationist would all at once fall out of favour; a few (Deloncle was one of them) were even liquidated when they became a nuisance. But such and such a protector might fall out of favour too, caught, along with his French protégés (and accomplices) with his hand in the till. As Delarue has shown in Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation, collaborationism could spread downwards into some extremely murky areas involving le milieu and the bad boys from the Berlin criminal underworld. For, at the crudest level, collaboration could be a mutually profitable racket; indeed, from 1943 on, it became one increasingly so.

So the fascination exercised by the study of collaborationism on the historian (especially the Anglo-Saxon one) can be attributed partly to unfamiliarity with something outside the national experience, but, perhaps even more, to the sheer range of mutual personal situations involved in what was always a changeable, even fast-moving, process.

In most cases, collaboration represented a business relationship profitable to both parties. It could not be all take and no give. The German censor got French books published and French films financed. The reading public – bigger than ever since there was little else to do during the long nights of the curfew and many people read in bed – was satisfied with a particularly brilliant harvest; the film public was kept amused, and the Germans were provided with evening entertainment. French compositors – many of them former CGT-istes – set the type for the daily Pariser Zeitung with the same professional skill and the same indifference to content as they had, in peacetime, for the continental edition of the Daily Mail. The Germans took over most of the best hotels, while retaining their regular staff. It was presumably all the same for a chambermaid in the Crillon or a night porter in the George-V to cater for the needs of German tourists in uniform as to cater for those of American tourists in civilian clothes. At Chez Maxim’s and at similar prestige restaurants it would be a matter of course for a white-coated waiter to go on waiting in white gloves, for what was a waiter to do, if not to wait? Indeed, in this respect, it would be important to take into account the binding element of habit and familiarity. Four years is a long time – long enough for the barman of Fouquet’s to be able to greet his regular German customers by name and to serve them drinks without these being named. A recent book, Paris in the Third Reich, describes the genuine distress of the waiters and maids of one of the big hotels when their customers of four years’ standing proceeded to pack up in the second half of August 1944. They had grown used to them and accustomed to meeting their unstated needs. People in the hotel, catering or restaurant business are cosmopolitan as much from habit as out of interest, and it is in the nature of their work to deal more with foreigners than with their own compatriots. The Germans seem to have been quite generous with tips, they were not given to quibbling over bills and they represented the ideal sort of customer in the hotel trade: the long-staying resident. Even the legendary newspaper lady at her kiosque who is supposed to have greeted her morning customer on something over 1,200 mornings (Sunday presumably excluded?), as she handed him the Pariser Zeitung with ‘voici ta feuille, grand con’, was not expressing any deep-rooted hostility to the uniformed reader. There is something disarmingly familiar both about ‘grand con’ and the tutoiement, even if it clearly did not get through to the thick-headed and rather obtuse Feldwebel. Equally, it is hard to spend four years working with a group of people without some sort of familiarity developing; this might take the form of mutual respect at a shared professional level, or of amusement, irritation, or sheer exasperation. In any case, unlike the forbidden areas of pavement, the barriers would be down and some form of dialogue would be possible.

Parisians had become so used to the physical public presence of the Germans that when, all at once, the helmeted sentries in their boxes outside the Majestic were withdrawn – and this had happened discreetly at night, so that the boxes were seen to be empty in the morning – they simply could not believe their eyes. Even the two nervous and heavily-armed sentries seen by Guéhenno posted on the Pont-Neuf, holding their grenades with one hand, their machine-pistols in the other, long after the fall of the prefecture of police, were not immediately killed; it was only after three hours that the two poor wretches who had overstayed their welcome were quietly shot in the back by a couple of civilians. The Germans had been there so long that they had even succeeded in imposing on the daily awareness of Parisians an alien topography over the familiar grid of streets and boulevards and métro lines: lazaret this way, supply services that way, the place de l’Opéra a veritable semaphore of boldly lettered wooden pointers in red and black. Once the Germans had gone, sans trompette ni fanfare, the signposts briefly stayed up, pointing to destinations now meaningless and to institutions that were no longer there. There was a sort of shocked pause as though of disbelief, before the message sank in and people set about pulling them down and piling them onto a bonfire. If, as some of my French friends have asserted, there hung about the Germans a smell – a combination of leather and after-shave – that was unique to them, well, then it was a smell to which they had become fully accustomed and that must have acquired a droit de cité almost as tenacious as the hot breath of the métro or the odour of garlic that used to linger so lovingly on the Orléans-Clignancourt line. No doubt it was a smell that would be sorely missed by a certain number of Parisian women.

Collaboration is an endlessly elastic concept that is not easy to define. Was anyone who worked, directly or indirectly, for the Germans a collaborator? Was the driver of a métro train a collaborator because in the first-class carriage somewhere well behind his box, in the middle of the rame, there were German, as well as French, passengers, wedged fraternally like close-packed sardines? Was the driver of a vélo-taxi who hauled in the little wicker basket behind him two stout German officers a collaborator? One recent author at least, David Pryce-Jones, in the severity of his indictment of the Parisians – pretty well all the Parisians – would seem to suggest as much. He even manages to compare Paris unfavourably to Warsaw. It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have been similarly reduced to rubble. The author in question seems to have regarded it as a sort of moral failing on the part of the Parisians that it wasn’t. Few everyday people would be very likely to subscribe to a patriotism so demanding. Occupants and occupés at least agreed that life had to go on: an eminently sensible aim.

With this in view, collaboration often took the form of government and administration on a putting-out basis. The Germans gave the orders; the French carried them out. In return for a rather dubious semblance of sovereignty – more of an appearance than a reality – the Gestapo and the other police bodies delegated the exercise of repression to the French police, and, later, to the Milice (or, rather, they stood aside and left the Milice to get on with its own programme of torture and killing). Such an arrangement clearly suited the Germans, who, from the start, were desperately short of repressive personnel, even after Knochen and Oberg had set up shop in the avenue Foch and had expanded the various services of the SD: a total of ten thousand police of various affiliations, including the Feldgendarmerie, the main concern of which was military crime. The French, on the other hand, could offer a total force of a hundred thousand police (including the gendarmerie, but not including the Milice), ten thousand of whom were available in the Paris area (another author, Azéma, puts the figure as high as twenty thousand, on the basis of the total force of the agents de la paix who went on strike in the prefecture of police in August 1944). A formidable force, then, and, after 1942, with the formation of the Sections Spéciales, often an extremely zealous one, several Paris commissaires de police – Poinsot, David, Rigal, Rotée – earning notoriety in their eagerness to track down Communists and résistants. The Paris police as a whole were to receive a number of testimonies to their effectiveness as partners in collaboration and repression from Knochen and his colleagues. There were no doubt exceptions – many refer to individual commissaires who gave advance warnings of an impending rafle – but the general impression is that, despite the dismissal of Chiappe in 1936, the Paris police remained much as he had recruited it, and that those of higher rank were often politically motivated and had certainly not taken kindly to the experience of the Popular Front, even if individual agents, so many of them of peasant origin from the Haute-Saône and the Haute-Marne, had likewise the greatest antipathy for students and lycéens, of whatever political leanings. It was certainly a brutal and extremely effective force.

At the public level of collaborationism, the relationship seldom seems to have gone much beyond this everyday, businesslike partnership (though the partners were not equal). Senior and junior partners might dine together in the evenings (the Germans playing hosts in the vanquisheds’ capital) or attend social functions that might – or might not – have a propaganda value (the test would be the presence or the absence of photographers and reporters from Signal). It seldom seems to have gone beyond such necessary administrative politesses. Even the French ultracollaborationists – the French nazis – stuck to their French wives or mistresses, and, in the last stages of the war, they travelled with them and their children to Germany, transporting thither their often trivial and unedifying quarrels, jealousies and panics. The leading Germans kept their wives in the Reich (supplying them with the luxury products of the rue de la Paix), or sought consolation among the German womens’ services on the spot. It was a relationship in which both parties kept their distances and maintained a certain reserve.

Collaborationism is a more public and political form of collaboration. The latter could also extend to a multitude of varying personal relationships, ranging from the timid, tender plant of love between individuals, a situation generally disastrous to both parties concerned and subjected to the terrible fragility imposed by a military situation in the rapidly changing conditions of war, to collusion between black marketeers (Joanovici, ‘Monsieur Jo’, though a Bessarabian Jew, thrived from such underground transactions with the German supply services), or the sporting rivalry between French and German torturers: rue Lauriston versus avenue Foch. There were other, intermediate levels; not all Franco-German idylls followed the tender path of Tristan and Iseult or of Hiroshima mon amour. Many French women latched onto the Germans for what they could get out of them, whether in the form of presents, or the more elusive goal of marriage (German serving soldiers were not allowed to marry Frenchwomen nor those of other occupied countries, though, presumably, at least up to 1943, they could marry Italians). In 1940 or 1941, a German husband might seem much the best hold on the future; he was the man of the future, Germany was the country of the future, and the passport to the Thousand Year Reich would be a husband of that nationality. As it turned out, such calculations were to prove short-term investments; by 1943, the côte of the uniformed German male was already beginning to plummet, and by the summer of 1944, innumerable similarly minded French girls – including a number of Marseille prostitutes from the rue des Couteliers – had concluded that the GI was the man of the future. He was also much easier to marry. Wars always widen the areas of matrimonial tourism, and, after April 1945, a number of former French prisoners of war and labour deportees under the STO (Azéma puts the figure at about ten thousand, out of a total of one million and a quarter) were to elect to stay behind in a defeated Germany and to continue to cultivate thousands of hectares of rich Westphalian land, to run a hotel or a beer-house, or to tend with loving care vineyards in the Moselle or in Bavaria; this, too, could turn out to be a two-way process, with German husbands long since lost to sight and mind in the snow of the East.

In 1940 and 1941, at least, a German husband – or a German lover – would seem a most desirable catch for a midinette, an arpète, a cinema usherette or a dactylo from Belleville-Ménilmontant or the eastern suburbs. Even the PCF would make of natural inclination a political duty, for how better to fraternize? But a German husband being temporarily beyond administrative reach, one could at least make a less direct, more oblique, bid on the future by securing German children. By the middle of 1943, eighty thousand Frenchwomen – one would so much like to know of what classes and social origins, whether urban or rural, whether Parisian or provincial – had claimed children’s benefits from the German military authorities and had requested German nationality for their offspring – and this only from the Occupied Zone; and Amouroux considers this figure to be only the tip of the iceberg. More banally, for the girl concerned with only short-term benefits, a German boyfriend could offer immediate and solid advantages not just to the working-class girl, but to the lycéenne from the XVIme and the VIIIme: le prestige de l’étranger, the hint of perversity and adventure, the wonderfully persuasive white dress uniform of a young Luftwaffe pilot, dinner in sumptuous surroundings, the best linen, starched napkins en dindon, fresh flowers on the table, heavy silver tableware, the obsequious deference of the waiters (one’s own contemptible compatriots), the attentiveness and elaborate politeness of the officer in the uniform of the Master Race. This would add a delectable spice to the pleasure, the first step towards collaborationism, whether at a personal or at a public level, being a desire to opt out of one’s own nationality and to cross the frontiers of an alien and adopted one.

One often senses that there is an element of rather childish provocation in such ostentatious forms of ‘consorting with the enemy’, a slap in the face to family and to compatriots – parlour games, jeux interdits indulged in by bored adolescents of the XVIme, games that could be quite agreeably combined with flirtations with the Resistance. Not a conscious double jeu, merely the excitement of trying out the temperature of the water at both ends of the pool: secret résistante in the afternoon, brassy collaboratrice by candle-light in the evening. A perverse game involving a double deception, nonetheless just a game, something not to be taken seriously. Also a claim to attention: ‘Look at me. I’ve crossed the border. I’ve done the unspeakable. I’ve gone to the end of the journey.’

But, among grown-ups, such a proclamation of the latest version of an overgrown épate-bourgeois would become increasingly strident, aggressive and hysterical, as the situation of the Germans became more desperate and the sense of isolation and apartness from the national community increased, and as one after another line of retreat was closed behind them. It is so much easier – without being a great patriot or a committed résistant – to go along with a generally accepted national mood, however prudent, passive, lazy or plain cowardly, than thus to set foot on a foreign shore and proudly to display the pagan flags of the conqueror. There will always be a slightly mad, embittered minority within any national community – generally social misfits, academic or professional failures, people uneasy with a lower-middle-class background – only too eager to persuade themselves that the enemy begins at home. How Georges Darien, a rancorous émigré de l’intérieur, hated and despised the French! How he ranted on about their ugliness, their stunted physical appearance, their degeneracy, their racial contamination! The only difference was that Darien did not have a heroic foreign race to which to transfer his admiration; while despising all Latins and reserving his choicest scorn for Belgians, he did not idealize the north Europeans, though he had a sneaking regard for the English and a healthy fear of English judges and lawcourts.

Céline and Drieu harped on similar themes, while Rebatet – more than any of the others – describing himself as a French nazi, wanted desperately to be a German one. The Germans presumably treated him with amused contempt. For them it would have seemed like dressing up a monkey in German uniform.

Perhaps such attitudes represented a form of self-hatred. There was certainly a considerable element of this in the case of Drieu, though he was an intellectual who was prepared to try anything once – he had tinkered with surrealism, sipped briefly at the Marxist table, flirted with internationalism and pacifism, pondered, like his fellow trifler and narcissist, Malraux, on the Wisdom of the East, hovered between pederasty and lechery, between cruelty to women and delight in their (necessarily admiring) company. He prostrated himself before the German conquerors, then became disillusioned with them (which was something entirely predictable, for Drieu had never stuck to anything, picking up this or that toy only to throw it away in a tantrum). Even his collaborationism seems to have been tepid and rather half-hearted, not unlike that of the sad and ageing naughty boy, Cocteau (indeed, even in their forties and fifties Drieu, Cocteau and Brasillach remained utterly spoilt, rather bored, children, who had never grown up and never ceased to attitudinize, in public and in private); the only time that the sickly, effete Drieu actually went through with something, went to the end of the road, was when he committed suicide in April 1945, the logical conclusion of a life of frittered futility.

There is also no mistaking in such attitudes the expressions of misguided pride and ultimate arrogance, as if it should have been of some world-shaking importance as to what choice they should have made, what side they should have deigned to come down on (there was, of course, as much arrogance in the attitude of a Gide pointedly – and in print – electing to remain Above It All), as though the future of civilization were to rest on their agonized decisions. There is apparently no limit to the conceit – and to the humourlessness – of a French intellectual, ever ready to pontificate in public on this issue or that. Guéhenno refers – with disgust – to the Manifesto of the French Intellectuals of March 1942, in which a choice selection of the Elect took it upon themselves publicly to denounce – poor shades of Bertrand Barère – the crimes of Britain and of the British government. Guéhenno believes that they did it to order, so as to please the Germans. It is much likelier that they did it in order to get themselves into print. It is an interesting document, grouping Céline, Drieu and Brasillach with such literary hacks as Donnay, Ajalbert, Amiel and Fernandez, grateful no doubt to have conquered at least a strapontin in such an august literary academy.

Then, at least in the case of Drieu, Brasillach and Montherlant, there was the veritable obsession with what they regarded as the Decadence of the West (these people thought in capitals and in the points of the compass, as if they had been literary geopoliticians), an unconscious mirror-image perhaps, as all three were indeed decadent, and their form of collaborationism droops like a sickly flower out of Baudelaire’s enervating greenhouse. As the West is decadent, let us look further East – but not too far East – to the virile Nazis: a dangerous geography that could indeed direct the committed gaze even farther eastwards, this time towards the equally virile Soviets.

Such attitudes also represent a rather pathetic form of self-deception (similar to Rebatet’s fantasies when attempting to will himself into the skin of a German). In his candid and often humorous and observant account of the shrinking French community in Sigmaringen and beyond to the shores of Lake Constance, Paquis convinces us that, as this group becomes more and more hopelessly committed to the consequences of German defeat and disaster, in their personal attitudes, their paltry disputes, their small acts of cowardice and deceit, their evasions and their lies, or in the maintenance of a sort of desperate Parisian gouaille, they somehow become more, not less, French, almost caricatures of themselves, each playing up his or her provincial origins. The méridionaux, underneath the Teutonic firs, become even more southern, and as they wander through the pretty little German villages in their light-coloured suits, white silk mufflers, loud ties and black-and-white shoes, the galéjades pour out, and, with every move further away from the Midi, the accents become increasingly pointu. The Corsicans too seem set to revert to the peculiar mores of their island, while the Parisian a’s lengthen. A similar self-caricature can be observed among the companions of Tiffauges, the French prisoners of war in their camp in faraway East Prussia at the other end of Europe, in Tournier’s novel Le Roi des Aulnes.

What could be more French than the way Christian de la Maizière, when questioned as to how the members of the Division Charlemagne had described Hitler in conversations among themselves, replied, without hesitation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: ‘le Grand Jules, quoi!’ There was a vague awareness of this ineradicable complicity as it were entre Français, even among their enemies and executioners, when they treated the star prisoners of Fresnes with a degree of gentle pity, as fellow children who had somehow taken the wrong turn and had been unable to find their way back. Treason no doubt brings its own form of frisson; but the taste of treason must be very bitter when it is discovered that, however far one travels down that dangerous path (generally a lonely one, for, in Sigmaringen and beyond, there seems to have been little solidarity among fellow traitors, each driven more and more onto his own resources, couples scuttling furtively in different directions as time ran out), the Germans would never accept one as one of their own. The best they could do would be to offer such people diplomatic passports, false identities, considerable sums in Swiss francs, transport, a fighter plane, to enable them to get out anywhere. They were not even to be allowed the ultimate and saving grace of being permitted to participate in the purely national experience of total German collapse, as if their German masters wanted them out of the way so that they would not witness the death agony of the Third Reich. So they became unhappy, bewildered refugees in an indifferent Switzerland mainly concerned to pass them on, in a hostile Denmark, in a grudging Spain, till most at least crept back towards France, knocking on the door for readmission to a national community, to a national family that they had rejected, even if it meant the firing squad. At least the firing squad would be French. That at least seems to have been the message of the last, deeply moving pages of Paquis’s memoirs. From the time when, with a sort of relief, he had been dumped on the French side of the border, at Bâle, by a Swiss taxi, till the date of his execution a year and one month later, Paquis had succeeded in coming to terms with himself and with his identity as a Frenchman and a Vosgien. One believes him when he asserts that he felt no hatred towards his political adversaries, and that, though they had fought on opposite sides, in what was, in late 1943 and in the bloody spring and summer of 1944, in the process of becoming a full-scale French civil war (a war prolonged judicially, or without even the semblance of justice, almost for another year, in the bitter vengeance of l’Epuration), they all remained entre Français, understanding one another as such. The vulgar and strident broadcaster of Radio Paris, heard every day from July 1940 to mid-August 1944 – few can have put more energy into collaboration, few can have worked harder in that dubious cause, none can have enjoyed himself so much; for Paquis, collaborationism had been a daily, perhaps even hourly, pleasure, a triumphant assertion of a talent and a personality not previously revealed (or only hinted at in his previous experience as a French speaker for Radio Saragossa), a reminder that national disaster can often be turned to individual advantage. The steady purveyor of hate acquired dignity, serenity, silence and a sense of peace in his last months in Fresnes, as he listened to the distant sound of the métro, ligne de Sceaux, a last link with a Paris that he would never see again. (Perhaps this was a merciful dispensation in its way, for how much crueller was the fate of those résistants, many of them Communists from the eastern and northeastern districts, noticed and heard by Guéhenno, who, in 1943, were driven from Fresnes right through Paris, almost from end to end, from the Porte d’Orléans to the Porte Maillot, in closed lorries, crammed together, and singing the whole way through the city that they could not even see, though, from the varying level of sounds, the more experienced Parisians among them were able to follow their tracks, before being shot at the Mont-Valérien?)

