Once France capitulated to the Germans in 1940, the invaders lost no time in imposing their Teutonic will. Determined to humiliate the victors of World War I, Hitler forced France’s high command to sign the instrument of surrender in the same railway car in which Germany admitted defeat in 1918. In addition, France was forced to bear the costs of its own occupation.
Paris and the coasts remained under direct military control. The rest of France was administered from the spa town of Vichy by a puppet government under World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. In Paris, German generals seized the best hotels and mansions and systematically set about looting the country, shipping back to Berlin everything from the treasures of its museums to 60 percent of its agricultural produce. Called up for their obligatory two years of military service, young men were shipped to Germany and forced to work in factories. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, took over the Palais de Luxembourg and, as food became scarce, dug up its famous formal gardens, laid out in 1612 by Marie de Médicis, to plant potatoes and cabbages.
Parisians did their best to live as if the Occupation was not taking place. Without gas to run their cars, cabdrivers fitted bicycles with an enclosed cabin large enough for a single passenger. A curfew forced everyone indoors by 10 p.m. After that, streetlights operating on diminished power kept the City of Light in perpetual gloom.
Like many Parisiennes, future screen star Leslie Caron, then a child, experienced the Occupation mainly in terms of food, or its absence. Moving to the country, her family lived mostly on what they could forage. “My mother tried to feed us with seaweed she picked on the beach and dandelions from the railroad tracks,” Caron recalled. “The seaweed was inedible—a disaster.” Fortunately their housekeeper came from Burgundy and knew how to collect snails and edible plants, and to spin out the little meat available. Even so, Caron’s health, like that of most children, suffered from this deprivation. She was given horse blood to build up her strength, and her father, a pharmacist, stole some of the cocoa butter supplied to grease anal suppositories, a popular remedy in the French pharmacopeia. Caron got used to every fried dish having the flavor of chocolate.
None of these restrictions applied to the Germans or to their collaborators. What they couldn’t divert from export was acquired through a thriving black market. Among the best films to come out of the war, Claude Autant-Lara’s 1946 comedy La Traversée de Paris (Four Bags Full) featured Bourvil and Jean Gabin manhandling four suitcases of pork across the blacked-out city. Bertrand Tavernier’s 2002 film, Laissez-Passer (Safe Conduct), dealt with the Occupation’s effect on the crippled French film industry. A period film has to be suspended because the extras eat all the food from the table in a banquet scene. Ernst Lubitsch caught the prevailing nostalgia for food in his film To Be or Not to Be. While being entertained by the head of the Gestapo, intent on seduction, actress Carole Lombard, used to the high life, almost faints when she sees the supper he’s prepared. “Champagne and caviar,” she sighs. “Then they still exist!”
In real life, the French did their best simply to survive. “Life is hard,” wrote one Parisian in 1944. “Everyone grows thinner. A kilo of butter costs 1,000 francs. A kilo of peas 45 francs. A kilo of potatoes 40 francs. Still we must find them.” Hunger didn’t suppress the French instinct towards coquetry; may even, in fact, have stimulated it. Even pro-Nazi magazines carried fashion tips—with stockings a thing of the past, women drew a line with eyebrow pencil down the back of each leg in imitation of a seam. Soldiers risked death to salvage the small silk parachutes attached to flares, which their womenfolk turned into lingerie.
Among those who remained in the city, the vogue was for the so-called partie surprise. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon event for which it was named, the French partie surprise was no surprise. Friends converged on the home of the host, each bringing whatever ingredient they had managed to acquire. Turning such miscellaneous constituents into a meal challenged even the most inventive chef, inspiring such dishes as North Sea Bouillabaisse, a variation on the Mediterranean fish stew that replaced onion and garlic with potatoes and turnips, and rascasse and loup de mer with cod and dogfish.
Under Systéme D (for débrouiller, i.e, to manage or get by), the Ministry of Food introduced rationing to make the most efficient use of what was available. Meat was mainly mince, of dubious provenance. Leslie Caron recalled:
I remember endless hachis parmentier, Shepherd’s Pie, or hash and mash. For vegetables, we were down to animal fodder: salsify, rutabagas, Jerusalem artichokes, all three previously unknown to Parisians. Fruit was as rare and expensive as tobacco. Children had one glass of milk a day. We were each given an ever-shrinking ration of butter; it eventually amounted to an eggcup full per person, per week. By the end of the war, bread was down to one slice a day per person: two-thirds flour, one-third sawdust.
As wheat disappeared, bakers substituted the animal feed alfalfa. Coffee was approximated by the herb chicory, mixed with roasted barley or acorns, sugar extracted from licorice and even pumpkins, while cigarettes were filled with a mixture of dried grass and herbs optimistically called “National Tobacco.”
Threatened as Jews with internment or even worse, Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas appealed to Americophile Bernard Fay, an old friend but also a prominent collaborator and associate of Marshal Pétain, who appointed him director of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Fay agreed to protect Stein’s art collection from seizure by the Nazis. He also had the couple moved to safety in Bilignin, a village deep in Vichy territory, where they lived out the war in well-fed comfort. Jailed in 1946, Fay escaped to Switzerland in 1951 thanks to money supplied by Toklas.