France was not alone in suffering an exceptionally severe winter that lasted from mid-December 1939 until March 1940. The cold centre was situated in the Netherlands and northern Germany but the extreme weather conditions were also felt in Finland, Sweden, southern Norway, Denmark, south-western England, northern France, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, the Baltic countries and western Russia. Even in northern Spain, temperatures of 0 degrees Fahrenheit (–18 degrees Celsius) were recorded. Some people in France began to wonder if they were living in Siberia, from where the arctic air originated. The ferocious weather encouraged those who believed that the phoney war could not continue and were in any case trying to prepare for catastrophe; ordinary people, many of them housewives, stockpiling essential items such as sugar, flour and tinned food, were shocked to find that water in flower vases turned to ice. But there were also several not so ordinary women who saw the need to offer whatever help they could as quickly as possible.
Early in 1940, Odette Fabius was one of many women from the Parisian haute bourgeoisie who responded to the call for volunteers for a variety of medical and social support services. Odette remembered that during the First World War an entire floor of her family’s spacious townhouse had been turned into a temporary hospital while her mother, in starched white nurse’s uniform, tended the sick. Four-year-old Odette was encouraged to walk up and down the beds offering cigarettes. Odette Fabius, née Schmoll, was born into one of France’s oldest and most illustrious Jewish families, with roots deep in Alsace on one side, in Bordeaux on the other, and was descended from Abraham Furtado, a French politician and one-time adviser to Napoleon Bonaparte. Her father was a high-ranking lawyer who worked in the Palais de Justice, and she and her brother grew up lacking neither parental love and devotion nor material goods. Her golden childhood enabled her to see life as ‘a marvellous gift’ full of privileges regulated by a British governess called Alice Darling. Darling, who was still with the family in 1940 after thirty-two years’ devoted service, ensured that English was Odette’s first language. That they were Jewish was simply a fact and did not disturb their daily life.
Odette and Robert Fabius’s wedding in 1929
In 1929 Odette was introduced to Robert Fabius, an attractive man ten years older than her, whose family were antique dealers, or as M. Schmoll disparagingly described them, shopkeepers. It was a profession, however, that was ultimately to save his life. Odette and Robert were married the following year by Paris’s Grand Rabbin in a magnificent ceremony at the Grand Synagogue in the Rue de la Victoire, the same synagogue where forty years earlier Captain Alfred Dreyfus had married Lucie Hadamard. Odette, just twenty, wore a magnificent dress with a thirty-foot lace train made by Lanvin, her favourite designer, and was attended by numerous cousins and friends, including Renée, formerly Van Cleef, daughter of the jeweller. The lavish reception was held at the Hôtel George V.
Within a year a daughter, Marie-Claude, was born and the family moved to an apartment on the fashionable Rue Meyerbeer with enough room for three staff, including an English nanny. But Odette was far from happy with a life that involved nothing more than dinners at the fashionable Boeuf sur le Toit or visits to cabarets, and a husband who, as she soon learned, drank, gambled and kept mistresses. The latter was hardly a surprise to her, since her own father had done likewise. But, in the way of the haute bourgeoisie, he had been discreet. There were few options in the 1930s for a young mother like Odette. Then, in 1937, her beloved mother died and, lacking anyone with whom to discuss how best to live her unhappy life, she visited a well-known psychoanalyst in Paris, Dr Démétrian. She continued the sessions until Dr Démétrian was called up, then suddenly ‘for me, life was about to begin’. Odette joined the SSA or Sections Sanitaires Automobiles (mobile health units) as a volunteer ambulance driver. Faced with shortages of both ambulances and drivers, the French Department of War had accepted an offer from the Croix-Rouge Française to help with transportation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield. A brief inaugural ceremony was organized on 24 April 1940 in the Cour des Invalides, following which some units went immediately into action. In fact, the role of these SSA women, many of them countesses and princesses from France’s best-known families, went beyond merely picking up wounded British and French soldiers and was also aiding refugees heading south out of Paris and sending much needed supplies to prisoner-of-war camps. It was dangerous and tiring work, allowing almost no sleep for days on end. Those units near the northern France front line, confronted immediately with casualties from fierce fighting in the area, had to undertake day and night driving, as well as the loading and unloading of the wounded, often under sustained German bombing.
The ambulance drivers were subsequently ordered to retreat from village to village in the face of ferocious German attacks. One of Fabius’s final assignments was to transport the Red Cross treasury in her ambulance to Bordeaux, an area she knew well and where the government was intending to transfer in the wake of the German invasion. She stopped for a night en route in Orléans, staying in a hotel which was hit by Luftwaffe planes in the early hours; twenty people were killed. Lucky to survive, Odette moved on as soon as she could. ‘I did not want to be accused of disappearing with the Red Cross millions.’ But although the SSA was formally disbanded in early September 1940, several of the women, having been exposed to fear and danger, subsequently involved themselves in further actions against the Germans by joining some form of inchoate resistance.