The terrible price of readmission to the bosom of la famille française would be the exemplary courage that most displayed, as a last gesture of complicity, a sort of desperate politesse when facing their executioners: Brasillach wearing a long, elegant red scarf, Paquis in his best suit, a bit frayed, but ironed, a plucky little chap at just over five feet, Bucard in the tatters of a uniform, Darnand, having written to de Gaulle – he got a reply – as from one soldier to another, thanking the soldiers of his firing squad, Bassompierre (whose brother had been killed on the other side, in the Resistance) cracking jokes, Paul Chack dignified in old age. The manner of their deaths was recorded at the time by their executioners, by the prison doctor, the chaplain, or the Protestant minister, as a sort of epitaph to lives that, for one reason or another, had taken a wrong turn. Only de Brinon seems to have failed in this ultimate and terrible test. Most met their end bravely, à la française, one or two puffing on a gauloise hanging on the lower lip, almost to the last breath.

At whatever level, whether timid, flirtatious or brassily calculated, run-of-the-mill technical and administrative, cultural or repressive, ideologically convinced or brutally cynical, collaboration and collaborationism would normally remain a temporary and largely accidental relationship, imposed by quite exceptional circumstances, for which there was no recent precedent, as well as by unique opportunities (for most collaborationists, whether Parisian or Vichyssois, 1940 was a sort of golden year that opened up undreamt of opportunities, eagerly seized on while the going was good), and confined within a time space of four years and one month – not a very large chunk out of an average life, though, however brief, a chunk that would generally have disastrous consequences for those lucky enough to have survived, even if time would generally erase the record of such unwise youthful choices. (Who would recall today, apart from two Anglo-Saxon historians concerned to put the record straight on the French origins of anti-Semitism and of anti-Semitic legislation, Maurice Duverger’s youthful and wholehearted commitment to the violent politics of the PPF and to a legalized anti-Semitism?) For only a tiny minority of collaborationists had opted for the German variety of national socialism before 1940. Indeed, most could not have seen ahead to the fact that, in the circumstances of 1940, they would have chosen to become collaborationists. How could they have done so? Collaboration was not a profession bequeathed by father to son, at least in France; in Belgium, Flemish collaborationism spans two generations, even offering some of its leading protagonists the chance of a replay the second time around. In the previous war, there had been hardly any collaborators, at least in a political sense, and such as they were – like the small group of journalists of the Gazette des Ardennes – they were very small fry indeed, just seedy, paid-up traitors.

How could anyone, even in the summer of 1940, have foreseen that he or she would all at once embark on the even more perilous path of resistance? For no one could have foreseen the little spark of anger, the indignity of visible humiliation, that might push one over. Collaboration and resistance are both eminently personal stances that have no past, whether familial or historical, though it could no doubt be argued that some French Protestants would not have needed to be reminded of what résister meant in French historical terms. Only the lowest hacks of collaboration, dénonciateurs and dénonciatrices, could look back to past experience and to previous opportunities. It is true that a few special categories of people were likely to be excluded from the start from the tempting option of collaboration. Most Jews and gypsies, foreign refugees and Spanish republicans, not to mention enemy aliens, most of whom were interned (though there were one or two English collaborators operating in France during these years), were automatically placed outside the recruitment areas of collaboration, normally a privilege – of a sort – reserved for Frenchmen of non-Jewish descent (the fact that there did exist one or two Jewish collaborationists does not invalidate this general point). Such people, by virtue of their origins, were much more likely to enlist in the ranks of the Resistance, out of sheer desperation and as the only means of possible survival. There were a few black and creole collaborationists; and there was at least one English vichyssois (it is true that, for his services, Sisley Huddleston was rewarded with French naturalization, as a personal gift from Marshal Pétain).

No one – either French or German or anyone else (save one or two worried British observers of French morale during the ‘phoney war’) – could have foreseen the scale of the catastrophe of May/June 1940, though, once it came, there were many, from Pétain down – revealed as a very active, positive conspirator and defeatist, with lists already written and ready in his pocket, in the Prefecture of the Gironde – who sprang at the opportunity offered by such a totality of defeat. As Ory has pointed out, no one was born a collaborationist, it was not a virus in the blood and, though Louis Marin, Philippe Henriot, Emile Buré, and Henri de Kérillis came from similar backgrounds in interwar politics, they made totally different choices in 1940. No one could be forced into a situation of collaborationism, but for those already occupying positions of great power and responsibility the temptation must often have been very great. The greater the responsibility, the more insistent the appeal. It is a natural assumption among those used to authority and obedience to consider themselves indispensable.

Some occupants would return, quite unashamedly – for they had really enjoyed their time in France and considered themselves, therefore, as francophils – a few years later: former Luftwaffe personnel were much in evidence in the Tournon, a café-tabac opposite the Luxembourg, in the 1950s, this time as real tourists. A certain number of Frenchwomen presumably settled in Germany, once access to the French, British or American zones became easier for non-German civilians; for, while serving German officers and soldiers were not allowed to marry French girls, there would be nothing to prevent them from doing so once they had returned to civilian life. But such individual instances of collaboration pushed to the extreme frontiers of domestic privacy will generally elude us, just as much as it is impossible to calculate how many – if any – German deserters managed to remain undetected in their hiding-places in Paris or elsewhere under the protection of their French female friends – for a deserter cannot last more than a few days without the active complicity of a woman, just as his most dangerous enemy is another woman – before reemerging in the more favourable conditions of the mid-fifties. (Unfortunately, the records of the Feldgendarmerie and of German courts-martial are missing.) We only know of those few who were caught and shot, like the poor young man whose execution was witnessed by Ernst Jünger in the woods round Fontenay-aux-Roses, the promenades for Sunday lovers and family walkers. (Military executioners seem to favour Sunday walks, and Guéhenno, in a succession of Sunday visits to La Fosse-aux-Loups, noted the gradual elimination, at the level of a human heart, of first one tree, then two; perhaps the shooting-grounds favoured the countryside south of Paris because of its proximity to Fresnes?) A few must have got away, to judge at least from the number of GI deserters, many of them black, to be encountered living quite openly in the VIme and doing their shopping, marché de Buci, with big black cabas – the surest emblem of having crossed the nationality barrier – accompanied by their French mistresses and their Franco-American children. If Heinrich Böll is a reliable witness – and there is no more convincing recorder of the dread fears of poor German soldiers as they travelled on the long iron trains to the horrors of the East, nor of the pathetic and hopeless attempts briefly to discard the uniform of servitude, the livery of death, by seeking refuge in the privacy and warmth of domestic peace or in some little room inhabited by feminine tenderness – according to this German novelist, it had even been possible for a Russian prisoner of war to live in hiding with a German woman on the outskirts of a town in the Third Reich in the middle and at the end of the war, protected and surrounded by a whole network of attentive accomplices. It is a comforting story not totally improbable. For, even in the most totalitarian regimes, there subsist little chunks of undiscovered privacy, small, closed kingdoms of successful rejection of the iron demands of the military collectivity; this was true certainly in France, and even more so in the well-organized anarchy of Brussels – rue Haute, rue Blaes, a warren of steep streets, in les Marolles, where people simply disappeared, for months, even years. The Feldgendarmerie was not all that infallible, not all that efficient, remaining largely dependent on the unsolicited – but well-rewarded – help of dénonciatrices; and these would have little chance of effective survival in closed communities, well accustomed to the vigilant discipline of clandestinity and to living beyond the reach of the law and of a fixed identity.

Brussels – or those parts of it which lay on the steep slopes separating la ville haute from la ville basse, a sort of neutral frontier zone where, like the lion and the lamb, occupants and occupés might, literally, lie down together, or even reverse rôles, along with outward clothing – Brussels had a fixed place in the recent hierarchies of the New European Order as the capital of crime and of the black market and as the centre of a European trade in false identities, passports, military paybooks, ration cards, laissez-passers cut through with impressive diagonals in various national colours, police passes that, readily flashed would open the steel doors of the fortresses of torture and repression. The extraordinary resilience of the place may be judged by the fact, witnessed by myself with a sort of admiration in September 1944, that, within three days of the Liberation of the city, British army uniforms, leather jerkins, webbing and boots, brown books and paybooks, and even army-issue typewriters were quite openly on sale in the various flea markets off the Porte de Hal. Sten guns and other weapons would shortly follow. The providers of outfits so complete as to offer the full panoply of a British or a Canadian soldier from head to foot, plus accompanying haversacks and small arms, must be presumed to have themselves been transformed, in a matter of minutes, into equally convincing civilians, fully-equipped Marolliens, de cap à pied, incapable of speaking a single word of either French or Flemish, much less of the wonderfully hybrid marollien (though that would no doubt come in due course), their pockets bulging with a generous selection of real identities and of papers that were in fact not false. This ability to adjust, as it were overnight, to the needs and opportunities offered by an entirely new situation was the most striking testimony to the skills acquired by a population long trained in all the tricks of living below the level of the law, skills that ranged from those of engravers and of the manufacturers of impressive-looking rubber stamps, to those of pickpockets and of head-to-foot ten-minute (the time to transform a man and to send him out with all the appearances of a convincing civilian) tailors.

With the help of a devoted woman, a man could live in security in les Marolles, or, for that matter, in the quartier du Sentier, the Goutte-d’Or, the faubourg Montmartre, the Halles or Belleville-Ménilmontant in Paris. The German authorities were well aware of the existence of such relatively safe, almost impenetrable, enclaves in most large French cities (la Guille, la Croix-Rousse, les Terreaux, in Lyon; Martainville and Eau-de-Robec in Rouen; le Pollet in Dieppe) and it was with this in mind that, in 1943, they set about evacuating, at a few hours’ notice, the ten thousand inhabitants of the Vieux Port in Marseille, before systematically blowing up the whole quarter, street by street. How many German deserters were revealed in the course of this vast operation we are not told (it is not the sort of thing that any military authority would be likely to trumpet from the rooftops) but one suspects that they must have been numerous – perhaps as numerous and as varied as the enormous animal population thus driven from its ancient refuges: armies of huge rats swimming for safety across the harbour, cows, goats, chickens, geese, rabbits herded away with their owners in other parts of the city. And we know, from a more recent war, just how effective a hide-out la Casbah could be as it cascaded down innumerable steps, like the montées of Lyon, in the very centre of Algiers.

Of course, it would presumably be much more difficult – not to say impossible – in the countryside, where the presence of an unfamiliar, and therefore suspicious, figure would be signalled from farm to farm, ahead of the increasingly despairing progress of the man himself, as he plunged hopelessly further and further into the woodland, into gorse, heather and marshland, following no specific course, moving unwittingly in circles, anxious only to avoid highroads and the outskirts of towns, open country and the exposure of bare hills. In such conditions, a deserter might be indistinguishable from a tramp or a gypsy, from any man who walked and wandered without being able to give a clear account of his movements, and who wasn’t a pedlar or a woodcutter, or even a poacher, all people acceptable to a rural community and, as such, liable to be covered, in an enveloping complicity, from scrutiny further up. Indeed, he would look like a tramp, having buried his uniform – his external passport to respectability and recognition, enabling him to shelter within the at least identifiable communities of occupants and occupés and giving him the relatively harmless, because by now perfectly familiar, even banal trade name of soldat allemand (in the countryside, a more formal society, people neglected, or were ignorant of, collective terms of insult). And what farmer, what farmer’s wife, would be prepared to take the terrible risk of taking in a uniform, or any part of it? He would have to clothe himself from such threadbare, ill-fitting and varied resources as were available: the shapeless coat and the bleached hat of a scarecrow, or some article of clothing stolen surreptitiously from a washing line or taken from a riverbank while the swimmer, luxuriating immobile on his back in the silvery water, looked up at the still perfection of a summer sky or at the scurrying clouds driven fast by the west wind. It would be unlikely in the extreme that he would be able to equip himself from head to foot in one single go, giving him the full and convincing walking-out gear of a recognizable civilian. There would be something missing, or he might keep his very identifiable Wehrmacht underwear or thick socks. Footwear would be the greatest problem, for people do not readily throw out shoes or boots while they still have a little life in them. And so the detailed description of the weird, tattered figure, in browns and blacks – l’homme des bois – would walk well ahead of him, causing prudent fear, the closing of bolts and the drawing of shutters: a tall man with straw-coloured hair and very blue eyes, a scraggy yellowish beard, talking gibberish, and expressing himself in gestures to indicate hunger, thirst, the desperate need to sleep.

We encounter just such a man wandering in the woods in the neighbourhood of the Breton town of Saint-Brieuc, in March 1944, in the first volume of Louis Guilloux’s Carnets. He arrives at a farm in a pitiable condition; the farmer, just in from the fields, pulls up the bottoms of the man’s trousers (he knows the drill, then – this is not the first time that he has encountered such a wanderer) and there is the giveaway sign: a pair of long, soft-leather boots. He has not succeeded in demobilizing his feet and legs; his upper half might pass as civilian, but he still walks, however wearily, as a soldier of the German army. He indicates by gesture that he would like to exchange his boots for a pair of sabots – the one thing that might enable him to prendre la couleur du paysage and allow him to prolong for a few more days or even weeks his perilous existence as a deserter (what chance has he got to survive from March to the relative safety of August?). He has already been refused sabots in half a dozen farms, and it will be the same in a dozen more. For the man on the run, the feet are the weak spot: he cannot walk barefoot in March, so he is stuck with his unmistakable boots – which, in popular memory, long after the departure of the occupants, are the very symbol of the strutting, stamping conqueror.

Give him a bowl of soup and a pichet de cidre, says the farmer, then send him on his way. The farmer, the patron, then returns to the fields. When he comes back, he is vexed to find that the man is still there. Well, let him just this once sleep in the hay, give him coffee in the morning and then send him on his way. The next morning, after the farmer has gone, the man persuades the womenfolk to let him help unload a cart of manure. He is trying to gain time. This the farmer has foreseen; he sends back one of his farm boys with the message: patron says promenade, accompanied by the unmistakable international gesture of dismissal; the poor man understands. He shakes hands elaborately with the wife and the daughters, kisses the children, sets off. But, still within sight, he turns back; more handshakes, more kisses for the children, then sets off again, without looking back. Later someone says that they have met the man further along and that he was crying.

And that is the last that we hear of the poor German deserter. There does not seem much hope for him, and one wonders how much more walking he will have to do before reaching the end of the road, the almost inevitable firing squad. Guilloux, as delicate and discreet as he is compassionate, does not put the dots on the i’s; he refrains from mentioning the firing squad, leaving his reader desperately hoping that somehow the shambling and increasingly mad-looking figure may somehow survive in the Breton woods for another five months, when the Liberation would free him at least from the threat of death and when defeat would be victory for him, as well as for the French. Five months is a terribly long time, and when Guilloux leaves him – or, rather when the man simply walks out of the novelist’s wonderfully evocative account of the occupation years in and around the small Breton town – all the odds seem to be against him. If only there could be a happy ending. Perhaps, after a few more days, he will encounter a compassionate and lonely woman – her husband a prisoner in Germany – who will take him in, feed him, and hide him in an attic. Such things have happened. But the countryside, even the depths of the plat pays, is like a public thoroughfare, lined with many eyes, all watchful and retentive. If the deserter is a townsman, there is very little hope for him as he stumbles on through bracken and undergrowth, moving in circles. Only a large city could offer an even chance for the deserter from the Wehrmacht.

Escape, then, could occasionally exist, in the realities of brick and stone, attic and cellar, courtyard and impasse. But thoughts of escape, the illusion of escape, of getting away from it all, of making a complete break, found their most persuasive refuges in those palaces of make-believe: les salles obscures. When considering the enormous success of the cinema during the Occupation – in Paris, audiences reached their highest figures in this century – one cannot make too much of la nuit factice, the comforting, enveloping night of the Rex, Normandie, Lord-Byron, Alhambra, in contrast to the stark blackout, the alarming night of the streets after curfew. La nuit factice is blue, silver and velvet, rather than black; it is warm, almost maternal; it is punctuated with brilliant light – a night of blue and silver, even a perfumed night. Robert Lageat and his female partner, la môme Andréa, are dressed in brilliant colours as they perform on the high wire – the most German film fantasies drip in rich technicolour (Agfacolor). La nuit fantastique is a very escape from the night. The grandes salles are warm, with the warmth of many bodies crowded together. French and German. This is perhaps the only terrain in which the barrières blanches are removed, the frontiers that, in real life, constantly emphasize the separation between occupants and occupés, an intermingling of ploying, exploratory hands, knees, feet, possible without the flags of national identification going up: here French and Germans can meet without being seen – or seen only briefly during the intervals (chocolat glacé Esquimau), their encounter, however brief and flickering, not being scrutinized.

It was a fantasy, an escape, a sense of liberty that might have as much attraction to the German soldier as to the French civilian. L’Eternel Retour, Les Visiteurs du soir, Les Enfants du paradis all offered as much a temporary escape – among the battlements and halls of medieval castles inhabited by dwarfs, reeking in magic, and in the presence of an engaging (Belgian) devil, or among the streets, noisy theatres and bains chinois of the boulevard du Crime – from the gnawing fear of what lay to the East (and reachable, from the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord, by night train, even, for the high-ranking officer, by sleeper) as from the daily humiliations of occupation: privation, cold, loneliness, worry. Indeed, as a shared experience, and one shared perhaps several nights a week, it represented a disguised, yet potent, form of collaboration. Such films were seen – and appreciated – by French and German audiences, who responded to them at the same time (Ooo!) in similar fashion. But, more important, this was an experience from which the Anglo-Saxon (and Soviet) audiences were excluded, just as their reading public was excluded from an awareness of L’Etranger and similar works, so that there remained a cultural gap and a sentimental backlog of four years to be made up in 1944.

This, of course, applied both ways. The French could no doubt catch up on Mrs. Miniver after the Liberation; much more important was to be the colossal impact of Citizen Kane and of the Soviet films shown at the Cinéma du Panthéon. By the physical nature of occupation, leisure at least, especially in the collective form of welcome immersion in les salles obscures, was a type of conversation à deux, a conversation that, in an unknown but no doubt significant number of instances, resulted in actual verbal exchanges, and the first groping steps towards a hurried and unobserved intimacy.

