September 3: France and Great Britain declare war on Germany
September 5: United States announces its neutrality
Winter 1939–40: “Phony war” (drôle de guerre); Russo-Finnish War
April: Anglo-Russian expedition to Norway; Germany occupies Norway
April 3: Prison sentences for former French Communist deputies
May 10: Beginning of German western offensive; Winston Churchill named prime minister of Great Britain
May 15: French prime minister Paul Reynaud informs Churchill by phone: “We’ve lost the battle”
May 18: Reynaud announces appointment of Maréchal Philippe Pétain as vice president of Council of Ministers
May 25: Charles de Gaulle given battlefield promotion to brigadier general
May 28: Belgium capitulates, to surprise of Allies
June 4: End of evacuation of Allied troops begun on May 24 from Dunkirk
June 5: Retreating French soldiers begin to appear in Paris; Reynaud names de Gaulle undersecretary for war and national defense
June 10: French government leaves Paris; Italy declares war on France and Great Britain
June 12: Paris officially declared “open”; US ambassador William Bullitt essentially “mayor” of Paris with prefect of police Roger Langeron
June 14: First German troops enter Paris
June 16: Reynaud resigns as prime minister
June 17: Pétain named president of Council of Ministers; requests an armistice
June 18: First radio speech to France by de Gaulle from London
June 22: Armistice signed at Compiègne
June 25: Armistice officially begins
June 28: Hitler’s only visit to Paris; British government recognizes de Gaulle as head of the “Free French”
June 1940–November 1942: Göring will visit Paris and the Jeu de Paume museum twenty-five times during this period
July 3: Great Britain attacks and devastates French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria
July 11–12: Third Republic votes itself out of existence; a new État français is established, with Pétain as its chief executive and Pierre Laval as vice president of the Council of Ministers and his designated successor
July 17: Vichy passes law that forbids employment for those not born of French parents
July 22: Vichy examines post-1927 naturalizations of five hundred thousand French citizens
August 7: Alsace-Lorraine officially annexed to Germany
August 8: Beginning of Battle of Britain
August 13: Vichy abolishes anti-Semitism laws, dissolves “secret societies,” aimed principally at Freemasonry; Germans forbid Jews to reenter Occupied Zone
September 12: First German announcement of hostage policy (hostages will be imprisoned or executed if violent actions are taken against German personnel)
September 17: First rationing of essential food products in Paris announced; appearance of cartes de rationnement
September 27: Jewish-owned shops must carry yellow signs bearing the words ENTREPRISE JUIVE (eleven thousand complied by late November); census of Jews by French police (under German orders) begins
October 3: First German edict against Jews in occupied France; first Gaullist tags discovered on Parisian walls
October 5: First roundup of French Communists in Paris, by Vichy police
October 12: Hitler postpones indefinitely the invasion of England
October 18: Publication of Vichy edict of October 3–4 forbidding Jewish ownership and management of enterprises and excluding Jews from the army and professions
October 22: Hitler and Pierre Laval meet for first time at Montoire, in France
October 24: Pétain and Hitler meet at Montoire, their only meeting
October 30: Pétain’s “path of collaboration” speech
November 5: Roosevelt reelected for a third term
November 11 Lycéens demonstrate in Paris
December 13: Pétain fires Pierre Laval; Admiral François Darlan will be his successor
December 15: Ashes of Duke of Reichstadt (the King of Rome, a.k.a. Napoleon II) brought to Paris from Vienna
February: Arrest of members of first important resistance group, known as the Musée de l’Homme network because most members worked at that institution; six would be executed in early 1942
February 14: Veit Harlan’s strongly anti-Semitic film, Le Juif Süss, opens in Paris cinemas
March 29: Creation by Vichy government of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, aimed at coordinating repression of Jews in France
April 26: Third Vichy law regarding Jews forbids them from trading their possessions with Aryans; Jewish bank accounts frozen
May 8: Ordinance listing professions forbidden to Jews is enacted
May 14: First rafle (roundup) of Parisian Jews (ca. 3,700, mostly Polish) is conducted
June 21: Exclusion of Jewish students from universities and other professional schools
June 22: Operation Barbarossa: German invasion of USSR
July 16: Jews excluded from legal profession
July 22: All Jewish bank accounts seized; vaults, safe-deposit boxes opened
August 8: Jews excluded from medical professions
August 13: Jews forbidden to have radios
August 14: French Communist Party outlawed; manifestations against Occupation begin to appear
August 20–23: Second rafle of Parisian Jews (4,300 arrested on German orders) takes place, in 11th arrondissement
August 21 and 28: First German serviceman, Alfons Moser, assassinated in a public place: “Colonel Fabien,” a résistant, kills him at the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro stop; thirteen hostages executed at Mont-Valérien, outside Paris, where there would be many such executions over the next four years
August 29: First Free French (Gaullist) agent, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, shot by Germans at Mont-Valérien
September 5: Opening of exhibition Le Juif et la France (will run until June of 1942)
November 21: Bomb explodes in a Left Bank bookstore that features German publications; probably set by Tommy Elek of the Manouchian Group
December 8: United States declares war on Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy)
December 10: Jews not allowed to change domicile; word JUIF or JUIVE must be stamped in red on ID cards
December 15: Germans arrest 743 affluent French Jews in Paris
January 20: Clandestine publication of Vercors’s Silence of the Sea
February: Relegation of Jews to last Métro cars; Jews forbidden to leave home between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.
