Peace is visible already. It’s like a great darkness falling; it’s the beginning of forgetting.
—Marguerite Duras1
Paris had been made a martyr, had been crushed, and had, against all odds, risen to liberate itself both militarily and morally from the Nazi yoke and Vichy ignominy. France was once again a whole nation, ready to reassume its position as one of the great powers. In perhaps the most significant speech he ever made, at least in terms of its historical resonance, Charles de Gaulle established the myths that would define the Occupation of Paris and the resistance of Parisians for the next quarter of a century.
Why should we hide the emotion that now clutches us in its grip, men and women here, at home, in Paris, resolute and ready to liberate itself, and by its own hands? No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. There are times that are larger than our own poor lives. Paris! Paris offended! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the aid of the armies of France, with the help and support of all of France, of the battling France, the only France, the true France, the eternal France. So it is, now that the enemy that held Paris has capitulated to us, that France reenters Paris, home again. She returns bloodied, but with resolve. She returns, enlightened by an immense lesson she has learned, but more assured than ever of her duties and of her rights. I mention duties first, and I reduce them to their essence by saying that, for now, these are duties of war. The enemy is weakening, but he has not yet been beaten. He is still on our soil. It will not be enough once we have, with the support of our dear and admirable allies, chased him from our land that we are satisfied, especially after what has transpired. We want to enter his territory, as we should, as victors. It is for that reason that the French avant-garde entered Paris with cannons firing. It is for that reason that the great French army of Italy has landed in the south and is moving rapidly up the Rhône Valley. It is for that reason that our brave and cherished interior forces will now have modern arms. It is to have that revenge, that vengeance, and that justice that we will continue to fight until the last day, up to the day of total and complete victory. This duty of continued war—all men who are here present and all those who hear us throughout France know that it demands national unity. All of us who will have lived through the grandest hours of our history want nothing but to show ourselves, up to the end, worthy of France. Vive la France!”*
De Gaulle had multiple goals in mind, and in this short speech, he addressed them all. Films of the remarks show a self-assured, uniformed general towering over those around him, speaking fluently and confidently. Obviously, he wanted to anticipate others’ definitions of the French reaction to the Occupation, especially that of the Communists, who were already describing themselves as the “party of the executed seventy-five thousand.”* He wanted to end the civil war—which was still going on, and threatening to escalate—by uniting the French in a common cause: the total defeat of Nazi Germany. He sought to renew confidence in the French armed forces, deeply diminished since May of 1940, and to ask for wide support of their efforts. He reminded the French that the war was not over, that their sacrifices would have to continue for months more. Cleverly, he wanted to build the myth that the French alone had liberated Paris, though with essential aid from the Allies, to whom he only glancingly refers. Finally, he intended to ensure that the Vichy experiment would soon be forgotten (he refused to declare a new republic, because, he argued, the old republic had not ended—though it had, and legally) and, perhaps most cynically, that the Resistance, courageous as it had been, was no longer essential to the liberation of France.
Parisians and the rest of France accepted these myths immediately and with some confidence. Fortunately for de Gaulle and this version of history, the État français, the Pétainist government, had remained in Vichy, in the middle of the provinces, during the Occupation and had not established residence in Paris or even in Versailles, for which Pétain had petitioned. Paris had thus remained “pure” though occupied, unsullied by the Vichy experiment.
Most of those watching the joyous newsreels, especially the Americans, could not fathom the complications of French politics, but everyone knew that the liberation of the world’s most famous city meant an almost fatal blow to the Third Reich’s control of the rest of Europe. Warsaw had been razed, twice; a besieged Leningrad had been bombed and shelled for three years; Budapest would be stubbornly defended by the Germans and severely damaged; Vienna and Berlin, especially, had been regularly and mercilessly bombed; but Paris, the jewel of the continent, had remained whole, effectively untouched (though it did not totally escape paying the costs of warfare). The Germans had not succeeded in leveling it—if they had ever had that intention, Hitler’s apocryphal “Is Paris burning?” notwithstanding—and the French (with a bit of help) had liberated it with little damage to its monuments and landmarks. An aura of optimism about the impending end of a terrible war spread across continents, and Charles de Gaulle’s speech cemented this optimism to his own plan to control post-Occupation France.