Of course, the Germans could see films free in their own Soldatenheime (the best cinemas had been taken over for the Wehrmacht); yet one can be sure that many would prefer to attend the grandes salles individually, not perhaps in a conscious effort to commune with French civilians (though the foreign female presence would be a draw) as to escape, for an hour or two, from the constant collective promiscuity imposed by uniform. The Soldatenheim – like the foyer du soldat – was a trap, the purpose of which was to hold the individual soldier within the safer collectivity of nationality and of regimental or corps loyalty during the always potentially dangerous hours of leisure. In Lyon, the Germans seem to have managed to isolate their military personnel, many of them young recruits, from the civilian population altogether. But Paris, as a leave centre, as a reward for the active soldier, was a different matter. Capitals are dangerous places for military discipline and cohesion. Immersion in a salle obscure might be only the first step on an escape route that could end in desertion, or even, if he was caught, the firing squad. More often, it represented a brief step into fantasy and illusion. And fantasy and illusion were never more brilliantly exploited, in works of genius, of great subtlety, and in a strange language of hints and allusion, of double-entendre, than in the films of the German-controlled film consortium, La Continental, in 1942 and 1943.

After such a brief excursion, not entirely fanciful, I hope, into the vast palaces of dreams of the grands boulevards and the Champs-Elysées, it is time to return to more mundane matters, such as the various motivations that might be at the origins of commitment to one form or another of collaborationism. Among the French, one could at once distinguish between the tenacious careerists and adventurers eager to push themselves forward to meet the more menial needs of the occupying power, the immensely relieved and timorous souls for whom June 1940 spelt out the welcome message – something that seemed to make even total defeat worthwhile, namely that France was now out of the war – and the convinced idealists, however confused, flawed, or odious the causes of their commitment (anti-Semitism, antiparliamentarianism, elitism, the cult of leadership, corporatism, anglophobia, anti-Communism after 1941, and antifeminism). Those in the first category often seem to have been genuinely surprised by the degree of hostility they generally inspired among their less fortunate, less pushing, or more honourable compatriots. There had been a job going, and they had done that job. What could have been more natural? They were the sort of people who would have queued up to serve any occupier; indeed, Paquis suggests that quite a few, in Radio Paris, may have served the Americans after having served the Germans; for, as he and his friends were hastily packing their bags, prior to departure in German lorries to Châlons-sur-Marne and Nancy, he had had time to notice one or two familiar figures lurking outside the building in the Champs-Elysées, ready to move back in ‘under new management’. Such people were not necessarily pro-German; it just happened that it was the Germans who had turned up. The Italians or the Russians would no doubt have met as ready a response; indeed, the latter possessed a far more effective potential fifth column than anything that had been available to the Germans before 1940, at a time when the adherents of the German Institute could be counted on one’s fingers. (Attendance at German classes began to increase rapidly only at the rentrée of 1940, when the German Institute and Berlitz – an eagerly collaborationist institution from 1940 to 1944, when it switched massively to the teaching of English – both enormously expanded their facilities for the teaching of German.) The Soviets could count, at any time, on the disinterested devotion of a highly skilled army of potential – and no doubt dreadfully frustrated – collaborationists, longing to be employed and denied such an opportunity, though a number seem to have had little difficulty, at least in the summer of 1940, in switching to service with the Germans, who, in their anxiety to get Paris back to work, found them useful when seeking the cooperation of the old unions.

Careerist collaborationists of this type were prone to argue that if they had not volunteered for the job, someone else would have. By taking it on, they had protected their more timorous compatriots (and, sometimes, just to be on the safe side, they may even have done just that, laying in store for themselves testimonials on an uncertain future).

Some professions would be more exposed to the temptations of collaborationism than others, if only because they operated within an unusually brief time span and were subject to a sort of daily death and daily renewal. This would be especially the case for journalists and for those in related activities, such as caricaturists. A journalist who does not get out his daily column is no longer a journalist, he ceases to exist, falls into an unbearable and unremunerative obscurity. A novelist, a historian, a poet can afford the luxury of a temporary silence, an internal retreat, while waiting for better times (though, as we have seen, very few novelists and poets were prepared for such acts of self-immolation, and, throughout the Occupation – as before and after – Gide continued to indulge his taste for elaborate self-examination and to look at himself in the mirror of vanity, as if this were in some way to expel the shadow of the occupier). Déat – one feels – eagerly offered himself to the cause of ultracollaborationism, not just because he admired the Germans, wanted the New European Order to succeed, and looked to the Germans to satisfy his twenty-year-old thirst for supreme power as chef (or Chef), but also because he could not bear to cease hearing the sound of his own voice and reading his daily thoughts in print. Déat’s greatest contribution to collaboration was not in the rôle of chef, a rôle so constantly denied him, but in the production of some thousands of editorials. From October 1940, when L’Oeuvre reappeared, avec trompette et fanfare, till late August 1944, when it disappeared, with an imperceptible whimper, rue Louis-le-Grand, Déat never missed a single issue. It is a colossal achievement and a suitable tribute to the man’s limitless vanity. One wonders whether he gave much thought to his readers and to what they made of his tirelessly insistent message; one knows that he did not have very many readers. (At its height, in 1940/1, when its apparently pacifist appeal to those who had not wished to ‘die for Danzig’ was likely to be the most insistent, the paper reached a ceiling circulation of about 130,000 – as compared, in 1943, to the 300,000 copies of Je suis partout. But then Déat, with plenty of German money behind him – and all collaborationist journalists were also themselves extremely well paid – could afford to look beyond the circulation graph; he had never been interested in such mundane matters.) L’Oeuvre kept afloat not so much because of his editorials, but because the paper continued saying the same things. Déat was engaged in a daily dialogue with himself: il s’écoute parler, il s’écoute écrire.

It must have been the same with broadcasters, announcers, and caricaturists. Henriot, who was better heard than seen – he was strikingly ugly, with enormous protruding ears that gave him a batlike appearance, and eyes that seemed to fall out, in the intensity of their fanaticism (Trouillé has a memorable passage on the subject of Henriot’s sepia photograph displayed all over Vichy following his assassination, and showing him in the black uniform of the Milice) – had a warm, velvet, caressing voice, giving no doubt a false impression of sincerity, as if he really cared about what he said. Even his London listeners had to admit that he was an extremely effective speaker. But he must have been his own most enthusiastic listener, and it is doubtful if he could have got through the day if he had not had his evening performance to look forward to, as its culmination and its reward. Here was a man who lived – and indeed died – for 9.15 P.M. As Guéhenno observes, with his usual acuteness (not unmixed with compassion), the circumstances of Henriot’s death covered the man in a shroud too big for him. He was murdered because he had talked too much, an outsize conclusion to the life of a compulsive chatterbox (his conceit was offered an ironical posthumous tribute when his recorded voice was broadcast every night till the final departure of Radio Paris in August 1944, rather as if the voice had outlived its owner and had acquired a momentum of its own). To have expected Henriot to be silent would have been as pointless as to have expected Sacha Guitry to give up listening to the sound of his own voice. Moâ, too, could be heard, from the stage, pretty well every night of the Occupation, the summer closures excepted, as he talked to himself out loud, in the presence of an ever appreciative Franco-German audience. Sacha’s immense conceit could be accommodated à toute sauce. After the Liberation, he was punished according to his deserts: not shot, or anything drastic like that; merely reduced to silence, at least in public (he presumably continued to perform in front of his many mirrors in the privacy of his sumptuous apartment). When unable to bear it any longer, he decided to break the public silence imposed upon him by giving a performance at the casino of Charbonnières, outside Lyon; this was too much for the leaders of the Lyon Resistance, who kidnapped him and, having removed his trousers, made him kneel down in front of the Monument de la Résistance, on the corner of the place Bellecour and the rue de la République.

Paquis would not have amounted to very much if deprived of his microphone, a far more important part of his standard equipment as a French fascist than the small revolver he wore in an elegant leather holster attached to a wide belt in bright yellow pigskin – part of the walking-out uniform of all the Paris collaborationists (even Déat had one, a huge affair), presumably as the visible assertion of their eventual participation in the longed for French civil war. For whom else were they going to kill other than their fellow French? Paquis had to admit, later, that he had never in fact shot anyone – nor indeed had most of the other leather-belted brethren, which must have been very disappointing for them. Like other collaborationists, Paquis had found his opportunity in the Spanish Civil War, as a regular speaker on the French programme of Radio-Saragossa, a circumstance that gave the remainder of his life the public dimension that made him in a small way memorable. This was a new departure. For, in his memoirs, there is a touching reference to the joyful clatter of the print-room, to the old, appetizing, reassuring smell of printer’s ink, as a reminder of younger days and early barrésien enthusiasms when a young journalist in Nancy. Paquis is revealed to be as much a compulsive journalist as a compulsive broadcaster. And, stopping for a night or two in Nancy, on his way to exile, he cannot refrain from a nostalgic visit to the offices of the old Républicain de l’Est, just to get his fingers stained on le marbre and to choose between elzévir, or didot, or another form of type. Paquis was as much an enfant du marbre as Lageat was of the sweaty gymnasium or boxing ring. Journalism and its familiar instruments represented for him a way of life and the reassurance of continuity. Even in the midst of the collapse of all his political aspirations, the clatter and the smells drew him back to the naïve hopes and enthusiasms of a young, right-wing, confused provincial journalist. In a modest way, Paquis was a poet, not a very good poet, but still one aware of the immense attraction of continuity in its simplest form: the daily paper, the daily broadcast, a short-term prospect that would in fact eventually be denied the consolation of continuity. In prison, he managed to transform himself from the man who had worked so diligently through the night for the morrow, from the broadcaster who had screamed and shouted for the immediate present, into a wiser, humbler person able to take stock of his whole life and to come to terms with a future that was rapidly running out. His execution seems rather a big price to have to pay for a combination of conceit and habit. As Simenon would no doubt have said or written, he should have stayed in Nancy: Spain, then Paris had been the undoing of this provincial.

When one glances at the collaborationist press, one is confronted with the old, familiar caricatures of prewar days. Albion is still long-toothed, bespectacled and scraggy, but Hitler has disappeared. Jean Effel still signs his drawings with a flower or a butterfly, Pol Fer Jac remains faithful to his powdery line. The caricaturists have not changed; it is the butt of their drawings that has changed, Churchill replacing Ciano, Roosevelt (again, like Albion, very toothy) replacing Mussolini (an inestimable loss). The caricaturists were mostly luckier than the journalists, most surviving to depict the long, gangling de Gaulle embracing the Eiffel Tower, or Edith Piaf singing a song of love and praise to ‘Mon Légionnaire’ (a Pétain in a white képi), or Pétain himself dozing in an armchair, with a cat on his lap and Germanic fir trees glimpsed through the long double window: Travail, Famille, Patrie. What could a caricaturist do other than to draw? Perhaps the indulgence shown towards them, in contrast to the severity shown to journalists, is a recognition of the fact that they were little more than amuseurs publics, and that laughter at whoever’s expense, far from being treasonable, represented a small article of consolation at a time when most pleasant articles were in desperately short supply. Who would remember the contents of their caricatures, even on the morrow? Who would recall the bestial traits inflicted on a bloodsucking Churchill? Who would linger on the Semitic features of an emblematic Jew? These artists of pen and pencil could presumably be forgiven because they had provoked a moment of laughter in a time of weariness, dreariness, fear and sorrow. Anyhow, they got away with it.

Relief at escape from the war was often the first step towards a more positive participation in collaboration. The Germans, who treated their own pacifists as traitors, had been quite happy to encourage French ones before the war and during the months of the ‘phoney war’, and, even after June 1940, they saw in them potential allies. This offered the basis for a bargain that was mutually satisfying. German victory had brought an immediate return to peace (though no peace treaty was ever to be signed; but, so long as Germany had not conquered the world, such a peace would still be fragile, so that, for many French pacifists, the success of the New European Order became identified with the assurance of a general peace; it was no accident that the most anglophobe among the collaborationists should have been drawn from the ranks of the pacifist left.) Relief at the conclusion of hostilities, even if one is on the losing side, is a perfectly understandable response, especially after a campaign which, though destructive – at least in the Northeast, for it had left the Massif Central and the Midi quite unscathed, as if in preparation for Vichy – had at least been mercifully short (just what all sides had hoped for in August 1914). Such a response was more understandable in individual and in family terms (and families are so often the alibi for what, at best, could be described as prudence, at worst, as cowardice), at least in the summer of 1940 – l’heure du choix, when so many choices were made – than the concern, on the part of a professional minority and of a handful of bold and eccentric aristocrats, to set about rebuilding a clandestine military organization to ensure for France a place in the future, whatever the future might contain. Few people, in France at least, would have had much thought for the future in the shattering circumstances of 1940, such were the enormous and immediate exigencies of a totally dislocated present. There is no doubt that Pétain exactly hit the national mood when he made a national virtue of a visceral form of cowardice that had already been dramatically displayed at the time of the middle-class panic of August/September 1938, when shivers of fear had run through the stifling Paris boulevards, a fear orchestrated by the incessant laments of the newspaper sellers, ‘édition spéciale, édition spéciale,’ twice or thrice daily, rising to a shrill climax in the torrid evenings and in the stuffy nights of foreboding and listening that had preceded the immense physical relief brought by the impact of Munich. How can one ever forget the sheer joy of that moment, the realization that one had been granted a reprieve of a few weeks, perhaps even of a few months (few, in that moment of delight, could have counted on a whole year) if one had lived through the crisis, as I had, in Paris? The stress on a return to family life, on the everlasting virtues of domesticity and on ‘business as usual’ was more than a brilliant propaganda coup: it showed an acute understanding of what was, for a few weeks at least – and vital weeks during which many irreversible decisions were taken and many risky options were closed – the mood of the nation. Guéhenno is no doubt right when he insists that the particular ignominy of Pétain was to have elevated cringing cowardice into an expression of patriotism. But one suspects that this austere republican was making too great demands on the majority of his less exalted, more selfish fellow countrymen. The Breton writer must have been one of a very rare breed of Frenchmen to have evoked, in the summer of 1940, the imagery of the embattled Republic of the Year Two. In a situation in which, in places like Clermont-Ferrand, people were exclaiming with enormous and mean relief, ‘Bah! ils ne prendront pas le Massif’, M. Homais and M. Prudhomme would have been more appropriate emblems than Saint-Just and Carnot. Pétain was an elderly Homais in a peaked cap surrounded by oak leaves. His invitation to seek refuge in the bosom of the family and to sit it out at home would be to most middle-class people a more comforting programme than blood, sweat and tears. And not just to middle-class people. Dutourd’s Poissonard family, sitting in their van, place des Quinconces, in Bordeaux, were quick to realize that the right thing to do, indeed the best way of responding to the Marshal’s patriotic appeal, was to scrounge some petrol from somewhere and get back on the road to Paris and open up their crémerie. The SNCF, with the help of both Vichy and the Germans, responded to the natural instinct of Parisians of all conditions to get back to Paris and resume work as soon as possible by laying on scores of extra trains each day, throughout July and August, to bring the work force back to the capital.

What is more, up to 1943 at least, the Vichy leaders could point to the fact that, while the young men of the belligerent powers were dying in their tens of thousands, the youth of France enjoyed the unique privilege – and one denied even to the more active neutrals such as the Swiss and the Swedes – of living at home, albeit in some discomfort, and of struggling through the old familiar educational track of baccalauréat, licence and agrégation. Guéhenno notes, with some surprise, that the rentrée of October 1940 was much like any other rentrée, and that his pupils appeared amorphous and apolitical, apparently indifferent to the fact of national humiliation, and concerned about forthcoming exams, prizes and positions in class. Perhaps he was expecting too much of them, for there is nothing very surprising about such a mundane and unheroic reaction. If this were the situation in a prestigious Left Bank lycée, how much more so would it be in a school in a quiet provincial town. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, recalling his time at St. Joseph, a Catholic school in Caen, could remember little enough of the crisis of 1940. Term had started as usual, the food had been perhaps a little worse than usual, the prayers and edifying readings had been the same as usual, public events had scarcely penetrated the thick walls of the internat, members of his family had gone on the pilgrimage to la Délivrande as usual, the Flemish boys in his school had been rather more uppish than usual, regarding themselves as true Aryans, and therefore associated with the might of German arms.

Until the STO began to threaten the entrenched safety of their male children, middle-class parents could not fail to feel grateful to a regime that had enabled their sons to remain at home, well protected from the perils of war. It could, of course, be pointed out that perhaps even greater numbers of Frenchmen – still nearly a million by 1944, that is, more than half those taken in 1940 – were to remain as prisoners of war in Germany, but most of these belonged to different age groups, and though their continued absence might cause both grief and hardship, it might be presumed that these too were relatively safe (safer, anyhow, than those caught by the STO, nearly half of whom – about 35,000 – were killed in German cities); at least they were out of the war.

Such an appeal would be more likely to recruit to the less extravagant forms of maréchalisme, as well as to a prudent attentisme that would endeavour to keep all options open and to wait for outside events. But, as we have seen, ultracollaborationism drew heavily on the ranks of former pacifist movements, especially among the generation that had had direct experience of the trenches in the First World War. One of the many ironies concerning commitment to collaborationism – at least in ideological terms – was that, in a matter of a year (from June 1941 precisely) so many of those who had started off from a violent and emotional rejection of war should have themselves started carrying weapons in public (whether for use or not) and should have begun displaying themselves in various uniformes de fantaisie – leather belts and pouches, bulging riding breeches, leather leggings – not to mention a facial expression that represented an unsubtle combination of cretinism and hate, as if they had been ready there and then to run off to the nearest front or, preferably, to do a bit of killing at home, within convenient walking distance. It is true that, to judge from the photographs, they do not look very convincing soldiers – they are too self-conscious – but they are at least trying to look martial.

In short, there were almost as many approaches to collaborationism as there were collaborationists, and most such approaches were easy, almost painless, at least for those with little imagination, less dignity and few moral scruples. The Germans had come to stay, and it was not much use trying not to see them, to close one’s shutters on their victory parades and to pretend that they were not there, though no doubt a great many Parisians, especially those of middle-class and professional origins, were to adopt this rather negative form of internal resistance, a closing in on themselves, and a deliberate retreat from public life and society. This was a line of retreat also available, in less intellectual and more agreeable forms, to men of the lower middle and working classes, to those proverbial and permanent attentistes, to those embattled individualists, les pêcheurs à la ligne. Henri Michel tells us that the basement of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, specializing in the full range of fishing tackle, had never been so busy as during the occupation years, fishing being the only leisure activity still available to male civilians as a result of the confiscation of all fire-arms. On 11th August 1941, Guéhenno takes the first métro of the day, at 5.30 in the morning, in order to be well up in the queue outside one of the German military offices. At each successive station there get on fully-equipped fishermen – their rods, their little tins of worms, their landing nets, and, most significant of all, their folding canvas chairs – not to mention their slender, modest hopes of a catch. More and more they come, cluttering up with their voluminous gear the already crowded carriages. Then, as if in response to a common word of command, at Châtelet they all get out, rushing to take up their positions for the day on a well-lined riverside. Their brief presence seems to have reassured Guéhenno, as a reminder of happier times, perhaps also as an indication of the right form of priorities. Certainly, nothing could have been more disturbing, nor more provocative, to any Germans travelling at this early hour than the sight of this small, but determined army of what Queneau has called les fanatiques de la gaule. And let us be sure that their precious rods were for use, that they were not being carried as a coded reminder of the name of the ‘general over the water’. These were no doubt the most convinced of all those who had decided to withdraw into the apparently unassailable fortress of quiet and harmless leisure, their eyes on their red-and-white floats as they bobbed up and down in the scintillating silvery water of an August Seine.