March 1: Opening of Le Bolchévisme contre l’Europe exhibition in Paris
March 3–4: Allies bomb Boulogne-Billancourt, suburb of Paris where Renault factory is located
March 27: First deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz from Drancy
April 18: Pétain reappoints Laval as vice president of the Council of Ministers—in effect, the prime minister
May: Drancy, outside Paris, becomes a major collecting point for deportation to Auschwitz; more than five hundred hostages have been shot since Moser’s assassination in August of 1941; Jews forbidden to possess bicycles
May 5: SS general Reinhard Heydrich visits Paris to introduce SS general Carl Oberg to the Occupation authorities; police matters removed from army control and put under German police control; French police put under German command
May 15: Arno Breker (Hitler’s favorite sculptor) exhibition opens at l’Orangerie in Paris
June 25: Thousands of Jews sent from Drancy to Auschwitz; also ten thousand from Unoccupied Zone delivered to Nazis
June: La Relève, a call by the Vichy government for volunteers to work in Germany in exchange for French prisoners of war (three workers for one prisoner); weak response
End June: Adolf Eichmann in Paris to coordinate “final solution” there
July 16–17: Grande Rafle (27,000 foreign Jews sought; 13,200 rounded up)
July 21–25: Arrest of Jewish orphans (of deported, escaped parents)
July 28: Camus’s The Stranger (L’Étranger) appears
August: Jews forbidden to have telephones
August 6: Inauguration of Paris’s new Musée d’Art Moderne
August 26: Arrest of 6,600 foreign Jews in Unoccupied Zone
September 14: Beginning of Battle of Stalingrad
November 11: Germans occupy Zone libre (Unoccupied Zone) after Allied invasion of North Africa
November 27: French navy sabotages its fleet in the port of Toulon
January 11: Thirty Métro stations closed
January 30: Milice française established (right-wing militia of Vichy government)
February 2: Surrender of German marshal Friedrich von Paulus and his armies at Stalingrad
February 16: Vichy establishes Service du travail obligatoire (STO), obligatory draft of young workers for Germany
April 4: Outskirts of Paris heavily bombed
May 27: Establishment of the Conseil national de la Résistance, organized under Gaullist leadership; most resistance groups had theretofore acted independently
June 21: Arrest of Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s chief negotiator with all resistance groups; he would die after having been extensively tortured
June 25: Sartre’s massive philosophical work Being and Nothingness appears
July: About six hundred examples of art dégénéré burned in Jeu de Paume garden
November: Arrest of the Manouchian Group, a resistance network
December 15: All French citizens must have cartes d’identité
February: Trial of Manouchian Group; twenty-two executed
March 8: Berr family arrested
March 27: Hélène Berr deported on her birthday
April 26: Pétain visits Paris for first—and last—time as chef de l’État français
June 6: Allies invade Normandy
July: Operation Valkyrie (assassination plot against Hitler by dissident elements of German army)
August 17: Laval’s last Council of Ministers meeting at the Hôtel Matignon in Paris; SS officer Alois Brunner leaves Drancy on a train with fifty-one deportees; 1,386 Jews at Drancy survived after Brunner’s departure (of 75,700 Jews deported from France, 97 percent died in Auschwitz and other camps)
August 19–25: Battle for liberation of Paris
August 22: De Gaulle’s first meeting with his Council of Ministers in Paris