De Gaulle was as sensitive to the symbolism of memorials, national celebrations, and public sites as he was to language. In the year and a half he would spend as head of the provisional government (from August of 1944 to January of 1946), he would steadily reappropriate the sites that the Vichy government and the Germans had used to impose their legitimacy—for example, the gold-painted bronze statue of an equestrian Joan of Arc on the Rue de Rivoli, at its intersection with the Rue des Pyramides. The deeply Catholic young woman who had fought the perfidious English, and who had been tortured and burned by them, was a perfect symbol for the Anglophobic, hyper-Catholic, militaristic État français and had been given exemplary attention by the Vichy government. Groups of Vichy supporters and other rightists had gathered at the statue to express their nativist confidence in a resurgent France. (The statue remains today a rallying point for right-wing groups in Paris.) But Joan of Arc had been born in a village in Lorraine, in eastern France, and de Gaulle had adopted the Cross of Lorraine as the emblem of the Free French. It had been scribbled on walls of occupied France for more than four years. On May 16, 1945, de Gaulle organized a massive event around the statue, taking her back, so to speak, reclaiming her as a symbol of the resolve, courage, and liberty of the true France: “By paying homage to Joan, de Gaulle recovered a heroine whose vibrant patriotism, deep faith, and humble origin could at bottom sum up the Gaullism of the war, while playing on two symbols, ‘the birth in Lorraine of one and the Croix de Lorraine of the other.’ ”2 This process of recuperating sites of collective French memory continued—often with ferocious opposition from the Communists, who had their own sites of memory—well after de Gaulle left the government in 1946.
De Gaulle returned to power in 1958, called to address the horrible mess that the Algerian revolution was creating for the Fourth Republic. After being the midwife for a new, Fifth Republic, one that made the presidency of France much more than an honorific position, he continued to impose his memory of the Occupation and its precedents on French history. With the rhetorical help of his comrade in arms André Malraux—the novelist, Resistance figure, and French army officer who was then his minister of culture—he made a major decision that would, he hoped, close and seal the book of memory: the transfer in 1964 of the remains of Jean Moulin to the Panthéon, the national mausoleum that sits atop the tallest hill in the Latin Quarter. Here the grands hommes of France (and Marie Curie) are interred in honor of their service to la France éternelle.*
Jean Moulin had been de Gaulle’s emissary, charged with uniting the fractious resistance groups that had formed the armée secrète that had so worried the general. Moulin succeeded in his mission in mid-1943. But betrayed by still-unknown colleagues, he was tortured so severely that he died on a Gestapo prison train taking him to Germany. In choosing to honor Moulin, de Gaulle hoped, in an ironic move, to put the ashes of the Resistance to rest permanently as well. And, by choosing his own man to represent the Resistance (and not a Communist, of course, or any non- or anti-Gaullist), he also appropriated the Resistance as part of the great Gaullist initiative that had saved France. In a magnificent oration, Malraux powerfully augmented this narrative of the Resistance. Referring to Moulin as the leader of “a people of the night” and “the people of the shadows,” he repeatedly invoked nocturnal and supernatural images not only to remind his audience of the glories of the Resistance two decades after the events of these sacrifices but also to recall that it had been General Charles de Gaulle—now president—who had enabled their successes.
Each group of résistants could gain legitimacy from whichever ally [Britain, America, Russia] armed them, or indeed by their own courage; only General de Gaulle was able to bring the Resistance movements together among themselves and with all other combatants, for it was through him only that France conducted one [unified] struggle.… To see in the unity of the Resistance the most important means of struggling for the unity of the nation was perhaps to [create] what has been called, since, Gaullism. It was definitely the means that attested to the survival of France.3
But it is not easy to assign new causes to events repressed in collective memory, nor are their effects so easily controlled. For the next fifty years de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic would find itself continuously addressing the legacies of France’s unique World War II history, and much of this debate would occur in Paris, where so many efforts were made to invoke the city’s history in various claims of authenticity.