Communist militants and their supporters, on the other hand, displayed their usual discipline and obedience to party orders, related to them from Brussels via ‘Clément’ (the Slovak Eugen Fried), the Komintern agent attached to the exiled Duclos, by positively seeking out the German soldiers, offering them drinks, sitting with them on café terraces in Belleville-Ménilmontant or in the XIIme. After June 1941, they would display a similar alacrity to follow the new party line by assassinating individual German soldiers, in the street, in the métro, or on café terraces. (They would not be the same soldiers as those who had been the object of their previous blandishments, as most members of the Paris garrison were rapidly moved on to more pressing sectors. But what of that? Such soldiers were not living individuals, to be fraternized with, or to be shot in the back; they were symbols in whatever ‘class struggle’ was currently on.) It was, however, a switch so radical that some militants – a minority – found themselves unable to make it, a sudden personal revolt that might account for the frequent individual conversions from PCF to PPF after the summer of 1941.

Unlike those professional people who retreated back into private life, collaborationists could continue to enjoy public life and collective forms of leisure and entertainment, often on a scale and at a level of luxury that had previously been denied them. In Paris at least, collaborationism was a vehicle of rapid, often sensational, social promotion, making of a hack journalist from Nancy, such as Paquis, a national figure, fêted by le Tout-Paris, titillated by his sheer vulgarity. Here was the nearest thing to a genuine prolétaire, for he sweated copiously, wore an assortment of pens and pencils in the top pocket of his double-breasted suit, and spoke with an accent that would reasonably pass as faubourien – indeed, in the course of time, Paquis managed to perfect his long Parisian a’s, as well as a parigot slang and cheekiness that could be accepted, at least in such social circles, as the genuine article, though a true connoisseur like Lageat would not have been taken in. In this respect, collaborationism had an appeal that could be described as pre-poujadiste, long before Poujade had ever been heard of outside Saint-Céré (Lot): the wiping-off of old social scores and the gratification of social acceptance of a sort. At the German Institute and at Abetz’s parties at the embassy, rue de Lille, like could meet like, communing in a common vulgarity, as German and French eyed one another, somewhat uneasily, as similar newcomers to rather gawkily assumed social graces. Neither would pocket the sandwiches, in order to take them away and eat them at home; that much they had learnt. Both would make a rush, pushing and shoving, towards the copious buffet. In the winter of 1941, moved by curiosity, and because he had nothing else to do that particular evening, Guéhenno attended what claimed to be a mass meeting of the RNP. The masses were not there; but, looking over the ranks of shop assistants and bank clerks, ratés and semiintellectuals who had responded to the appeal (there was to be a buffet, too, afterwards), he sums up this rather seedy army of frayed fanatics in suits shining at the seats and at the elbows and stained under the armpits, in the marvellously evocative phrase, ‘de petits bourgeois à manches de lustrine’. How often have we encountered, in the 1950s, just such eager but uneasy provincials, fresh to the capital, but à la conquête de Paris, and wearing, like overgrown lycéens, their long, black, shiny ink-sleeves, like tellers or cashiers in a bank, in order to protect their tight jackets from the venerable dust of centuries, in the salle du public of the Archives nationales! After a few months, or perhaps a year, the ink-sleeves would be quietly abandoned; someone had had a word in the ear of the wearer. I can recall, in particular, a young historian from Lyon – or rather from Villeurbanne – who had ink-sleeves longer than any I had ever seen before: they came right up to his shoulders and appeared to be attached from behind. But, quite soon, the ink-sleeves were abandoned, along with his Villeurbanne wife. He then married into the haute-bourgeoisie parisienne, soon abandoning the PCF, of which he had been a militant, for the more fashionable PSU. This was ten years on from the seedy brigades of the RNP. Now such provincials or suburbanites were more likely to be recruited into the equally rancid and rancorous ranks of the PCF.

But there was also, from the start, a high price to pay. Easy in – or relatively so – not so easy out. Very soon – and because, in Paris, they were working so close to the Germans – collaborationists would begin to find themselves prisoners of their institutions, their papers, their political groups, their well-provided canteens and shops, their regular invitations to the German Institute and to the embassy – both on the Left Bank, like the bookshop, Rive Gauche. This was nicknamed by Sorbonne students Rive Gauche du Rhin, a location that lent to collaboration something of both the hysteria of prewar right-wing monômes and the poor dottiness of the ineffable Ferdinand Lop (the permanent presidential candidate of the boulevard Saint-Michel). They would find themselves prisoners, too, of their outwardly polite, but dangerous, uniformed friends in the various technical, propaganda and cultural services (the military high command tended to avoid all contacts with Frenchmen, whose cooperation, in the purely military sphere, they did not need). At the same time, rippling waves of isolation would gradually envelop them, as many of their former friends, and even relatives, began unobtrusively to shun them.

Of course, if there undoubtedly existed a common social appeal from the rancorous to the rancorous across the national barriers, by no means all candidates to one form or other of collaborationism gained admittance to what still remained a fairly wide open club. Guéhenno, though a good observer, even a sympathetic one when commenting on the loneliness and bewilderment of the individual German soldier, lost and wandering purposelessly amid the stony-eyed Parisian crowd, even noting the signs of wear and tear on uniforms no longer impeccable, displays his middle-class prejudices when dismissing with such marked contempt the ink-sleeved outsiders of the thin ranks of the always seedy RNP, third-class collaborationists and even conscious of the fact. These were the collaborationists who had not made it, who were not needed, who often could not even find anyone to collaborate with, and so who were irrelevant. The Germans did not keep absolutely open house, the Maison Collaboration was not a Salvation Army hostel, and the occupants, as well as displaying a ready hospitality when it suited them, knew how to make themselves unapproachable and elusive. Collaborationism was something of a maze, and, even at the top Vichy level, a politician such as Flandin would have to be scrapped, because, in a matter of months, he had not succeeded in making contact with any Germans of importance. The Germans knew when to make themselves coy.

So, at a much humbler level, the German masters would certainly not be likely to be appreciative when reminded of their own ink-sleeves, of their own suburban or small-town origins (it would have been like reminding Heydrich that he had been dishonourably discharged from the officer corps of the German navy). They would reach out only to collaborationists who, while sharing a sense of rancour and a feeling of renewal, of having been born again (part of the process of becoming a nazi, whether German or French) had long since discarded, with shame, the manches de lustrine, whose suits were not shiny, whose trousers were not baggy, whose socks were not holed and odorous, and whose overcoats were not stitched and frayed. Collaborationism had to be seen to be successful; it would not be allowed to walk about in the visible tatters of failure. Short hair, a stern, unflinching eye – one can see Déat and others in eye practice – a straight back, as collaborationist and senior partner marched resolutely away from the nagging memory of past humiliation and towards the radiant future of the New European Order and its well-clipped lawns and gigantic vistas. How many would-be collaborationists fell at the initial hurdle? It is something that we will never know, for they are not likely to tell us of their ill-deserved luck.

Paquis’s pathetic memoirs, perhaps more than any other collaborationist work (for it was written in the shadow of death) make one understand how, within these rather narrow circles, tempers so easily flared, quarrels became so bitter and so prolonged, rivalries became so personal, so intense and so unforgiving. It was not just that this often admirably suited the Germans’ book, for the Germans, while encouraging collaboration, were as much concerned to keep the collaborationists at one another’s throats (they may even have been amused at the spectacle). It was also that the collaborationists, as time went on, were thrown more and more on one another’s company, their wives and their families, willy-nilly, being drawn in behind the invisible enceintes guarding a besieged, despised, privileged and increasingly shunned minority. How to get out, when there was nowhere to go, when all doors were closed? The only thing was to go on to the end of the line, wherever that might be. By the summer of 1944, the leading Paris collaborationists were reduced to clinging to such desperate straws as the German secret weapon, or the imminence of a counterattack that would drive the Allies back, into the sea. In their heart of hearts, they must have realized that it was all up, a realization, that, far from endearing them to one another, would only fan the flames of acrimony and mutual accusation. Some, not unnaturally, took to drink – there was always plenty of that in Sigmaringen and in the southern redoubt – in efforts to prolong a shrinking present and to seek the heavy deadness of snoring slumber. They drank individually, and in corners, hiding their drink supplies, as others might hide hoards of petrol, obtained from drunken German soldiers. Much of what Paquis has to say about his colleagues during the last, sultry days in an August Paris – all those desperate telephone calls, late at night, across the silent, waiting city, from flat to flat, so many appeals for reassurance – or in the course of their chaotic journey from the East of France to South Germany and their stay there, is both unedifying and comical. There was not much left of solidarity even in the common experience of collaborationism, or in the shared knowledge of the common fate that was liable to await them back in France, at the time of the final, undignified sauve-qui-peut. The luckiest were those who moved with the most discretion, at the dead of night, while their normally watchful colleagues slept, who did not tell anyone, lest others be tempted to join them, for larger numbers would make them more conspicuous. Marcel and Hélène Déat set out alone, well wrapped up and in strong boots, to undertake a personal crossing of the Dolomites. Others managed, improbably, to obtain Spanish passports which might enable them to reach at least temporary safety in neutral Switzerland (which displayed little neutrality when confronted with the ex-collaborationists). Poor Paquis – not important enough, now reduced once more to his original stature as a hack journalist and a small-time propagandist – was unceremoniously chucked out of the German fighter plane that would have brought him to safety, to make way for Abel Bonnard’s brother. He was not even surprised at this outcome, for he had never been much more than a third-class collaborationist, an executant, not a chief, a follower, not a leader, a voice that relayed the orders, hopes and fears of others. Paquis, one can see, was as expendable as all the fourth-class collaborationists who had not even been collaborationists at all, the so-called horizontales, who had merely gone to bed with German soldiers (many of them they had no doubt put out of action, for months at least) and who were to have their heads shaved.

Paquis at least had few illusions. But what of all those would-be leaders? Déat, a bizarre mixture of half-baked intellectual, of failed politician, lacking in even the most elementary human touch, a typical victim of la philo, and a peasant unable to shake off the traces of an earthy Auvergnat accent, Déat who, for twenty years, with a dog-like persistence, had sought only one thing: power, not to accomplish anything in particular, but just for its own sake, to satisfy his own inexhaustible vanity, who wanted to be a chef, or rather le Chef, under any conditions – if it were the only path to the throne, under German patronage – and who did not even vaguely look like a leader, a squat, hunched, weedy little man hiding behind his pipe. Why should the Germans have picked on a Déat as national regenerator? What had he to offer them, apart from his daily article in L’Oeuvre and his consistent hatred of Vichy, because Vichy would not even make him a minister (it did, in the end, but only in March 1944)? Déat was a fantaisiste who seems to have believed in his own destiny.

And what could the Germans have made of the indolent, effete and unpredictable Drieu, yet another candidate for leadership, a self-appointed apprenti-chef by virtue of the elevation of his bourgeois conceit and his hatred of ordinary humankind? Drieu, too, was a fantaisiste, an ageing adolescent, thinking up new games, greedy for new toys. What had a Bucard to offer, save the scourings of the Paris streets? Darnand, in many ways a natural leader, was bought off by being transformed into a brutally effective policeman, at the head of la Milice. Indeed, in the French context, collaborationism represented the grave of most ambitions to leadership, which, deprived of all reality, was little more than an exercice de style, a litany on the word chef, a boy scout vocabulary that had taken a wrong turn and that, though farcical, had begun to take itself seriously. Could one even take a franc-garde seriously? However ridiculous the title, it would have been as well to have done so, for young men in black uniform and wearing the gamma sign shoulder-flash were both heavily armed and trigger-happy and took themselves decidedly seriously.

In any case, the Germans had no use for French leaders as long as Laval and Henriot were available. It was indicative that, after Henriot’s assassination, the dead man was replaced by his ghost voice, repeating, from beyond the tomb, recorded renderings of his previous broadcasts, night after night, punctually at 9.15 P.M. (What, Guéhenno wonders, did his wife and children make of the prolongation of a public voice? Did they listen to the dead man?) Doriot alone might have met some of their requirements, but it was only at the last stages of the agony of the Third Reich that they were prepared to grant him any effective power. And then le Chef (mourned by Paquis and a handful of gunmen) was killed as the result of an attack from the air. At best, the French could be allowed to be chefs de gare.

Collaborationism, then, had been a working partnership, between unequal partners, in a temporary relationship in which neither party could do without the other and in which neither party ever had complete trust in the other. Despite a few shared interests – a German victory and so a German future, above all – and even a few shared prejudices and beliefs (anti-Semitism, anti-Communism) it had never been a particularly happy relationship. The Germans needed their own chosen French collaborationists in order to demonstrate their own importance to their superiors in Berlin, many of whom had increasing doubts about the need for maintaining permanent bodies in Paris in the first place, particularly after 1943, when the rôle assigned to France, apart from being the most promising potential source of labour supply for war production, was to offer the principal training ground for young recruits to the Wehrmacht and for the re-formation of units that had been decimated in the East. A body that engaged the services of forty civilians must seem to have more value than one that had only twenty on its payroll. Military bureaucracies, particularly those on the fringes of armies – technical and supply services, transport, lines of communication – have their own inimitable ways of perpetuating themselves and of arguing, from more ‘strength’ to yet more ‘strength’, an argument familiar to those who have experienced the potency of the British military concept of On Strength. Given a certain number under his orders, the person in charge could claim promotion from lieutenant colonel to full colonel so that, in 1943/44, colonels and their equivalents in SS ranks were thicker than ever on the ground sur la place de Paris.

And so, in their turn, the French would be likely to be drawn to the big battalions, rather than to what could be merely peripheral or ephemeral organizations. The Armistice Commission, which lasted out the whole period of occupation, was clearly a good investment for all parties concerned even after the withdrawal from it of the Italians. On the other hand, people like Paquis must have always felt insecure, propaganda being a mercurial substance subject to very sudden shifts in emphasis. The Germans might lose interest in it altogether, if they were no longer to care what the French thought, and Dr. Goebbels would take a great deal of convincing that French opinion was really a matter of importance. It still had been in 1942, when some German leaders had still been considering a French option. But by 1943, all that the Germans wanted of the French was labour; and force and threats, rather than persuasion, seemed the most effective means of ensuring a steady stream of French workers to the Reich. Indeed, the very pressure of the STO undermined the diplomatic and cultural efforts of Abetz, Epting and Grimm. The wonder is that the propaganda network managed to survive at all. The fact that it did is an eloquent illustration of the incoherence of Nazi administration at the very top. One sometimes suspects that Berlin simply did not know the current state of play in Paris and that certain bodies survived simply because people in Berlin had forgotten about them or did not know that they still existed. One can well appreciate why the German officials in Paris – like French conscripts before them, or STO conscripts at the time – should have regarded the Gare de l’Est with such alarm; for it was not only the point of departure (almost certainly on a single ticket) of the much dreaded posting to the East; it was also – and quite as alarmingly – the point of arrival of important officials sent to enquire into the various organizations that had proliferated in the French capital since the summer of 1940, and likely to ask a number of highly inconvenient questions. Of course, no doubt some of these unwelcome visitors could be softened up with a dinner Chez Maxim’s or at the Tour d’Argent, but there was always the danger of an inflexibly puritanical visitation. Mercifully for those with a vested interest in staying put, puritans seem to have been in short supply in the higher échelons of the Nazi hierarchy. Indeed, as the years went by, Goering, in his steady pursuit of loot, employed an expanding army of German agents and French go-betweens to scour out the Paris art market and set aside the treasures hidden away in the cellars of the Louvre and the Petit-Palais. And so Goering became the most reliable protector of the Paris bandes amarantes, whom he expected to entertain him according to his own lavish standards.

So, in their turn, the more calculating French collabos would seek employment in what was, at any time between 1940 and 1944, a going concern, though with even heavier demands put upon it from 1942 onwards; a police organization: the prefecture of police and its multifarious services, the Sûreté, the police municipale, and the limb out of that enormous body, the PQJ, the Section Spéciale, and even the rather reassuring gendarmerie. The prefecture worked in daily cooperation with the whole gamut of German police and intelligence agencies and repressive bodies. The police municipale carried out arrests at the behest of the German authorities and put deportees on the death trains that left from Drancy. The gendarmerie worked in close links with the Feldgendarmerie (they were indeed in exactly the same line of business) and the French Gestapo, as its name implied, was the most effective arm of Knochen and the avenue Foch. The Germans, with a total repressive force of only ten thousand available to them in the whole of France, were wholly dependent on the vast body of French police: a hundred thousand – Amouroux, as we have seen, has even put it at double that figure – with ten thousand alone available in the Paris area. In this respect, the magnificent machine of French repression enabled the Germans, from the start, to cut down on their own police requirements, making the maximum number of members of the Feldgendarmerie available for service in the East. As things turned out – with the notable exception of the Gestapo français, whose members were to go on trial and to be executed – collaborationism in police organizations would ensure both survival and subsequent security of tenure, partly thanks to the carefully staged police mutiny of August 1944 that gave the police municipale a semispurious testimonial as résistants. They had certainly waited till the very last moment to resist! The result was that there was scarcely a commissaire de police in Paris who was replaced at the Liberation. There was nothing new or exceptional about this; it had happened in 1789, in 1794, in 1814 and again in 1815, in 1830, in 1848, the only partial break occurring in 1871. Nineteen forty and 1944 both represented the truly remarkable continuity of the Paris police force to which the Germans owed such an enormous debt. Much the same happened in Lyon, and no doubt everywhere else.

The ultimate form of collaborationism was service in German uniform, on the Eastern Front. This involved only a handful of collaborators, a few hundred at the most: doriotistes, miliciens, and a very thin scattering of déatistes. It was a form of collaboration in which the Germans, even in 1944/45, showed only a reluctant and grudging interest; and most such volunteers, once having forced their way onto German military awareness, were assigned to second-line functions rather than to combat duties, though, at the very end, disparate elements of the Division Charlemagne were fighting alongside fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Hitlerjugend in the tunnels of the Berlin U-Bahn.