The Duchess of Windsor also joined the SSA for a short time and agreed to deliver plasma, bandages and cigarettes to hospitals near the Maginot Line. Wallis admitted: ‘I was busier and perhaps more useful than I had ever been in my life.’ However, much to the annoyance of the Duke of Windsor, assigned to the British Military mission at Vincennes, just outside Paris, British newspapers were not interested in writing about the activities of his ‘courageous’ wife, ‘billeted within the sound of gunfire’, as he proudly tried to tell them. Then, once Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May and began to threaten the French defences, the Duke and several of the international set – including the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes, Sir Charles and Lady Mendl, the writer and collector Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas – decided it was time to flee Paris. Edward deposited Wallis in Biarritz and returned to Paris briefly to sort out his affairs. By the end of May his need to be with his wife was so overpowering that, leaving their house at 85 Boulevard Suchet in the hands of a German caretaker, he now abandoned his oldest and most loyal friend and ADC, Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, without a word of warning, forcing him to find his own way back to England without any means of transport. Not surprisingly, Metcalfe saw this as a callous disregard of twenty years of friendship and threatened never to forgive him. ‘He deserted his job in 1936, well he’s deserted his country now, at a time when every office boy and cripple is trying to do what he can. It is the end,’ he told his wife. Some historians have defended the Duke on the grounds that he probably left Paris with the approval – indeed the relieved approval – of the military mission. More significantly perhaps, the Duke understood that, at a time when everyone else seemed to be against the Duchess, he had to be with her to support and defend her. From Biarritz the pair went to La Croë, their home in the Cap d’Antibes, where they heard news of the German advance and the French collapse. It was agreed with the local British Embassy that the Duke and Duchess must get to Spain, without getting caught up with the fleeing French government.
Somehow Edward found time during these last frenetic weeks in 1940 before the invasion to visit Cartier and collect his latest commission, intended as a birthday gift for Wallis on 19 June, and which he had ordered several months previously. On 4 March 1940 he had visited Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier’s Design Director, with his pockets full of stones from a necklace and four bracelets, and discussed with her the making of a magnificent brooch in the shape of a flamingo, with startling tail feathers of rubies, sapphires and emeralds and a retractable leg so that Wallis could wear it centrally, without the leg digging into her should she bend down.
Toussaint was one of an unusual group of self-made women responsible for defining good taste and style in late 1930s Paris; women who felt a burgeoning need to break free and express themselves. Before the First World War jewellery had followed certain rigid conventions and traditions but in the 1920s, as women fought for an enhanced role in society, jewellery and clothes reflected this desire for greater freedom. Toussaint was patronized by women who refused to be confined within narrow limits. Her mother was a Belgian lace-maker, but Jeanne – small, slim and dynamic – left her Charleroi home at just sixteen and came to Paris as the young mistress of an aristocrat and one of the first women to be paid for modelling. When her lover abandoned her, she had affairs with several other men, moving in circles of kept women, courtesans and coquettes that flourished in Belle Epoque Paris, circles that included Coco Chanel, who remained a close friend until the end of her life. In 1918, Jeanne met and fell in love with Louis Cartier, one of three brothers who had built up the jewellery firm which was by then flourishing on the Rue de la Paix. Cartier, with branches in London and New York, famous for its fine platinum settings designed to set off exquisite stones often imported from India or Russia, was at the height of its international success. Louis, forty-three and divorced, wanted to marry Jeanne, but his family was appalled by the idea of him marrying a woman they considered a demi-mondaine, fearing this would impact negatively on the firm. So she remained his mistress and, although she could neither draw nor sketch, he appointed her Design Director, a key position in the company and also in the life of Parisian high society. She could relate to the French custom of indulging les grandes amoureuses and to the role played by lavish jewellery in an extramarital relationship, a world from which she and Chanel had so recently emerged. At Cartier (and other Parisian jewellers) it was not unusual for a man to maintain two accounts: one for his wife and one for his mistress. Meticulous records were kept of everything bought and sold, but discretion was paramount. It was imperative that salespeople were trained never to confuse the two, a discipline followed to this day.