The political fractionalization of the new postwar Fourth Republic (1946–58) permitted the blossoming of dozens of organizations that thought they should at least be part of, if not write the history of, the Occupation and the Resistance. Labor and political deportees, former prisoners of war, Jewish organizations, groups of still influential ex-Vichy officials, Communists, anti-Gaullists, the many and various resistance groups—the list seemed endless—all demanded formal recognition, either in terms of memorialization or official recognition or financial compensation (pensions). Plaques began to appear on Parisian buildings as each society or association remembered its own. The Cold War, which began almost immediately after the end of World War II, further divided the country between those who were staunchly anti-Communist and those who supported a still vibrant French Communist Party and the left in general; and then there were the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. One would think that these important events, plus the massive rebuilding of France that was being financed by the Marshall Plan, would push the memory of the Occupation into the background. So did the presidents who followed de Gaulle in the Fifth Republic (1958–), hoping that his efforts at tying, once again, the success of the French during the war to his own person would neutralize the persistence of this collective memory. No such luck. Georges Pompidou (president from 1969 to 1972) was criticized for defending his pardon of Paul Touvier, a notorious Vichy and Nazi sympathizer and leader of the despised Milice, the Vichy paramilitary arm. He implored his critics and others to get on with the work of modernizing France: “Are we going to keep the wounds of our national discord bleeding eternally? Has the time not come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, attacked one another, and even killed one another?”4 The answer, in 1972, was “not yet.”
The next two presidents of the Fifth Republic—Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81) and François Mitterrand (1981–95)—both burned their political fingers whenever they endeavored to put memories to rest about the defeat of 1940 or the Vichy experiment or the Occupation or the Liberation. Who was to be remembered? Who had suffered the most? Who had been unjustly unmemorialized? Were the Gaullists more effective than the Communists at national union? What about the Vichy supporters who were patriots and anti-German? What was owed them? And the interrogation went on and on. Amnesties, the establishment of public holidays marking those years, constructions of memorials: all brought grief to French presidents who wanted to move into a new future, unburdened by a sordid past. The fact that the center-right—Gaullists—remained in executive and legislative power until 1981 exacerbated the divisions that still prevailed in French politics and culture. However, President François Mitterrand, the first leftist leader of France since the Front populaire of the 1930s, also was pierced by the arrows of those who still had grievances. To make matters worse for him (and for the resolution of the differences), before joining the Resistance Mitterrand had been a low-level member of the Pétain government. He was still friends with some former Vichy servants, and he insisted, until he left office in 1995, that a wreath in his name be laid annually at Pétain’s grave on the Île d’Yeu.* When the full story of Mitterrand’s Vichy engagements became more widely known with the publication in 1994 of a book approved by him, he would argue that he was a maréchaliste, not a Pétainiste, one of those exquisite distinctions that had become the hallmark of self-definition after the war, referring to the difference between those who admired the “victor of Verdun” for having saved France in 1917–18 (the “marshalists”) and those who had bought into being the principles of the “New Order,” created under the persona of Philippe Pétain.