Collaborationism of this extreme kind, as well as previous enrolment in the uniformed ranks of the PPF, the RNP, the Milice and the francistes, was confined to males, these various bodies not possessing women’s sections. So it is difficult to quantify feminine collaborationism and to assess the impact of feminine participation in collaborationist activities. Let us exclude, once and for all, the prostitutes, who were merely doing their job as before. Let us also exclude the nonprofessional horizontales, who lay down for a variety of motives, few of them ideological. Let us exclude the 80,000 mothers who claimed German nationality for their offspring. It is hard to place the wives and the daughters of the leading collaborators; they may, or they may not, have shared the commitment of their husbands or their parents; certainly most stuck to their husbands in Sigmaringen – I do not know of any who sought a divorce, either in 1944 or later. Corinne Luchaire shared the views of her father. Later, some of the widows of those executed would be concerned to vindicate their memory and to keep the guttering flame of collaborationism burning. There were women actresses and singers who delighted German audiences during these years; and social collaborationism was able to enrol some of the big names of the feminine branch of le Tout-Paris with the suggestion that dishonour was as much the motto of the faubourg Saint-Germain as its opposite (though the women of the provincial nobility often gave the lead to early adherence to the cause of honneur et patrie); perhaps such duchesses, marquises and vicomtesses thought that, but for their presence, the social round would simply grind to a halt. They were, after all, almost professional hôtesses, and monocled German officers were agreeable and enthusiastic guests. Perhaps the least that could be said of such ladies is that they were utterly selfish and were lacking in imagination. Their eager participation in such junketings gave a veneer of social respectability to collaboration, a point that was eagerly exploited by the photographers from Signal, quick with their flashes to reveal the gleam of elegant shoulders and the scintillation of jewelry.

Numerically, the most important element in feminine collaboration would be supplied by the secretarial personnel employed by the various German organizations in Paris. Secretaries were extremely well paid – double the wages offered in the civilian sectors – and they also had access to German canteens where they could purchase goods not obtainable in ordinary shops. They might also have ready access to the favours of good-looking or high-ranking German officers. The attraction of such employment may be gauged from the steady increase in the number of students – nearly all of them women – enrolled for courses in spoken and written German at the German Institute and Berlitz, between 1940 and 1943 (when numbers began to decline). Michel points out that one-fifth of those – 20,000 in all – brought to trial in the Département de la Seine after the Liberation were women, no doubt most of them secretaries, typists and interpreters in German organizations.

But, undoubtedly, much the greatest service rendered by women to the German and French repressive authorities was in the ancient form of delation. There was an uninterrupted flow – Sundays included, for there was still a Sunday post – from July 1940 to late August 1944 (individuals were still being denounced by name at the time of the Liberation, though some of the letters must have gone astray or must have fallen into the wrong hands) of both anonymous and signed letters addressed to the Germans, to the prefecture, to the PQJ, or to the rue Lauriston, the work of the dark battalions of yellow-faced dénonciatrices, the bile and slime of times of disaster; the work, too, however, of women of substance, wreaking vengeance on some neighbour who had gossiped about them, had hinted that they had been showing undue favours to members of the German forces, or who had insulted them in food queues. (Guilloux reports hearing from his window in November 1943 an early-morning dispute between two large women. ‘Oui, vous êtes une sale femme’, etc. The other one, picking up a brick: ‘Foutez-moi le camp, ou je vous jette la brique à la gueule. Sale Boche!’ ‘Ah! Boche! Vous avez dit “Boche”! C’est bon! Je vais vous dénoncer.’ What amuses Guilloux, as he puts on his clothes, is that the two women, in the course of their row, should have employed the gestures of small children.) Probably more of these letters were signed than were anonymous, Amouroux making the important point that it was only a signed letter that would bring the financial reward due to a successful denunciation of a gaulliste, a Communist militant, or an Allied agent. Greed was certainly as great a motivation as jealousy and the desire for revenge. Many Jews, gaullistes, insoumis, and résistants were detected by these means, the PQJ regularly informed by a network of concierges spread right across the city (though, as Guéhenno reminds us, there were also patriotic concierges who covered up for their locataires, like the aged Madame Etienne, who, having opened the door four times in the course of the night by the cordon next to her bed, died early in the morning of cold, having expressed her sorrow at not living long enough to see Paris free again). What prompts such literature it is hard to say, though the promise of a reward, often considerable, jealousy and rancour seem to have been steady stimulants; and it is reasonable to suppose that most such corbeaux were not young. Perhaps such compulsive dénonciatrices should not even be qualified as collaborationists, for many of them were merely doing what they had always done, and what they would go on doing in the equally favourable circumstances of l’Epuration.

In his Journal, Guéhenno returns several times to the phenomenon of homosexual collaborationism. Sometimes this took a purely literary form, in the enthusiastic evocation of the blond and muscular beauty of young German manhood, as echoed in Montherlant. It is possible that pederasts, like other social outcasts, may have sought in collaboration a more secure status for their own minority interests, if one envisages collaboration as a gigantic new deal in which the picture cards go to those previously deprived. They may also have been drawn to a period during which youth movements pullulated and shorts – no doubt in imitation of the leather model – got shorter. A few seem to have been stimulated by the sheer enormity of the defeat. Certainly Peyrefitte set the tone in Les Amitiés particulières, published in 1943 (it was at once forbidden in Vichy!); and Peyrefitte also had solid personal grievances against a Third Republic that had expelled him from the Carrière (he was reinstated by Vichy, in rather an open-handed gesture in view of their prohibition of his book). Guéhenno remains intrigued by the problem, but is unable to find an explanation for what he believes to have been such a massive and enthusiastic adherence of this rather closed community to the collective pulls of collaborationism. Perhaps it represented the possibility of an escape from moral isolation. Whether it ever took the more practical form of collaboration across the national borders, whether there rose up and lay down a small army of horizontaux we do not know; it is something that must be confined, for ever, to the secrets de l’oreiller. But a regime – or rather, regimes – that shortened shorts and exposed bare knees (while lengthening skirts) was bound to raise secret hopes, even if these were not openly expressed. The culte du chef could also contain homosexual undertones, though both Degrelle and Doriot were pretty far removed from Jean Marais, being, on the contrary, sweaty, earthy men with a strong appeal to women. Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an opportunity to move in and secure the best jobs.

To conclude, as far as the sexes and the ages are concerned: Collaborationism tended to be masculine and adult, because men possessed the technical skills that were likely to be of value to the Germans, and because women, adolescents and children did not. There were no women railway engineers and very few women in the police, there were no miliciennes nor any fascist amazones, there were more waiters than waitresses, chauffeuses de taxi were extremely rare (a profession that began to emerge in the 1950s and that has considerably expanded since), men drove the métro, women clipped the tickets at the barriers (but not those of the Germans, who did not have any tickets and who travelled free), and women were not even subjected to the operations of the Relève, nor, later, to those of the STO. Collaborationism was a striking case of the inequalities of opportunity. Within its generous, expansive confines, women could only be assigned to secondary or subterranean rôles: typists, telephonists, secretaries, chambermaids. There were no women publishers or printers; even the most famous woman journalist, Geneviève Tabouis, had left France for New York in July 1940. Most of the ultra-collaborationists, if not active antifeminists, tended to despise women, seeing them as incompatible recruits to the politics of ‘virility’. As we shall see, the language of ultracollaborationism was an aggressively – not to say, stupidly – masculine one. The crusade to the East was a journey for men only, an opportunity to reassert their masculinity and to prove to the German masters that Frenchmen were men indeed. What the Germans made of all this posturing and claptrap we do not know: probably not very much. Certainly, most were not indifferent to the feminine allures of la doulce France; and in their now ageing memories, it is this feminine aspect that they would be most likely to recall of the golden years in Paris.

In this section, I have attempted to illustrate or to suggest some of the complexities of collaborationism as envisaged in personal, as much as in organizational, terms in the form of both a dialogue and a cohabitation between Germans and French of both sexes. In this respect, a vast, anonymous city like Paris is likely to be particularly uninformative to the historian, just as it must have so often presented a blank and stony face to the military tourist. To recapture something of the familiarity, the everydayness, even the sheer banality – the Anglo-Saxon historian would be inclined to overemphasize the dramatic quality of the enemy presence – of day-to-day relations between French and Germans, a provincial terrain would be likely to offer a more intimate picture of life, as shared, in common awareness of one another, and indeed of the simple need to keep things going, by German soldiers and French civilians.

The first volume of the Carnets of the Breton novelist, Louis Guilloux, describing the occupation years in his native Saint-Brieuc, succeeds both in giving human proportions and even faces to individual German soldiers, and in reducing their presence in the town, on the beach or in the surrounding countryside, to something so familiar as to be taken as a matter of course, unaccompanied by expressions of anger, indignation or surprise. Indeed, for Guilloux, an attentive and delighted observer of the changing colours and sounds of dusk and nightfall from his window overlooking the bay, the coast, the sea and the scattered houses of the semirural suburbs, the Germans have become, by November 1943, part of the landscape. As he watches the darkening of sea, sky and hills as they blend into a single black, he recaptures the peaceful sounds of a still winter evening: two neighbours talking in a nearby garden – he cannot pick out the words, just a murmur of masculine voices – a man hammering in a wooden stave, groups of young people joking and whistling as they hurry along the boulevard to reach home ahead of the curfew, from the centre of the town the sound of a group of Germans singing in clipped rhythm, and, close by, the shrill cry of a seabird and the song of a starling. It is an utterly peaceful scene, holding no trace of menace. And it is much the same, though in brighter, more vivid colours, in June/July 1944: the happy voices of young people, the snatch of a sentence in German to the accompaniment of the heavy tread on the quiet boulevard of two pairs of long army boots, soft voices in gardens, the shouts of children at play, and, very close by, the sound of a cricket. Far away, on the horizon, there are occasional dull flashes, the only suggestion of the slaughter taking place, by night as well as by day, in the long Normandy peninsula.

We can observe so much through the eyes of the local novelist. The French policeman, as he passes the Feldgendarmerie, raises his hand in familiar greeting to the Feldgendarme standing smoking on the step, the collar of his jacket unbuttoned. Guilloux is at the station, watching three busloads of madwomen being entrained, the population of the lunatic asylums being evacuated from the coastal areas: a Feldgendarme standing near him says something to him in bad French, accompanying the phrase with the gesture of using a syringe: ‘Chez nous, this is what we’d do.’ Guilloux walks in, without knocking, to the house of his friend, Léopold. A young German officer is having a French lesson: ‘Winner takes all,’ he says, ‘we will win this War even if we have to go on for fifty years.’ Léopold disagrees; then they resume the French lesson. One of the officers at the Kommandantur is known to be more accommodating than the others. ‘Let us hope that he doesn’t get posted away.’ Emil, a fifty-year-old bald man from Kiel, the chief gaoler at the prison, is very good about visits: ‘Yes, let them come after hours, but keep quiet about it.’ A red-haired woman in her forties who keeps a bar-restaurant has a German lover; she is good about providing information about what the Germans are likely to be up to next, enabling those who should get out to do so in time. In July 1944, Guilloux goes to the beach; it is crowded with swimmers. Of those in the water, it is hard to distinguish between French and Germans, though some of the latter stand out as being much darker than the blue-eyed local Bretons. The children know that some members of the garrison are a good touch for a packet of sweets.

In all his tranquil chronicle – almost a pastorale – of these years, there is hardly a word of anger; and, when there is, it is addressed to individual French men or women. So, like the author, we soon learn to take the German presence for granted. And even their final departure appears quite undramatic. Most of the shooting and looting occur after they have gone. His account, maintained throughout in a low key, and taken up primarily by family matters – concern for his mother’s health, long walks, visits to friends, plots for the next novel, the visual awareness of the changing seasons – is a wonderful antidote to any temptation to see French and Germans merely as mutually hostile groups. Its sheer banality is as reassuring as it is convincing. But then, of course, Saint-Brieuc, a community of manageable size, offers a more all-embracing observatory than Paris, and Guilloux, in his home town, has the sharp eye of the miniaturist.

Such a dialogue and such a cohabitation are forms of sociability that must be of particular interest to the social historian and to the historian of privacy and of everyday life, in that it is almost unprecedented – particularly over such a length of time – and in that, being unprecedented and so quite unfamiliar, it had to construct its own rules as it went along, and secrete its own temptations and its own specific forms of repulsion. It is a dark frontier area of history which the historian can explore only very tentatively, through suggestion and allusion, and with considerable reliance both on imagination and on supposition: ‘it must have been so’ or ‘so’. It is also an area of human relationships dominated by accident; individuals might slip, almost unconsciously, into collaboration, just as others might slip, step by tentative step, into resistance. The narrow balance of choice is very well put by Balavoine, a character in Marcel Aymé’s short story, ‘La Bonne Peinture’. ‘Je suis la déveine en personne,’ he complains, after the Liberation.

Quand je me suis donné à l’Europe, j’avais pas encore d’idée politique. On m’offrait deux places: ou garde du corps ou livreur de produits de beauté … Dans le personnel de chez Fantin, on était à la résistance … Si j’avais choisi livreur … je serais dans le tricolore avec un condé officiel, bien payé, bien bouffer, les dactylos de la République et fumer des américaines …¹⁰

A humble man’s dream of attainable bliss on three counts, and with only the whisky left out: whisky, cigarettes, et petites pépées, as in the popular song of the mid-1950s. He had made the wrong choice, partly because being bodyguard to a leading collaborator had seemed rather more prestigious – and had been no doubt much better paid – than being a commercial traveller in beauty products. How was the poor man to have known? How could he have read into the future? In 1942, to a simpleton like Balavoine, the future would have seemed to reside in a certain conception of Europe, something much bigger than France, more powerful than the familiar Hexagone, and how much grander than peddling cosmetics, in a couple of fibre suitcases, from door to door. If only the two offers had not come up together! But there it was; and, having made the wrong choice, he had been awarded – at the very least – l’indignité nationale, the loss of his civic rights – not that he would have much missed them – and, worse, the virtual impossibility of landing a new job. A very thin wall, indeed, on the other side of which lay at least one decoration, probably the red ribbon, a carte de résistant, a job in a ministry, and, as he says, government typists galore, Chesterfields, Camels and Lucky Strikes. Balavoine, poor fellow, is a character in fiction, but the results of a mistaken choice could be illustrated, again and again, in the personal case histories of le menu fretin of collaborationism. In the ambience of 1944/45, little mercy would be shown towards those who, faced with two contrasting offers, had gone for the wrong one.

A somewhat similar case is quoted, sympathetically, by Jean Galtier-Boissière, in his post-Liberation journal. It is that of an anarchist schoolmaster and militant pacifist, Maurice Wullens, one of those craggy, homespun, bearded rural cranks so often thrown up on the more innocent shores of French – or British – pacifism: a Tolstoyan beard, china-blue eyes, reddish eyebrows and a pleated blue peasant smock. Wullens had been severely wounded during the First World War. As he lay bleeding on the ground, he had been confronted by a German soldier who, instead of finishing him off with a bayonet, had carefully dressed his wounds and checked the flow of blood, thereby, as Wullens saw it, saving his life twice over. He had concluded from this act of humanity that the Germans were decent and kindly people, and had devoted the interwar years to pacifist propaganda in a little-read journal called Les Humbles. Defeat and occupation did nothing to alter his views – he was still back with his merciful German of 1916, however archaic he might have become in a Reich dominated by Nazi fanatics – and he continued to preach the purest doctrine of pacifism and to remain faithful to his extreme left-wing commitment. Wullens, one feels, was one of those obstinate, rather tiresome village prophets, a Tolstoyan autodidact who would not easily consent to remaining out of print, would, on the contrary, insist on selling his pottery and his rustic wares, his herbs, health foods and patent medicines, hand-woven garments and rope-soled espadrilles, however little suited to altered circumstances. For him silence would seem like treason, like letting down his handful of eager disciples, as well as deeply wounding to a man long convinced of his own utter rightness, one of those tenacious individuals who could always be relied upon to get his timing completely wrong, and to go on witnessing at a time when just common sense and prudence would have called for silence. Wullens, then, almost innocently – had they not offered him print, and did it matter where the truth appeared, so long as it appeared? – ended up in the company of the extreme right – a transformation to which militant pacifists fell easy victims. To the consternation of his friends and followers, Wullens ultimately wrote articles for Je suis partout. Luckily, after the Liberation, the bearded and smocked seer had – prudent for once – returned to the obscurity of the rural existence he should never have abandoned, settling in his native village in French Flanders, where he died, almost unnoticed, in January 1946.

Galtier-Boissière is both touched to learn of the death of this village innocent and relieved to hear that he had escaped the retribution which would have overtaken him had he remained in Paris. Few of those who had been unwise enough to have contributed to Je suis partout can have got off so lightly. Yet we can see that it was right that poor, simple Wullens should have got off. Galtier-Boissière, like Guéhenno and Louis Guilloux, is an unusually generous observer, well able to distinguish between those who went into collaboration with their eyes open and for what they could get out of it, and those, like Wullens, who merely lost their way in a world of cruel choices and wandered, almost unconsciously, into dangerous company and dangerous publications. He expresses a similar sympathy for the far more unfortunate Gérin, literary critic of L’Oeuvre, given a savage sentence, and for Francis Delaisi, released from Fresnes with one of his arms paralysed. And, at the same time, he observes bitterly, in the course of the trial of Jean Luchaire, that, out of the hundreds of people who had obtained favours from this all-powerful, venal, but generous collaborationist, only seven had been prepared to come forward and witness in his favour at the high court.

Understanding and mercy were not at a premium in 1944–46, and there were few people prepared to admit, publicly at least, that one might have stumbled, almost by accident, into some mild, relatively innocuous and even eccentric form of collaborationism, as one might have stumbled, equally fortuitously, into an equally eccentric form of resistance. Both sides had their mild loonies, their sillies, their jokers and their bores. The ex-serviceman in Au Bon Beurre is more pathetic than wicked, and he is above all an intolerable bore, a heavy-footed casse-pied; but resistance casse-pieds were even worse. Just as the PCF militant killer has his perfect counterpart in the SS officer or NCO with an exemplary Nazi background, so, as between minor collaborationist and minor résistant, there remains a largely uncharted common ground of silliness and naïveté.

Most Parisians had only peripheral contacts with the Germans: serving them at table, cutting their hair (they were assiduous customers for a short-back-and-sides), hauling them along in a basket behind a bicycle, selling them a paper, showing them the way, waiting for them to relinquish a rowing-boat or a pédalo on one of the lakes in the Bois de Boulogne, taking their bets at the PMU in Longchamp or Vincennes, enticing them into expensive night spots and clip joints. They represented a presence that came to be accepted almost as a matter of course, almost as part of the physical landscape, something to which they could readily become accustomed – as one might to a thundershower or a gale or a terrible winter – and would regard with the same sort of blind indifference as present-day Parisians might vaguely register the presence of the garish Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Belgian, Spanish, Italian and Jugoslav buses parked behind Notre-Dame, or a beflagged, fibreglass-topped pseudo-bateau-mouche passing under a bridge.

Guéhenno, more observant than most, constantly anxious to take the moral temperature of the occupant, if only to detect some tiny chink of weakness and uncertainty, of doubt and unease, detects the loneliness and lack of assurance of individual German soldiers lost in the unseeing indifference of the native crowd and denied even the small favour of a living glance, recognition at least of his presence; and his watchful yet sympathetic appraisal can take in the shininess and the thinning material of a uniform worn for too long and showing as many signs of war-weariness as the elderly soldier or the bewildered peasant boy it contains. He can remark on the ridiculousness of the toy pistol – it is in fact a real one, but designed more for display than for actual use – in its holster and the elaborate dagger in its sheath, both worn at the hip. (Is the pistol, he asks himself, supposed to intimidate the defeated? He thinks, on the contrary, that it is more likely to amuse them.) The Germans, in his eyes, are as much comical as bewildered and embarrassed, as if apologizing for their presence (what are they doing in this foreign city when they could be at home?). He is amused at the stiff gestures of the Feldgendarmerie as they direct the rare traffic as if impelled by an interior clockwork mechanism, he finds the exaggerated salute, accompanied by a resounding stamp of boots, grotesque and unnatural. The military bands that play on Sundays in the Luxembourg and the Tuileries have instruments that are topped by clusters of tiny brass bells that remind him of the sentimental rusticity of Bavaria or Austria (or, indeed, of a Swiss Sunday village band). He has an eye too for the vulgarity of the tall, stiff caps of German officers, less impressive than cheaply ostentatious, as well as for the thick, close-shaven necks bulging over tight-fitting, strangling collars, as if there were some military merit in such acute discomfort.

Every Wednesday, as he waits for his office to open, in a western district, he looks out for a tired, frayed old soldier who smokes a squiggly porcelain pipe and whose only friend is an equally tired and run-down old horse who nestles his pink nose up against him: weary and faithful companions of so many journeys across Europe, in victory and in defeat, first this way, then that, eastwards and westwards, the ancient couple of peace and war, a reminder, too, that the shining, metallic, ultramodern Wehrmacht of the proud summer of 1940 dragged along behind it, in unprestigious and obscure supply services, the semirustic baggage trains of medieval, eighteenth and nineteenth-century armies that were the refuge of the old and the broken-down. (Guéhenno notes the presence, in this transport company, of a dwarf, his long overcoat dragging along the pavement among the horse droppings; he notes, too, that the old man and his animal friend avoid the dwarf.) Later, after the Liberation, he would find himself missing the regular early-morning presence of the old man and the old horse, as they waited in patient resignation for whatever they were waiting for, before slowly moving off – twin reminders of Wednesday, of a series of Wednesdays, and thus admitted – all unknowingly – to the intimacies of the personal calendar of a compassionate and observant Frenchman. (Had the old man, puffing on his pipe and lost in his dialogue with his chevaline companion, ever noticed him, as he sat waiting on a street bench? As likely that he hadn’t, his eyes far removed from the realities of Paris, taking in the memory of some black-and-white village or the flat northern plains.)

Guéhenno has also spotted the luckiest German serviceman in Paris, the perfect and accomplished embusqué, a young blond Nordic god who has got the best job in the bitter war, as he polishes the brilliantly shining brasswork of the immaculate boat, La Lutèce, requisitioned by the Germans for the last two and a half years, then lazily stretches his long limbs in the brilliant spring sun of the quays between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-des-Arts. Does the young man, he wonders, have a single thought for the terrible slaughter of the East, as he proceeds methodically and unhurriedly to scrub down the immaculate deck, his muscles rippling under the striped vest of the Kriegsmarine, a reminder, too, that Paris is a port, if in this happy instance, a port de plaisance (barge traffic had almost totally disappeared during these occupation years, as a consequence of the cutting off of northeast France and Belgium). The young Adonis must have had a powerful protector, perhaps a naval officer.

Guéhenno, like his friend Paulhan, knows how to walk through the occupied city to a purpose in order to distinguish between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the reassuring and the alarming (the appearance of a yellow poster in the corridors of the métro, shiny and menacing), and so he has an eye too for the desolate little groups of field-grey soldiers – les hommes verts – as they wander through the sordid, seedy, sweaty, run-down topography of a declining Luna-Park: a shadow of its former self, its dirty, deforming mirrors throwing back the grotesque reflexions – pulled out or squashed down – of the bored, purposeless occupiers, the rendezvous too of very low-class prostitutes and of a few zazous engaged in smashing plates, a Luna-Park of despair and desolation, far removed from the noisy attractions of Pierrot mon ami. What a place to come to! – as sad, as used up, as the broad deserts of the portes de Paris, and the heartless yellow-brick blocks of the HBM. Is this the way to spend a precious, exiguous leave, so much looked forward to?

He can gauge the loneliness and despair of the single soldier, the solitary conqueror, separated from his group, as he wanders aimlessly along the heartless wide streets (the wider, the more heartless) of the foreign city, so uninviting, so uncommunicative, his thoughts on home or on the dread East; and he feels pity for the fellow – rather shabby by now, and no longer strutting – due for inevitable slaughter, putting it off, gaining time just hitting the boulevards, nowhere to go, just walking, as if sheer fatigue would deaden fear. He has even spotted, in a pissotière opposite the lycée Henri-IV, in neat Gothic capitals, the chalked words: Heimat, Süsse Heimat, the cri du coeur of some homesick soldier with his fly undone.

But Guéhenno is a man of exceptional imagination and generosity, capable of seeing the German soldier as an individual – like the bewildered, well-meaning Hans Pfeiffer, a paysan de Paris indeed, hankering for his Brandenburg village, who makes an intermittent, grinning appearance in Au Bon Beurre – a poor, increasingly shabby and shiny creature, caught up in a struggle quite out of proportion to his modest needs and timid hopes, his personal Lebensraum contained in a few frayed family photographs in his wallet, taken in his village on a background of steep-roofed black-and-white houses and vast, dark wooden barns. A constricted vision of world conquest – and not as a symbol to be stalked and hunted down like a beast, à chacun son boche, by a PCF killer squad of three (the killer, a second gun, and a scout). They set out on their human hunt by train, with all the equipment, acquired in the basement of the BHV, of a camping holiday (tent, groundsheet, duvets, butagaz) and for them such carefully rehearsed and organized assassination outings offer an interesting and exciting replacement to les congés payés a few years before: a breath of fresh air, camping out in the woods or in an urban garden belonging to a reliable militant couple – their children are also in the know – and at the end of the trip a nameless dead boche, preferably an officer – go for the uniform, do not bother to look at the face (it will be done from behind, in any case). Then back to Belleville-Ménilmontant, Saint-Denis, Ivry, Montreuil, or Noisy-le-Sec. Bonne chasse.

Guéhenno, as acute an observer as a novelist like Marcel Aymé, was also becoming aware, by the beginning of 1943, of the increasing parallelism in the outward appearances presented by both occupants and occupés, as if imitating one another as a result of an imposed familiarity, their clothing, civilian and military, showing common signs of wear and tear, as if they had become yoked together, for better or for worse – in 1943, it would seem to both unwilling partners that it was for worse – as they travelled on the same downward slope, equally exposed to the same relentless cold, a silent reminder of the priorities to the East. It seemed as if shabbiness were now crying out to shabbiness in a fraternity of shivering discomfort and frayed elegance. There was Martin, the veteran of the Dardanelles in La Traversée de Paris carrying his two immense suitcases on the eight-mile walk from the rue Poliveau to the rue Caulaincourt, a bulky man with a huge black moustache, just contained in a splitting brown overcoat, shiny with age, but still bearing traces of elegance, likewise hinted at in the immense gold horseshoe pin through his tie, and wearing a homburg hat, greasy with use, with its bold turn-up – giving the general impression of an inspecteur de police. Or there was the elderly seamstress in her threadbare, wafer-thin overcoat, once woollen. These are the unconscious counterparts of the Gefreiter, his uniform worn down to the seams, his trousers shining at the seat, his long boots cracked and unpolished, the heels revealing their uneven nails. All three have travelled a long way by then towards a shared cynicism and a common concern to keep the cold at bay, increasingly indifferent to the likely course of public events, their thoughts taken up exclusively with private worries. Could there then be signs of mutual recognition between Martin and his companion – stealthy walkers in the arctic night – and the silent group of German soldiers encountered cycling past the Porte Saint-Martin in the direction of the Hôtel Majestic? Members of a common army of shabbiness, a fraternity of ci-devants: the Germans still showing traces of the elegance and brassy freshness of the glittering army of 1940, Martin, the seamstress and their like carrying around on their bodies the frayed tatters of the double-breasted fashions of l’année Expo, the lost hopes and illusions of 1937. Both were living outside and beyond their allotted time: yet another instance of the Time Machine having gone wrong. But the French were dragging even further behind than the Germans, as they shivered in the thinning wardrobes of Stavisky, the 6 février and the Front Populaire. By 1944, however, they would be more or less neck-and-neck in the shared inelegance of vestimentary weariness. But, a year later, the civilian population of the ruined Reich would be well ahead, their nakedness covered in the ragged decencies of the débris of the Wehrmacht, a whole people, children, women and old men, clothed in camouflage: a brilliant jungle green, sand-coloured yellow, and splodges of deep black, two-legged lizards, regiments of upright crocodiles.

Few Parisians can have taken in so much, have read so deeply in the humbly complaining language of a tired clothing, have detected such secret signals linking soldier to civilian, but merely seeing through the grey-green figures as if they had been transparencies, as if they had not been there. Guéhenno’s vision and Aymé’s alert eye for detail take in not just the creases and the stains (dark stains), the traces of clumsy stitching, the pitiful thinness of the material, itself ersatz, but go beneath and beyond to the wallet, the family photographs in the top pocket of the tight jacket, the long army-issue underwear, to the naked man underneath.

There was, however, another sign of military decline that the philosopher and the novelist fail to mention: the increasing proportion of German soldiers wearing metal-framed spectacles. Henri Michel refers to a requisition order made by the authorities of the Majestic for 100,000 pairs of tortoiseshell frames, 80,000 pairs of metal ones and 200,000 lenses of various categories. Given the origin of the order, this can hardly have been to provide for the civilian market. By 1943, the German army was becoming short-sighted as well as shabby.

As few Parisians would seek them out, try to use them, attempt to work with them (more would work for them, whether voluntarily or not: Michel has the figure of 590,000 Parisians working for the occupant by 1944, 171,000 in Germany, the remaining 420,000 in the Paris area), as would take potshots at them, spit in their faces, shout insults at them (which they did not understand) or turn their backs on them. Despite the strident litany, A chacun son boche! – that hymn of hate tapped out again and again by the underground L’Humanité – there were relatively few takers. The militant killers had names (some of which, most inappropriately, were later given to Paris streets or métro stations), they were exceptional individuals, almost copybook militants, and, in the sheer perfection of their fanatical commitment, they were the direct counterpart of their SS opposite numbers, whom – across the gulf of political Manichaeanism – they so very much resembled, both in terms of common ruthlessness and cruelty and often in shared social origins. Take, for instance, Pierre Georges (alias Frédo, Albert, capitaine Henri, Camille, Patrie, and, in his final persona, Colonel Fabien), whose life is that of an unswervingly exemplary militant, born into militancy and dying a hero in de Lattre’s First Army, with everything in between exactly in line and as it should be: born in January 1919 to a Communist family (or one soon to be, that is, in 1920); at ten already in charge of a small group of Pionniers in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, a commune of fairly strict orthodoxy (though it did also produce the unorthodox and individualist René Fallet); at seventeen, a volunteer in the International Brigade in Spain, then back in France with severe wounds and the rank of lieutenant in the Republican army, in 1938; in 1939 working in an airplane factory in La Courneuve. Interned in December 1939, he escapes from prison during the chaos of l’Exode, enrolling shortly after, with Ferdinand Vigne, in a PCF killer squad in Marseille; then he is in charge of a clandestine printing press in the suburbs of the same city. Soon after, he is sent to Corsica, with the task of reestablishing contacts with the local cells. Next he is to be found in charge of the undercover Jeunesses Communistes in Lyon. Spotted by the Vichy police, he returns to Paris one step ahead of arrest, in June 1941, to become the leader of the local Jeunesses Communistes and an officer in its military wing, the Bataillons de la Jeunesse. It is this implacable and dedicated militant who heads the murder squad and who fires the shot that kills the unfortunate midshipman Moser, 21st August 1941, métro Barbès.

But Georges and his contemporary, Brustlein, born in 1919 in the XIIme and the leader of the murder squad sent to Nantes, are – mercifully perhaps – individuals quite exceptional in their ruthlessness and fanaticism, figures indeed out of a PCF primer, capable at the most of inspiring by their example a few dozen young men and even more fanatical young women. They were not leaders of a whole army of faceless fanatics. We even hear of a case when a member of a Communist killer squad, his revolver at the ready, failed to pull the trigger on a German officer as he came down the steps of the Madeleine. He was presumably excluded from the party. Even PCF militants can occasionally lapse into human emotions. There is evidence that Cachin, from the Santé, wrote a letter to the German military authorities in order publicly to disassociate himself from individual acts of murder; and this ‘lapse’ – if it were one – was brought up again in an article published in Le Populaire in 1951. Some party militants, when ordered to undertake a particularly dangerous mission in 1943 or 1944, simply lay low and failed to carry it out. One such, it was widely held, was a very eminent party historian. The PCF, after the Liberation, thought better about making a public example of a man so important. But he had to earn his passage back to the bosom of the party by a particularly zealous display of orthodoxy over the next few years. A great many Communists during these difficult years were primarily concerned with survival in a world in which everything was stacked against them. They were indeed members of what already called itself – with an eye to the future – le parti des fusillés – but they did not always see why they should be one of these elect. So the call, à chacun son boche generally went unheard, not out of any concern for the Germans, but out of simple prudence. The Germans were dangerous game, best left alone. Indeed, even the killer squads were to display rather more zeal for removing from the scene ex-militants, some once on the bureau central, who had gone over to the PPF taking with them some of the best-kept secrets of the party’s activities during the period 1939–41, than with random murders of probably harmless German officers who did not possess any such inconvenient knowledge. Even within the ranks of the politically committed, there was room for attentisme, for sitting it out, for simply ignoring the Germans, and keeping well out of their way, if one were one day to enter the Communist heaven and enjoy the future lendemains qui chantent.

For most of the Germans – not those lucky ones who had secured a permanent posting to Paris, but all those soldiers and NCOs rewarded with a brief stay in the city as part of a leave (and one of the functions of Paris – as of Brussels – was as a leave centre, both for the Germans and for their successors) – it would have been much the same. They would be isolated by language (how few would have known more than a few scraps of French – enough perhaps to ask the way, with a finger on their street plan, to some utterly unpronounceable locality, totally resistant to the Teutonic tongue: Rueil-Malmaison, Barbès-Rochechouart). Often bewildered by the métro system (for some of these peasants were very stupid), they would first of all have gone on a shopping spree, using their inflated marks or their army purchasing coupons to sweep up knickknacks, miniature Eiffel Towers and other articles de Paris, scent, silk stockings, groceries, alcohol, carrying to the transport office of the Gare de l’Est enormous parcels to be sent to their families, customs-free. Then – their families thus provided for – they would have done their dutiful round of the sights, have taken hosts of snaps of each other against easily recognizable backgrounds: Tour Eiffel, Notre-Dame, Arc de Triomphe, Moulin de la Galette, Carousel, Sacré-Coeur, Opéra (Hitler’s favourite too), Invalides, moving around in shoals, only vaguely aware of Parisians, in the almost unseeing way in which tourists regard natives, perhaps even thinking, with some envy, how lucky they were, for they did not have the Eastern Front awaiting them at the end of their brief period of leave. But, perhaps they would recover a more acute eyesight at the sight of a tight skirt, a small, shapely, undulating bottom, or firm legs well set off by high-heeled cothurnes.

(Later, a visit to one of forty-odd licensed brothels could look after that aspect of military tourism, though, as we shall see, some soldiers struck off on their own, rue Berger, rue d’Aboukir, rue Saint-Denis, to take a dip in unlicensed French flesh, perhaps in an effort to ‘get away from it all’, or as a rather pathetic groping for female companionship, the ladies of the licensed premises no doubt operating with suitable military expeditiveness, precision and unfeelingness. This initiative was an act of military indiscipline and often the first step towards a furtive visit to a pharmacie: one can imagine the wretched soldier going from pharmacie to pharmacie in order to find one that did not employ any female assistants, and then waiting in the shadows till the place was empty, before throwing himself, in broken French, and with the help of gestures in the general direction of below the Gott Mit Uns belt, on the mercy and discretion of the white-coated chemist. Members of that body must have acquired a unique sum of knowledge on the subject of such undisciplined sex. But such lone flyers, escapers from the herd, were no doubt rare. Most would have played safe. And it would be safe, in every sense. As Henri Michel observes, rather wrily, ‘Boule de suif’ does not seem to have been a source of inspiration to the professionnelles of the first half of the 1940s, though he does quote instances of résistants having been given refuge in brothels during the hours of curfew, having missed the last métro.)

Tourists, travelling in groups and staying at special hotels (all on the Right Bank, most boulevard Haussmann, avenue Wagram, République, none on the Left Bank), whether in uniform or not, are insulated from the inhabitants of the cities to which they are brief visitors, and they follow a fixed circuit that is unlikely to take them behind the scenes, into courtyards and impasses (Dutourd’s only German soldier, Hans Pfeiffer, who somehow found his way to Au Bon Beurre, in a quiet street off les Ternes, showed quite unusual initiative, or he may have been lured there by the enterprising Mlle. Léonie). There is no intimacy in their standardized circuits, nor any memory in the prestigious buildings that line them. The Louvre, the Invalides, the Opéra, can swallow, in common indifference, a Hitler or the anonymous hordes of military tourists in different uniforms. Of the German soldiers, all that would survive of their brief encounters with Paris would be the group snapshots of themselves, an arm round the waist of a fellow soldier, against the background of a monument as artificial and as totally unfeeling as one of those painted-in backcloths used in military photographs of the First World War: a French soldier sitting in the painted-in cockpit of a Farman, a German soldier grinning from a painted zeppelin little more than his own size. The final irony would be that so many of these photographs would be likely to survive their owners and their momentary photographic companions, amidst scattered pieces of the human rubbish, strands of clothing and ammunition, in the snows of the East or on the hot, dusty plains of the Puszta, very many miles from the Parvis Notre-Dame, and without ever having been proudly displayed to family and friends back home. Like so much else about life in wartime, there is something cruelly unfeeling about such carefully organized tourism, in well-drilled and numbered groups, a brief respite, a halt on the road to death. They had merely passed through, gaped, and moved on, to make way for others. What would stay the most vivid in their minds for what remained of their lives was to have slept two or three nights in clean, crisp sheets, before being returned once more to the filth and the bugs of the East. There is something hideously cruel about those unfeeling sheets, constantly washed and laundered for the use of the next batch of temporary tourists. The sheets, like the busy chambermaids, who, in a few deft and determined gestures, shook them out, spread them, and tucked them in, or who changed them and threw them in untidy bundles onto the floor, also had no memory. But Otto von Stülpnagel, who spent so much time walking about, taking in the window displays, staring at the tasteful contrivance of Yvonne de Brémond d’Ars, opposite the closed British embassy, would be remembered, for he was not a tourist; he was a resident – indeed the number one resident.