Jacques Chirac became Paris’s first popularly elected mayor.* He was a classic French pol, integrated fully into the Gaullist ideology, and not known as an imaginative or especially articulate representative of French ideals. But between July 18, 1986 (he was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995), and January 18, 2007 (he was the Fifth’s Republic’s fifth president from 1995 to 2007), he made eleven major speeches about Paris during the Occupation, about the French responsibility for Vichy excesses, and about France having forgotten, for a brief period, its traditions as the nation of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. We have seen how, in 1986, as mayor of Paris, at the site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver (which had been razed in 1959), he insisted that “in that summer of 1942, our capital knew the weight and the straits of a foreign occupation but had not yet taken the complete measure of the horrible ideology that subtended it.… France had still not completely sensed to what point the Nazi order was perversely and insanely criminal.”5 Still seeking forgiveness for the nation for its irresponsibility in failing to protect the most vulnerable of its citizens and residents, Chirac nonetheless was forthright in remembering the horror of the Grande Rafle. After he assumed the presidency, Chirac brought a clear and focused light to the rhetorical and political obfuscation that had attenuated Parisian memory of the excesses of the Vichy government. On Sunday, July 16, 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, President Chirac spoke with a vigor that shattered the Gaullist legend, which had sought to subsume all requited suffering and courageous resistance under the Cross of Lorraine. The scene was again the former site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where a statue was being dedicated that represented the thousands of Jews who had been temporarily imprisoned within its walls. Chirac began his remarks with his major theme: “There are, in the life of a nation, moments that wound its memory as well as the idea that one has of one’s country.”6 For those who had fought with each other for a half century over the ownership of the legacies of 1940–45 France, these words must have brought a sudden silence. Reassuring not only the Jewish members of the audience but also, by extension, many of the immigrants who had arrived since the war, Chirac insisted that Parisians—in fact, all French citizens—must “recognize the mistakes of the past—and especially those committed by the [Vichy] state. Nothing must block out the dismal hours of our history if we are to defend a certain idea of humanity, of liberty, and of dignity. In so doing, we struggle against those dark forces that are constantly at work. This ceaseless combat is mine as much as it is yours.”7 No other speech by a French politician did more to erase the ambiguity of the Mitterrand years and, in effect, undermine the internecine squabbles that were still going on (many of the résistants and Vichy supporters were still alive and quite active; we must not forget how young they were in the 1940s). In one of the most important addresses given by a French statesman in the twentieth century, Chirac resurrected the ghost of the Occupation in order to put it to rest. His speech did not bring complete closure to the continuing confusion and arguments about who was responsible for the worst excesses of the Occupation, but it did move the debate toward more trenchant, and thus more transparent, arguments.
Nicolas Sarkozy was born in 1955, the first Fifth Republic president to have been born after the war. Insensitive to, because he was essentially ignorant of, the querulous arguments about the Occupation that had bedeviled his Fifth Republic predecessors, Sarkozy nonetheless chose, as early as 2006, to use in his campaign the example of a youth named Guy Môquet—“a young man of seventeen who gave his life to France; this is an example not of the past but for our future.”8 Immediately, leftist politicians, including former Communists, attacked the arrogance of a politician from the right using a Communist youth to support his run for office. But more significant is that Sarkozy and his staff did not appear to be aware of the complicated story of this young man from the 17th arrondissement. He had been caught up, at the age of sixteen, in the Nazi frenzy following the assassination in broad daylight of two German officers, one in the Métro station at Barbès-Rochechouart in August of 1941 and the other, a Feldkommandant, in the streets of Nantes in October of that year. Immediately, Hitler had ordered fifty hostages shot for each German killed; after much negotiation between the Vichy government and the Germans, the ratio of ten hostages per assassinated German was agreed upon. Soon after this agreement, at a camp run by the French government near the Breton town of Châteaubriant, twenty-seven young men, Communists, for the most part, were executed. The Germans felt that the execution of Communists would send a clear signal to the French that their most important enemy was internal and not the Occupiers.
For reasons that are still unclear, among the selected victims was the youngster from Paris, barely seventeen. It was his letter home a few hours before his execution that Sarkozy would read in his campaign. The problem is that though Môquet had certainly “resisted,” it was not against the Germans but against the Vichy government. In fact, the lycéen had been arrested in October of 1940, while the Communist Party was following orders from the USSR not to fight the German Occupiers, for they were allies. Guy and his young Communist buddies had been posting tags and stickers all over his neighborhood demanding that his father, a Communist deputy arrested after the Soviet-German treaty, be released from prison; the Vichy government, dead set against Communism, had arrested not only deputies but also many party members. Earlier, too, even under the Third Republic, Guy and his friends had been protesting against French support for Finland in its short war with Russia (during the fall and winter of 1939–40). The point is that Guy was not demonstrating against the German authorities but against the governments of his own country.