The intimacies that, rarely, lay beyond the well-mapped itineraries of the guided tour, in the secret places of the city, in the anarchy of what was left of the Zone will elude us: maids’ bedrooms at the top of tall apartment blocks, the hut in a piece of wasteland, the abandoned garage, the former dormitory of railway workers among the sidings, unobtrusive in the confused maps of marshalling yards, any place, in fact, beyond the double searching eyes of the prefecture and the German military police, the soldier’s dream of a quiet corner and a place in which to hide, beyond the reach of nocturnal checks on papers, a haven in which to sit it out, under female protection, so seldom – yet sometimes – attained. The stumbling dialogue, in ponderous, halting Franco-German will also elude us. ‘Mademizelle Léoni, si fus plait, je peux foir?’ ‘Krieg. La Guerre. Triste.’ ‘Cherard, fus êtes un garzon remargable, vous feriez ricoler un mort!’ – the new, timid langue de l’oreiller we cannot perceive. From the French side of the bed, there would be greater facility, thanks to the German Institute and Berlitz (the latter as ever on the make: 939 doing German, 2,470 doing English, in 1939; 625 doing English, 7,920 doing German in November 1941 – an eloquent vote of confidence in the future of collaboration and of the belief in a long occupation, and lack of confidence in an Allied victory, though the figures for German courses must have started to go down in 1943). The German must have shown some sign of improvement in the course of four years; and, if ‘M. Anse’, also known as ‘M’sieu Féfé’, the peaceable German soldier in Au Bon Beurre, acquired only a very tentative and rudimentary French, his teacher in bedroom arts, Léonie, had presumably achieved a good working knowledge of German, before following one of her military lovers to Germany in the summer of 1944. We cannot perceive such consoling intimacies directly, though they may be recreated in works of fiction, such as Dutourd’s celebrated novel, one of the most convincing accounts of daily life in occupied Paris, at the level of a peaceful, provincial street in the quartier des Ternes. Such is the case of Mlle. Léonie and the naïve, bucolic Hans Pfeiffer, who was fortunate enough to stay on in Paris the full four years – he was thirty-eight – as a Gefreiter in a Flak detachment, shooting ineffectively at Allied planes from a rooftop in the avenue d’Orléans, and simply waiting for the war to end, heading for Au Bon Beurre and civilian company (and Léonie) as soon as he was off duty, staying on after the German withdrawal in August 1944, to be captured by a squad of self-appointed FFI – one hopes that they did not treat the unwarlike Brandenburger too roughly. There must have been, one hopes at least, quite a number of such unwilling and untidy soldiers – his uniform worn thin and greasy, his long boots unpolished, though he was buttoned up all the way down the front, in the approved manner – as the candid, sentimental ‘M. Anse’.

Both Jean Dutourd and Marcel Aymé managed to introduce us to the realities and the irritations of the Occupation witnessed in miniature: from within the manageable, enclosed, and, even in these terrible times, reassuring world of neighbourhood: Julie and Charles-Hubert Poissonard, crémiers, and their customers; or from Aymé’s favourite observation post on the steep rue Caulaincourt, on the upper slopes of the faubourg Montmartre – Simenon’s world, but against a period background, in which shattering outside events, great battles, huge advances and retreats, are muted and reduced to a scale strictly unheroic.

Such literature is the best that we can hope for. For we are interlopers, gatecrashers at a party to which we were not invited, we were not there; the Germans and the French – and, perhaps, at one time, some Italians (though there is no record of them, so that, in Paris at least, they must have been rarely sighted, familiar figures though they would have been in Nice, Gap, Sisteron, Digne, Briançon, Manosque, Valence) – were there.

We are eager eavesdroppers after the event, when that particular play is over and the leading characters are dispersed and sent about their business; and so we can only capture impressions at second or third hand, or through the printed evocation, in a nostalgic novel or in a journal such as that of Guéhenno or of Galtier-Boissière. Here is the memory of endless winters that are always bitter and in which the biting wind is always from the north and the east, making the grands boulevards, the quais, the Sébasto, the Boulmich and métro Glacière (boulevard du Port-Royal) agonizing chasms, rendering the crossroads Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, that house of two of the most inhospitable of the four winds, so cold that the prostitutes are driven to huddle behind the heavy blackout curtains of the cafés on the corner of the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and the rue Saint-Denis. As the years pass, les années noires will seem less black, and more bizarre, an upside-down world containing mysterious intermediary zones of half-shades and semicollaboration and semiresistance, in which many go about in disguise, in which black marketeers announced their activities in their shiny black macs, in which the Gestapo français wear grey chapeaux taupés, like prewar Marseille gangsters (some were), in which a certain café in the Place Blanche will make available, for a considerable sum, a full set of papers. They are less black too because we know that it will all work out in the end – the allusive vocabulary, half-coded, wry, cynical, a language of hints and city inventiveness (it must have been much the same with the Berliners), revolving insistently around such well-worn themes of hardship and privation, the harking back to the believed splendours of avant la guerre, the new insults that drew on the constant preoccupation with provisioning and rationing, with queueing, hoping and waiting, with the threadbare protection of overcoats, with shoes that let in the snow and the wet, with persistent chilblains on feet and hands, with the lack of soap and the prevalence of skin diseases. These were years during which the prevailing and timid light attempted to escape through thick blued filters: les années bleues, an anaemic and unsightly, ungenerous blue that even covered the vast glass roofs of the termini, giving the rare and patient passengers, awaiting ancient pre-1914 carriages (all the modern ones having been taken for the needs of German military transport) the impression of walking in the dim, opaque light of a deep ocean bed.

War and occupation will bring new sounds and create new silences. Many, recalling the occupation years, in Paris or in Lyon, will remember the silence and the stillness of the long winter nights under curfew, broken occasionally by the dull tramp of a German foot patrol – the agents cyclistes (the hirondelles as they were known to Parisians, in their long blue capes) and the German bicycle patrols, pedalling silently through the dark streets, could not be heard, which made them potentially all the more dangerous to the illicit nightwalker, fearful of the moonlight and constantly endeavouring to remain in the shadows. An inhabitant of Lyon, who had lived for many years near the quays of the Rhône, not far from the pont de la Boucle, would identify the occupation years with the fact that, all at once, he could actually hear the fast-flowing, greenish river, a dull, steady murmur, its waters heading southwards over the shallow sandbanks and the deep, swirling central bed, an eerie, powerful sound, drowned in peacetime by the constant noise of the traffic and the roar of the night lorries.

In Paris, the night hours would also bring, to the light sleeper, to the man or woman reading in bed – and this was a time for reading in bed; indeed people had never done so much reading in bed – the realization that the city was not just shared out between French and Germans, whether in cohabitation or in confrontation, and that there was a third element of population to be reckoned with which, like the night patrols of the hirondelles, favoured the still watches of the small hours. This other army of occupation, far from coming from the East, had always been there down below, and now, driven by privation, started coming up from the sewers, moving into the cellars and the ground floors of offices and houses, fighting, biting and screaming over the disputed contents of dustbins, running, in tight, well-ordered patrols, ten abreast, those ranks behind keeping close up, at great speed, and with a dire sense of purpose, through the dark streets and along the wide, black boulevards. This time, not members of an invading army, but old inhabitants, previously content to remain below ground, but now laying claim to a chosen terrain on the surface, as if the time had come to assert their ancient rights and to take the place over. They, like the occupants, were in uniform: dark black, russet, several shades of brown, but they were well-coated against the cold. And even more effectively than the occupants, because they were much more intimately acquainted with the layout of the city, its quays and riverbanks, canals and markets, its narrow streets, courtyards and impasses – a network that they had been scouring since the time of Villon – they patrolled the frozen streets from end to end. Nothing would escape the little gimlet eyes of these urgent fast-moving watchers. Henri Michel, Delarue and many other observers comment on the sudden, impudent, almost open presence of these swift-footed soldiers, the ancient advance guards of disasters, plagues, floods, famines, thickest in the area of the central markets and near the black river – armies of enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats, a match indeed for the Germans and all their sophisticated weapons of hygiene: the familiar gaspards that lurk, in brown hordes and as obscure moving shadows, around the sinister and filthy commissariat of the rue des Prouvaires, well-known figures quartier des Halles, in the remembered childhood recollections of Robert Lageat, familiar enough even to be awarded a collective first name.

But, thanks to the silence of the night and the absence of a population of nightwalkers and revellers that emboldened these inhabitants of the nether regions of the city, it was only during these years that their presence above ground could actually be heard, as, with piercing screams and squeaks, and amidst the dull crash of heavy dustbin lids, they fought indiscriminately for what both occupants and occupés had rejected (presumably the fur-coated, low-slung invaders concentrated most heavily outside Soldatenheime and hotels and restaurants reserved for the Germans, as a sort of high-pitched, squeaky tribute from one invader to another).

Later, at the time of the floods of February 1952, standing on the platform of the métro Solférino late at night, I noticed first a thin, slow trickle of brownish water coming between the lines, from the direction of Chambre des Députés and the river – the water, then, was actually running up a slight incline – closely followed, first by one – the leader was an enormous beast in brown and black – then by ten, then by fifty, scuttling in Indian file, as they too rushed uphill to safety, just ahead of the brackish floodwaters. I had seen the advance guard, the shock troops, of a second occupation, this time only of the VIIme and the VIme, that lasted only a few weeks before the ‘occupants’ once more withdrew from the cellars of the rue de Seine and the rue Mazarine, to return to their own quarters lower down. One could appreciate the enormity of La Peste, the rats of Oran dying with their pink feet in the air, in the streets, heralding the death of the human inhabitants of the port. And one could appreciate the prophetic note in Pierre Gascar’s short story, ‘Gaston’, in Les Bêtes. Gaston, a rat the size of a mastiff, was the scout of an army of invaders about to come up from below ground and take over.

The Occupation brought other, less sinister, dislocations to the animal world of Paris. While many of the more exotic inhabitants of the Jardin des Plantes died of cold, a few of the wolves escaped, enjoying a few hours of joyful freedom, and spreading carnage among the chicken, rabbit and hamster population of the shops on the quai de la Mégisserie. French police and German Feldgendarmerie patrolled with the wolves’ cousins, Alsatian dogs, some responding to words of command barked in German, others to words of command barked in French (but none coming to heel in both languages) but equally zealous in the service of order and repression. (The result of this language difficulty – and one beyond even the resources of the ever-greedy Berlitz – was that the guard-dogs placed to protect the parcels offices of the main Paris stations had to be withdrawn after they had attacked individual German soldiers coming to check in food parcels who had been unable to communicate with the monolingual beasts. After their withdrawal, on orders from the Majestic, thefts of food parcels sent from the countryside to Parisian families who were fortunate enough still to have relatives there – Henri Michel makes the point that the occupation years witnessed a massive rediscovery of previously neglected country cousins, aunts and uncles – or awaiting despatch to the Reich, increased to quite catastrophic proportions.)

Apart from the Alsatians, whether responding to French or to German words of command, the canine population of Paris declined dramatically, indeed so dramatically that, when I first returned to Paris in October 1944, I had the agreeable – and unfortunately rare – experience of walking, in complete safety, in a dog-free city. Even wars and occupations bring some peripheral benefits. What is more, cats, like les gaspards, had managed to survive, though, unlike the rats and like their owners, most had visibly lost weight. Living in the southern suburbs, in an area of market gardening and rabbit breeding, the writer Léautaud, totally indifferent to the humiliation of France, and rather amused and intrigued by the arrival of the Germans, spent a great deal of time during these years seeking out titbits for his numerous cats. Another case of getting one’s priorities right.

In his recent book, Paris-Montpellier PC-PSU, 1945–1963, the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, recalling his wartime experiences as a boarder at a Catholic school, Saint-Joseph, in Caen, refers to the pro-German element among his fellow schoolboys, the sons of local farmers of Flemish origin whose parents had settled in Lower Normandy after the First World War. One of these Flemish boys had the enviable gift of being able to address a German military horse, regularly tethered just outside the main entrance of the school and employed by the local garrison, in German, bringing an appreciative response from the animal. The boy’s prestige among his contemporaries was, of course, enormously enhanced by a skill so unusual. As the Germans requisitioned huge numbers of French horses for army transport, there must have arisen some difficulties in the transmission of simple orders from man to beast.

Another negative aspect of early occupation, another absence, was to strike many Parisians who had remained in the city, or who had returned to it, in June 1940: the parks and the gardens seemed strangely silent, though the nature of the silence was not at once apparent. Then it would occur to the listener that what was missing was the song of birds. Following the destruction of the huge petrol dumps on the Seine Estuary, Paris had been enveloped in an oily black cloud which had wiped out most of the bird population. Other birds had flown away towards healthier skies. (Much later in the war, in fact right at the end of it, we hear of a similar migration of storks, rooks and blackbirds from the polluted skies of Berlin, as they flew westwards, the storks in regular formations and in vast numbers, away from the doomed city, soon followed by as many ducks, both a little ahead of the advancing Soviet troops.) But, by the late summer of 1940, the familiar moineaux de Paris were back in their usual haunts, while the Germans liked to have themselves photographed feeding the pigeons outside Notre-Dame or the Sacré-Coeur, or on the upper walks of the Tuileries. It was one easy form of fraternization and domestication. Throughout the Occupation, the bird market continued to be held on Sundays, quai aux Fleurs (just as the stamp markets, the stamps displayed on iron park benches, continued to be held, on Thursdays, under the trees off the Rond-Point, bringing together, in shared and equally engrossed enthusiasm, uniformed and civilian philatelists, a terrain d’entente that was no doubt to be the first stage in a certain amount of verbal exchanges, borrowings of magnifying glasses and tweezers leading even to friendships – Thursday friendships that might extend to other days of the week – between occupants and occupés). Some tiny, brilliantly flashing exotic birds – from Indonesia, South America, the West Indies or Africa – were no longer to be had, depriving Paris of its brief weekly joy in tropical colours, even on Sundays in November, but there seems to have been no shortage of canaries. It would indeed be hard to imagine a loge de concierge without the little yellow bird in its cage.

Les gaspards and their fellow animals have caused me to digress. Let us return, then, to the semicoded language of the four-year span – long enough indeed greatly to enrich popular vocabulary. We know the meaning of fumer sa décade (there is a surrealist quality about the action of thus smoking time, a quality of which Marcel Aymé is well aware and which he exploits so imaginatively in his fantasy on ‘La Carte du Temps’ – March 43rd, April 34th, and so on), no mere fantasy in fact, when applied to a period of some 1,500 days – 1,531, to be exact, dating from Saturday 15th July to 19th August 1944 – when Paris lived under German time, one hour ahead of the proscribed French time (no doubt in accordance with German railway timetables for the whole of occupied Europe) so that one of the first acts of the provisional government was to put the clocks back one hour, with the result that Paris was no longer à l’heure allemande. Fumer du belge and manger ses tickets are self-explanatory, the former, even familiar. The adjective national lingered on into post-Liberation years (as, indeed, it did in Italy, where it designated the execrable nazionali, possibly the worst cigarettes ever produced) to qualify anything that was of poor quality, was not what it claimed to be (le café national had not the remotest connection with the coffee bean), or was simply unsmokable, undrinkable, uneatable, unwearable. A variant on national, as designating something of Orwellian seediness, both in English and in French, would be municipal: ‘municipal restaurant’, restaurant municipal, communing in equally execrable food.

Chleuh, fridolin, verts-de-gris, doryphore, souris grise, bande amarante lingered on, like forgotten clothing left in a drawer, devoid of its human contents, some months after the departure of those to whom the words applied, but they were mere shadows of themselves, deprived of virulence and hate or of sneaking regard and even hesitant friendliness (les Fritz, les frisous), and their use had lost the risky savour that the actual presence of the occupants had lent them, for there was always the possibility that the overhearer might understand.

I did not need to read Guéhenno to recall the snivelling vocabulary of cloying hypocrisy and sackcloth-and-ashes mea culpa, mea culpa, retribution and atonement poured out nasally from Radio Vichy, as if the station had been taken over by battalions of French Uriah Heeps, trained in high-frequency seminary-voice control, whining and shrill clerics speaking as if they had pains in their tummies. Vichy, a clerical regime, admonished its erring and incorrigible administrés in clerical tones of high-pitched lament.

But one could be only retrospectively at home with the sloppy, woolly language of Etat Français propaganda and so-called thought – more admonishments, delivered in querulous tones, and as if not counting on getting through to the so insistently admonished: penser proprement français (propre, proprement, as we shall see in the next section, were key words in the vocabulary of a regime that, while making a cult of cleanliness, could not offer much-needed soap to the to-be-cleaned-up, though, in this phrase, the adverb has of course a more abstract sense), reprise de conscience de l’essentiel autochtone, les confluences spirituelles. Vichy, in its muddy thinking, was very keen on things that ran together, to form a sort of maréchaliste mishmash, in a common communion with the elderly redeemer. But Confluences was also to be the title given to a literary review published in Lyon with vague Resistance connotations, but with similar imprecision: indeed, again, a running together of this and that, as if to evoke the topography of the Second City, as the timid Saône runs into the impetuous Rhône, just beyond the tip of Perrache, at La Mulatière. Confluences has at least the negative advantage of meaning anything or nothing, so that it would be unlikely to offend or exclude any particular group. In the sparse bookshops of the spa (censorship was far more severe in Vichy than in Paris, especially in defence of the New Moral Order) one would be confronted with such titles as Présence de Péguy (the presence of the dead poet seemed especially to thrive in that of the occupier), Immanence de Nietzsche (or of Kierkegaard), Pour une ethnie française, and, of course, Vers this or that (Vers l’Europe Nouvelle, Vers l’Ordre Nouveau, Vers la paix universelle), pointing, in whatever direction (towards Vichy, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Quebec, Berchtesgaden, or Mercier’s L’An Deux Mille), but always in a dishonourable one, and happily, as it nearly always turned out, to a terminus never reached and to a future as elusive as that of the Thousand Year Reich. Wherever it got, or failed to get, it was always a ‘towards-ing’ that would be likely to leave many corpses along its relentless and futile path. Perhaps it did not very much matter about the final destination: the journey was the thing. And both Vichy and Paris, using such contrasting language about most things (though communing in a common humourlessness – a sense of humour would hardly be able to accommodate either ultracollaborationism or the idiotically gaga language of Vichy), laid great stress on the word movement. Movement is action, and action is the liberating force.

The Prefect Trouillé was to describe the ambience of the Vichy régime in his diary for March 1944: ‘la fausse dévotion au Maréchal, le conformisme tricolore des marchands de berlinguots’, a fair enough description of a system born of hypocrisy and surviving anaemically on doubletalk. Vichy had so little to offer in the present: less and less each month, especially to young people, though the word youth was constantly in its mouth, as it was – but a very different, crueller, more vicious youth – in that of the Paris group, and it made increasingly pitiable efforts to lay a tentative hand on a choice of golden future times (resembling, in this respect, the litanies of the PCF on the subject of the ‘singing tomorrows’), just as, for an octogenarian marshal of France, time was running out.