But Minister Sarkozy, later President Sarkozy, persisted. His first edict as president, aimed at marking his commitment to unite France under the banner of collective patriotism and duty to the Republic, instructed high school teachers in France to recite Môquet’s last letter to his mother in their classrooms on October 22. Ridicule, political correctness, old memories, and partisan opposition combined not only to revive memories that many thought had been put to rest, but also to remind everyone that those memories would never stay buried. Slowly, the edict was forgotten.*
François Hollande, the current president of France, paid attention to his predecessors’ faux pas. He has returned to the less divisive memories of the Occupation, those surrounding the rounding up, imprisonment, deportation, and murder of Jews. Speaking at two Parisian sites early in his presidency—at the place where the Vélodrome d’Hiver once stood and at a new museum at the Cité de la Muette, in Drancy—he took up Jacques Chirac’s charge to the French nation to take responsibility for what happened: the État français had been a major player in the French Shoah. On July 22, 2012, he emphasized that “this crime took place here, in our capital, in our streets, in the courtyards of our buildings, in our stairways, on our school playgrounds.” The French government had betrayed Jewish confidence that “the country of the great Revolution and City of Light would be a safe haven for them.”9 At Drancy two months later, he stated that “our work is no longer about establishing the truth. Today, our work is to transmit.… Transmission: there resides the future of remembering.”10 Even if one has to insist on how treacherously the French government had acted against those seeking protection in France, it was better than trying to figure out who was most responsible for the crimes and for their punishment.
In his second essay on the Occupation, “Paris Under the Occupation” (1945), Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth century’s most famous philosopher, tried to capture what it was like to live cheek by jowl with one’s oppressor.* “A thousand times in these last four years, French have seen serried rows of bottles of Saint-Emilion or Meursault in the grocers’ windows. Approaching, tantalized, they found a notice saying ‘dummy display.’ So it was with Paris: it was merely a dummy display.”11 He offers that Parisians had lived only in the past or present in the early 1940s, for their future had been stolen from them. Camus’s The Plague would echo another of his themes: “France… had forgotten Paris.… Paris was no longer the capital of France.”12 But the Occupation had done more than diminish the spirit of the city’s citizens; the very nature of the built environment had changed: “Everything was hollow and empty: the Louvre had no paintings, the Chamber no deputies, the Senate no senators and the Lycée Montaigne no pupils.” Earlier, Sartre describes even more specifically the architecture of the city:
There was nothing but ruins: shuttered, uninhabited houses in the 16th arrondissement, requisitioned hotels and cinemas, indicated by white barriers which you suddenly bumped up against, shops and bars closed for the duration… plinths with no statues, parks partly barricaded off or disfigured by reinforced concrete pillboxes, and all these big dusty letters on the tops of the buildings, neon signs that no longer light up.13
In the spring of 2008, the estimable Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), located in the Marais, announced and opened an exhibition entitled Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca. Few who saw the handsome posters recognized the name of Zucca, a somewhat talented Italian-Frenchman who had passed away in 1973. But what did strike Parisians and tourists were the vibrant photographs featured in the show, depicting a colorful Paris basking in the light of the Occupation. The BHVP had bought from the Zucca family the thousands of photographs that he had taken between the 1930s and his death. Included in that collection were about six thousand shots, mostly of Paris under the Occupation; of those, about one thousand were in color. Color film was still a nascent technology and a rare commercial commodity in the early 1940s; it was an expensive and delicate technology, used primarily by the military and the propaganda ministry to project the actions of the Wehrmacht and other arms of the military. That a French photographer, André Zucca, had had access to it was exceptional.