But, in Vichy, if not so much in Paris, there was as much looking back, to a hazy past, as looking forward to an equally hazy future, in an effort, again, to rediscover this or that – the same muddiness and confused groping: roots (a word even more in favour in Vichy than in Paris, for the pétainistes were much given to a vocabulary of trees, of which there were many in the Southern Zone), an expurgated past, a distant time when people had known where they were going (as if such a time had ever existed!). In the winter of 1940, announcing his new list, the Paris publisher Bernard Grasset launched a new series of books under the somewhat Proustian title – though Proust would have been firmly rejected at this stage, his works being placed on the first liste Otto – of A la recherche de la France, as if France too had disappeared down a side road in the course of l’Exode, an evocation of times past that might take one safely back to Saint-Louis, or better still, to Charlemagne, or le bon roi Henri (he and Sully also got onto the Vichy banknotes, under the inspiring motto: Labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles de la France), but, more profitably, to Napoleon’s European Order. Grasset’s series was to start at a time when the existing France, a truncated France that had shed well over half its outlying territories, at least as seen from Paris, was just beginning to settle down, gingerly and without too much immediate pain, to the fact of German occupation. And the Germans were hardly likely to object to such distant soul-searchings, to such flights into a semimythical past that might help to disguise the realities of a stark and humiliating present. The occupation years were years of make-believe, representing the careful reconstruction of an idealized rural past and of rugged rustic virtues that bore no relationship to the cruelties of agricultural life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: no room in such stained-glass-window history for the bitter memory of dearth and famine, cold, poverty, dirt and disease. A la recherche de … might lead anywhere but towards the truth. Picture-book, folksy history: Comment naît, vit, et meurt un paysan bas-normand, a book illustrated with woodcuts in black and white depicting la veillée, published in Caen in 1943, which I bought in Bayeux in the following year, tells us nothing at all about any of the three processes. Such an obsession with a carefully sanitized past would result merely in the proliferation, on breast pockets or on handbags, of the coats of arms of the old provinces: the fleur de lys of Flanders and the Ile-de-France, the three leopards of Normandy, the rampant lion of the Lyonnais, the red cross of Languedoc, the black and white lozenges of Brittany, the rearing bear of Franche-Comté, and under whatever mystical beasts and emblematic flowers or trees marched Aunis et Saintonge, Maine, Anjou, Poitou, Aquitaine, Guyenne, Gascony, Dauphiné, Savoy, and the rest of them. In short, history reduced to its most inane and harmless form: heraldry and genealogy, history for boy scouts and girl guides, a fuite en arrière into myth and fantasy that could accommodate Joan of Arc – but not Jehanne la Lorraine – Bayard, du Guesclin, Bernadette, Lammenais, Dupanloup, history with the sting taken out, a harmless bestiaire.

Vichy, a dishonourable, equivocal, and ludicrous régime, was likewise profuse in its evocations of the emblems of nationhood – one had to cling on to such few baubles as had been left one, toys to keep potentially naughty children quiet. The flag was always being raised or lowered, carried in procession, dipped, its golden-tasselled fringes kissed; Vichy was at least rich in woodlands that would supply tall flagstaffs, so it was a régime drapeautique (and one that even secreted, at one time, the abortive légion tricolore). And being a régime born of defeat, indeed owing everything to defeat, it tended to march at a fast pace behind la clique, to ‘Sambre-et-Meuse’ or ‘les Allobroges’. The Marshal, in particular, was tireless in his references to de chez nous, de France, de nos provinces. De simples poules de chez nous, as if there were something specifically French about chickens, and, indeed, about all animals born in what remained of l’Hexagone (de belles vaches de chez nous, de petits chien-chiens de chez nous, de braves chevaux de chez nous, de petits poulains de chez nous, des vipères de chez nous). In the Marshal’s baby talk, the French become des Français de France; a little boy cannot stand alone – he is un petit garçon de France. And, rather in the manner of those bizarre juxtapositions that used to be favoured in the names of hotels (Hôtel de Romorantin et de l’Univers, Hôtel de Vercingétorix et des Jeunes Cyclistes), in his always ineffable conversations with admiring delegations come to offer him presents (de beaux produits de chez nous, des fruits de la bonne terre de France) he strings along combinations that have an absurdity specifically vichyssois. The Poissonards and their two awful children are preceded, Hôtel du Parc, by a delegation of electricians, who sing to the Marshal a song of their own composition vaunting the triumphs of ‘La Fée électricité’ (Electricité de France); the Marshal comments sagaciously: ‘c’est une très belle chanson. J’aime beaucoup la musique et l’électricité.’

Vichy is not only dishonourable, it is inane, obsessive, desperately provincial, and exceedingly boring. One can appreciate the eagerness with which successive Vichy ministers took the Thursday government autorail for Paris, under one pretext or another – that is, if they could obtain German permission to visit the former capital. Vichy was no place for an intelligent man to linger in. Even its topography could seem slightly dotty. Wags (brief visitors from Paris) would point out that the Ministry of Colonies had set up in L’Hôtel d’Angleterre; Trouillé noted, with a mixture of amusement and alarm, that Darnand and his gunmen had taken over le Thermal. The navy ministry was situated in the Helder, its new inhabitants setting about scrubbing the wooden floors as if they had been decks of a man-of-war. Darlan himself lived, most appropriately, 1 avenue des Cygnes. (The inventory of the contents of his Vichy abode, drawn up by a local huissier, in November 1942 – inventaire avant décès, as Amouroux calls it, in questionable taste – makes astonishing reading: 11 suits, 12 pairs of socks, 27 white shirts, 1 admiral’s cap, 2 bérets basques, 25 ties, 55 pipes, 16 boxes of cigars, 37 packets of cigarettes, 1 black vase ‘TFP et francisque’ – Vichy’s own kitsch – 1 round tray Maréchal [ibid.], 1 plaster bust of the admiral, 1 tricolor flash ‘Base aérienne de Pau 27 août 1942’, 16 sheets, 79 pillow-cases, 51 serviettes, 1 set of embroidered naval table mats [red and blue with anchor], 6 kilograms of coffee, 630 cakes of soap [a suitable tribute to cleanliness], 500 litres of wine in barrels, 100 litres bottled and 225 Hermitage red, 54 Hermitage white [from the Marshal’s estate], 12 Château-Chinon, 48 Beaujolais, 40 Roussette, 28 Pouilly Fuissé ’38, 106 Champagne, 12 White Label, 16 Johnny Walker.) Collaboration, naval style, certainly removed all the usual problems of shortage.

The hammered-out slogans and the unlovely clichés of the clandestine Communist propaganda prefigure much of the dreary newspeak of the Zhdanov era; yet they could be lethal at a time when we could not actually hear them or read them: les valets du nazisme, la camarilla de l’Hôtel du Parc, Pour un Noël de combat (for two or more could play at the Pour … game, though only those hidden figures who guided the hands of the PCF killer squads could have thus called for a Christmas celebration in the form of exemplary individual murders, as if A chacun son boche was the ideal gift to be placed in the sabot waiting in the fireplace; and, of course, the party could not neglect Christmas, for, like Stalin, it loved children, and middle-class Communists tended to spoil theirs). The clandestine L’Humanité was always on about les boches, as if to make up for its total silence on the subject of those of that nationality throughout the period from June 1940 to June 1941, when l’impérialisme britannique had been the principal target. The aim now was l’ écrasement du fascisme assassin et barbare (two adjectives rather than one being a rule of Communist clichés); after 1941 it would favour, as for the killer teams, threes. Que le sang boche coule, coule, coule (that litany of incitement to murder, the message of hate tapped out again and again, designed to penetrate the thickest and most unreceptive of militant skulls, a child’s primer, an alphabétaire of assassination, a message shrieked out in the sort of martèlement later favoured, when spokesman for the party, by Auguste Lecoeur, the stark brutality of whose adjurations was accentuated by his ungraceful northern accent). Que le sang boche coule, coule, coule, was no empty formula, as we have seen. And any German in uniform would do. This was not a coded, or semicoded message, such as that described by Le Roy Ladurie, generally to announce a change of line and followed by a denunciation of those who had failed to see it coming: Nous vous le disons bien tranquillement (which would then bring in the following, alarming phrase: le camarade un tel n’a pas raison). Outside France, in the ‘Popular Democracies,’ the adverb tranquillement would take on a particularly sinister premonitory connotation, as if one were to lower one’s voice before delivering the death sentence.

Le Roy Ladurie is always informative on the evolution of PCF allusions and of what he rightly describes as ‘verbal terrorism:’ à la Robespierre: flic d’Occident (Slánsky), vipérine, termites, laquais, the dismissal of a whole sector of humanity, ready for the dustbin of history: les débris des anciennes classes exploiteuses. The awful pseudofrankness of Courtade: Croyez-moi, introduces another death sentence: c’étaient des traîtres. Nothing much has changed since then, and the old verbal terrorism was recently seen and heard to be even more effective if strung out and hammered out in nine contemptuously shouted syllables, Monsieur-Valéry-Giscard-d’Estaing, or in the lethal politeness of Le Prince Poniatowski. It is the voice of Fouquier-Tinville, of several generations of public prosecutors, designating the enemies of the Republic. It is also the voice of Céline and Paquis, of Je suis partout and Au pilori. The language of the PCF echoes, almost to the syllable, the language of hate and incitement to murder of Paris collaborationism. Linguistically, nothing could have been easier than for a PCF militant to transform himself into a PPF militant: just a matter of hate speaking to hate.

We have not actually heard the self-congratulatory language of the black market, as it unconsciously harks back to the usage of the Franco-Prussian War and of a much older, but shorter occupation, only dimly remembered, and by the 1940s experienced only by people in their eighties and nineties: c’est autant de pris aux Allemands (it would have been, in 1870/71: autant de pris aux Pruscots), or encore une bouteille que les chleuhs n’auront pas, the enjoyable verbal commentary on a meal both vast and rare, and all the more delicious because quite beyond the means of the vast majority of Parisians, lending to gluttony a joyful alibi of patriotism (even if the statement can only be accurate in fact, for what went down went down). Save in the form of J3 (for a teenager) the surrealist language of rationing – another alphabétaire less insistent, less strident than the Communist appeals for blood to flow – of carte D and carte W, is lost to us, as are so many of the bureaucratic formulae of a period during which the technocrats were allowed a free range in their attacks on the purity, clarity and brevity of the French language, and in their persistent efforts to trip up the poor, wretched administré (more administered than ever) in the byzantine trip wires of Le Journal Officiel and Le Bulletin Municipal (contingentement, semelles compensées).

Nor have we ever encountered, much less had to eat or to drink, such dreadful concoctions as started to appear in grocers’ shops and crémeries in 1941/42 as le Malto fruit, le Miel de Guinée, la Springaline, la Datima, unwelcome newcomers, crooks in fact shoving their way into the familiar, respectable, but diminishing ranks of the old prewar veterans, Banania, with its wide-grinning Senegalese, a grocery gollywog, Eléxa, Meunier, the copious Dutch lady of Van Houten, the friendly La Vache qui Rit. The tunnels of the métro still flickered with the little Dubonnet man as, in a series of jerks, he raised, savoured, and emptied his glass; but, during a period when every other day was, officially at least, a jour sans, his continuing presence and obvious and active enjoyment in raising his arm were something of an affront. However, he survived, thus linking, for people like myself, the Third to the Fourth Republic, as if erasing the years between, that homely little man, a résistant malgré lui. The Dubonnet cat came out the other end of the Occupation too. So did the cothurnes, products of the Occupation that were still clop-clopping on Paris pavements months after the Liberation. I have seen and touched – easy to tear – suits and jackets made of la fibrane, but le complet Pétain eludes me, though I imagine it to be double-breasted, electric blue with a narrow white stripe, and designed to show off to advantage le ruban rouge and the francisque. I have, of course, never encountered a porteur de francisque, though I could not help noticing buttonholes in lapels that looked all at once unoccupied (like their owners). But very soon there were plenty of new rosettes, ribbons and metal objects to put in old buttonholes.

There were some newcomers that were to be (most unwelcome) heralds of the future, préfets régionaux (Vichy had discovered – or rediscovered – les régions) notably among them. La drôlette, l’Occupance, la Préfectance, faire viandox, le blaquaoute, ‘l’homme n’était pas rare; il voulait du linge’ (as placed in the mouth of one of Aymé’s rue Caulaincourt prostitutes) are more in line with the traditional skills of Parisian slang, but la Carlingue presumably disappeared with the departure of the institution to which it briefly applied. The semimilitary contre-pêtreries – a form of humour much favoured by Le Canard enchaîné before and after the war – would find new subjects for their bizarre, inverted skills, while being reduced to a clandestine and purely verbal existence: ‘Il faut dire, “Métropolitain”; … il ne faut pas dire, “Pétain mollit trop.” ’ I have no doubt that there were plenty of others, delicate spring flowers thriving briefly in the shade, but soon killed off, like la Carlingue, with the loss of their terms of reference.

But there was one area of spoken (and even sung) French in which les Français de Londres (gaullistes or independents, or even their English friends) enjoyed an advantage over those whom Vichy propaganda so persistently and belabouredly referred to as les Français de France, even to the extent of contributing directly to the new vocabulary in current use under the Occupation: ‘Radio Paris ment / Radio Paris ment / Radio Paris est allemand’, soon to be hummed by errand boys and in the métro, perhaps the best-known jingle of the whole four years. Even the expression prendre Londres was given a new meaning by those who, at 9.15 or so in the evening listened to ‘Les Français parlent aux Français’.

The language of love, and that – closely related to it – of pregnancy, both intimate, and the latter easily descending into a sort of litanic baby talk, managed to resist the pressures of hard times, constant ill-temper, discomfort, fear, uncertainty, and rumour, thus providing the happy reassurance of continuity, and illustrating the ancient theme of the survival of private worlds and private values even in the midst of public calamities and national humiliation. Léon, a refugee from Paris with resistance inclinations, and Madeleine, a native Lyonnaise, are seen walking hand in hand through the dark streets of the Second City – rue Désirée, rue Romarin, rue Terraille, rue Bouteille – or crossing, over and over again, le pont Morand, or walking blindly along the quays of the two rivers. Léon has a rendezvous with a fellow résistant on the pont de la Boucle, after which he returns home to the attic in the quartier des Terreaux, whereupon the very pregnant Madeleine addresses him: ‘C’est mon Lélé? Comment vas-tu, chou-chou? Tu sais, le petit fan-fan a bougé trois fois dans mon ven-ventre aujourd’hui … Il y a du nan-nan à manger. Tu vas faire miam-miam. Des blettes au su-sucre pour Lélé, des blettes tout-à-fait tsouin-tsouin, vi, vi, vi, vi … Les Anglais ont envoyé un gros zin-zin sur Villeurbannette, chic, chic, chic. Lélé va me faire un bis pour fêter ça …’ A feminine and effective manner of putting war and occupation in their proper place and of reducing a high explosive bomb to the childlike zin-zin. A language, too, that would not make a stranger of the temporarily absent Englishman, excluded from so much else.

Indeed, we have never seen anything like such an experience. The study of the endlessly varying relationships between occupants and occupés lies outside our national awareness and our national memory. We may attempt to envisage it in such measurable terms as economic exploitation – what the French, when it had been their turn to be occupants, in Belgium and elsewhere, had crudely and candidly called extraction – pillage, deportation, extortion, repression and resistance; but its physical reality continues to escape our perceptions. It remains a blank page (though it may one day be filled as a result of events that are not entirely unpredictable, though one hopes that in fact they will never occur) in our national history, but one that I have endeavoured to sketch in mainly by an effort of imagination, by drawing on literary sources such as the novels and short stories of Dutourd and Aymé, both of whom had a quite remarkable gift for rendering direct speech in a manner so utterly convincing, and often so refreshingly crude, that one can actually hear the speakers, as if one had been with the other travellers in the train from Paris to Chalon, or with the fourteen friends who met so regularly in a queue, rue Caulaincourt, during the 1939–73 war (Aymé’s characters are pessimists, as well they might be in 1943).

Here, for instance, from Dutourd, is an entirely convincing collabo, a poor creature all the same, wearing (of course) a béret basque: ‘… Je vois, Monsieur, que vous lisez Mène Camphre. Beau livre. Et intéressant … Non, Monsieur, la France ne mérite pas le Maréchal … Et la jeunesse! …’ And he moves on to the subject of the occupants: ‘… Leur attitude, leur discipline, leur correction forcent le respect. Un jeune soldat de la Vermate s’est levé dans le métro pour céder sa place à une vieille dame. Je l’ai vu, de mes yeux vu.’ It must have been just like that. And in shop conversations in which rumour plays an enormous part (as always in time of war) one is equally convinced by the gaulliste Madame Lécuyer, another character in Dutourd: ‘On m’a dit qu’un officier boche, à Noisy-le-Sec, la semaine dernière s’est tiré une balle dans la tête après avoir embrassé trois petits Français dans la rue … Hier, dans le métro, un soldat m’a offert sa place. Il essayait de se faire pardonner d’être là …’ It is the beautiful precision of Noisy-le-Sec that gains one’s admiration. And here is a plumber, in one of Aymé’s queues, lamenting the golden pre-Occupation period, when he got through his daily 6 litres of gros rouge:

… Qu’on nous donne du vin, j’en peux plus … J’étais solide comme le Pont-Neuf, jamais un jour de maladie … Comme le Pont-Neuf, oui, je me portais. Le Pont-Neuf, bon Dieu … Assez c’est bien, mais trop c’est trop. Le Pont-Neuf … Si c’est pas révoltant. Le Pont-Neuf … Un litre par semaine. Un litre. Non, un litre … J’en peux plus …11

Aymé is reporting verbatim conversations heard in food queues, always the most sensitive and representative form of assembly.

Another approach to the problem posed by such a chasm has been to ask so many of my French friends what it was like and how it felt at a time when ‘it’ was only just round the corner, when my friend Maurice was still driving around in a camionnette somehow acquired from the Vermate, and while a few scattered objects – a dagger in its sheath, a Gott Mit Uns belt, a cap-badge, the jaunty cap itself, a couple of regimental buttons – lay abandoned in drawers in bedside tables, perhaps not to be discovered for months or years. It was a time, too, when the extended stomachs of very pregnant Frenchwomen still contained yet unborn Franco-German babies – a very visible hangover from a previous period of history that seemed to be making an effort to prolong itself, and a matter, too, of unfortunate timing (the public calendar running faster than the unalterable and leisurely private one) – it was a time also when the smell of the recently departed occupant lingered in odd corners, cupboards and wardrobes, as well as, more potently, in barracks. There the white walls were still adorned with the pornographic strip cartoons, the dreams of womanless lustful soldiers (a member of the women’s services of the German army, a souris grise, her grey skirt pulled up from behind, being penetrated standing up, on a station platform, by a private soldier, belted but unbuttoned, in field grey, his cap at an angle over his ample nose) combined with sentimental poems in Gothic script, and pictures, of the German Forest, of a village with steep red roofs and medieval protruberances, of the holly and the firs of Christmas – the curiously juxtaposed work of once present military artists, the combination of lust and sentimentality, on the ample wall space of the dormitories and eating places of the Caserne des Grenadiers in Malines.

In the next chapter, we consider another, less personal, more traceable, aspect of occupation and collaboration: that of a reassuring, but partly fictitious, continuity, set up to disguise the more alarming reality of discontinuity and rupture.