Zucca, a Germanophile probably on the right wing of French politics, had been the only French person hired by the German magazine Signal as its photographic correspondent.* None of the images in the 2008 exhibition ever appeared in the magazine, but the fact that Zucca had been given a press pass, access to a supply of film, and freedom to snap away wherever he wanted meant that he was able to provide us with a rich record of certain aspects of daily life in occupied Paris. Not surprisingly, the exhibition immediately brought back into the open the same questions that had been bedeviling Parisian politics since the Liberation. Whose view of the Occupation is the correct one? Were not those fifteen hundred nights of Paris’s agony the années noires (the dark years), a period that it had valiantly emerged from? The colored brilliance of hundreds of photographs showing Paris as a tourist site in the 1940s, with Germans and Parisians in casual contact, was immediately criticized in the media. One city official referred to the “indecency” of the photographs, arguing that they represented “mundane revisionism.”14 Pierre Assouline, novelist and biographer, wrote in Le Monde: “In this exhibition, it is never made clear… that all these photos are a matter of propaganda.”15 Editorials appeared on the right and on the left; Zucca’s descendants argued with each other in public (the son referring to his father as a collaborator and anti-Semite); the librarians and curators at the BHVP went public with their own internecine squabbles; bureaucrats working for the city of Paris spoke publicly about their dissensions. Finally a compromise was reached: the title of the exhibition (but not the catalog, which had already been printed*) would be changed from Les Parisiens… to Des Parisiens sous l’Occupation. Changing one letter enabled the offensive direct article to become a partitive one, from “[The] Parisians” to “Some Parisians.” And a separate flyer was handed out to all viewers at the entry booth stating that these photographs had been shot by a man with strong connections to and some ideological agreement with the Occupier. The show was quite successful, but the brouhaha over its interpretation, sixty-four years after the Germans had left, revealed how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.
Our engagement with the urban landscape is persistently one of interpretation. The history of a city resides in a combination of its architectural evidence and the present and past activities of those who have lived within that built environment. This is important: physical, mental, and spiritual engagements with a planned and unplanned architectural environment, not its geopolitical location, define the essence of any metropolis. And that essence changes with the knowledge that we as inhabitants, tourists, temporary residents, filmgoers, readers, and artists garner as we learn about the upheavals that powerful cities such as Paris have undergone.
Imaginative essayists and writers of fiction as well as historians and cultural critics have plumbed the psyche of those disoriented by the disappearance of liberty in a city known for that freedom. In his Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, the Italian essayist, imaginatively wrote about how urban dwellers, both physically and in their dreams, adapt their city to their desires and vice versa—about their desires “constructing” their cities. “The city… does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps… the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”17 Paris was physically marked during the Occupation, and many of those marks remain. A military occupation leaves as well traces on the “invisible” history of a city, but its inhabitants make a daily effort to ignore them, to forget them. “We can keep only ‘one’ city in our mind verbally, though others are there [always], visually, experientially.”18 Once the occupier has gone, the evidence of his presence diminishes; although, just as memory protected the invested city, memory also never quite allows the occupier to disappear completely. In our master example, Paris has yet to be “liberated” totally from the Occupation of 1940–1944.
“Paris” is not just a set of GPS coordinates but also, and maybe mostly, an imagined city; its special genius has always been based on this fabulous definition. We are far from the Terror of 1793–94, but many of the buildings where its executions and tortures took place are still standing. We are much closer to the 1940s. Some historians do not want us to forget what happened in the buildings occupied by the Germans and their Vichy accomplices. But in the end, what will remain of the memories of that period? What will be the equivalent of the tumbrel and the guillotine? Will de Gaulle be compared to Napoleon, who brought the nation out of the Revolution with his assertion in 1799 that “It is finished”? Will the memory of the Occupation and the Liberation be whitewashed? Do we really have to know about the Occupation in order to understand and “feel” contemporary Paris? When our children pass those little pieces of marble that say so-and-so died here, do they really care? Should they? Will these memorials eventually fall to the ground, forgotten? And if they do, if there is no written record on the walls of Paris, where will the memory of the Occupation and its legacies go?
Yes, the lights came back on, and Paris was no longer darkened, either by war or by the presence of its enemies. But as we have seen, the city has remained haunted by this period. “We’ll always have Paris” means that we will always have the memories of how we felt at some past moment—but that Paris is gone.
If reading this book has made you more curious about Paris and its violent midcentury history, and if you can still admire her almost unreal self-confidence, then I am pleased. If, on the other hand, the information in these pages has made you more suspicious of her charms, more critical of her adaptation to the “plague,” then that, too, would please me. For either way, or both ways, you would have thickened your knowledge so that the next time you confront Paris, either in person or imaginatively, you will have more respect for her resiliency as well as for the hope that she still offers those seeking to escape the depravations of ignorance and cultural violence.