Suzanne Belperron, one of the most talented jewellery designers of her generation, was a decade younger than Toussaint, but she too moved to Paris while still in her teens and she too had an instinctive understanding of the women she was decorating. Belperron, born Suzanne Vuillerme in the Jura in 1900 to a family with deep roots in the area, had won prizes at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Besançon from the age of eighteen and went immediately to work with Jeanne Boivin, sister of the couturier Paul Poiret and widow of René Boivin, the most famous Parisian jeweller of his day. But at Maison Boivin, Suzanne could never be given credit for her highly individual creations; her work had to remain anonymous, an impossible scenario for a woman of immense talent and a strong personality to match. So in 1932 when Bernard Herz, the well-known Parisian pearl and gemstone dealer, invited her to work for him as Artistic and Technical Director with much greater freedom, she could not refuse. From now on, Vogue regularly featured whole pages with ‘dresses by Chanel or Mainbocher, jewels by Belperron’, thus linking the names of couturier and jeweller in a new way. In the months to follow, the relationship between these two branches of the luxury industry was of key importance. The name Belperron was suddenly vying for attention with the longer-established Cartier and Van Cleef. Yet little was known about the woman behind the name, which added to her attraction.
Suzanne had married the engineer Jean Belperron in 1924 and the young couple lived in Montmartre, where they made friends with many avant-garde artists. Her friend the beautiful Nusch Eluard, actress and occasional jewellery model, and wife and muse to the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, was photographed by Man Ray in Belperron creations. However, Suzanne saw clients at her private salon at 59 Rue de Châteaudun in the unfashionable 9th arrondissement. She never had a shop front, but her work – swirls of naturalist leaves and shells, an antidote to the then fashionable Art Deco, and the mixing of precious stones with non-traditional materials such as ebony or chalcedony – was highly sought after by trendsetters such as the Duchess of Windsor, Daisy Fellowes and Schiaparelli. Parisiennes whose trademark was shopping driven by word-of-mouth recommendations knew where to find her and recognized her bold, unsigned pieces. At the same time, Suzanne was becoming famous for her own personal style, her very short hair often covered by a turban, and, although an extremely private person, she was herself photographed by Horst and Man Ray, sometimes wearing magnificent clips, large cuffs or rings on her long fingers. Herz was a handsome man some twenty-three years her senior, with a large country house at Chantilly and an apartment in the Avenue du President Wilson in the chic 16th arrondissement. His own children – a married daughter, Mme Aline Solinsky, and a son Jean who was a prisoner of war – were now grown up. He became something of a father figure to Suzanne and quite possibly her lover too. Among her most precious possessions was a white gold and platinum lorgnette from which dangled two heart-shaped charms; inside were two photographs, one of her mother and one of Herz. But Herz, although born in Paris, was Jewish, which meant that from early 1940 Suzanne Belperron was looking into how to transfer the company into her name and run Maison Bernard Herz entirely alone.
Although in 1940 the United States had not yet joined the war effort, the American Hospital in Paris was one of the few organizations that was prepared. Rebuilt after the Great War with 120 beds for medical, surgical and maternity cases and three operating rooms in the wealthy Parisian district of Neuilly-sur-Seine in the west of the city, it had shed its 1920s reputation as an upmarket clinic providing succour for rich or famous Americans such as Ernest Hemingway and the Scott Fitzgeralds to become a first-rate hospital for all Americans in Paris. Now, once again, with the help of Ambassador Bullitt, it had to get ready to become a military facility able to deal with shrapnel wounds, gas attacks or damage from bombs, with a special unit set up for blood donations.
One of the most senior doctors at the hospital was Sumner Waldron Jackson, a genito-urinary specialist from Maine. He and his Swiss-born wife, Toquette, had lived through one war against Germany and, like many in their circle, had been following the news on the radio for the last two years, listening with mounting horror to Hitler’s threats. Charlotte Sylvie Barrelet de Ricout, always known as Toquette, came from a well-off family of Swiss Protestants. Her lawyer father had brought his young family to live in France, settling at Enghien-les-Bains just outside Paris, where Toquette grew up with a love of tennis and sailing on the lake at Enghien. She had been working as a nurse since 1914 and met Sumner in Paris when both were at the American Red Cross Hospital Number Two, treating hideously wounded men brought back from the trenches, often barely alive. The romance began, apparently, with a snatched kiss in a linen cupboard at the hospital, and the pair were married in November 1917. He was thirty-two, she twenty-seven. In 1919 they returned to live for a while in Philadelphia. But Toquette was not happy in America, too French to feel at home there, and so after two years persuaded her husband to return to Paris. That he obliged his young wife so willingly is an indication of her forceful personality since the move involved his taking not only French-language but also fresh medical exams. In January 1929 their first and only son Phillip was born, by which time Sumner was working as a surgeon and urologist at the American Hospital and the family were living in an apartment at 11 Avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement. As the hospital in Paris braced itself for action, its doctors were already working at a makeshift field hospital established in a former casino at Fontainebleau, using it as a dressing station for French soldiers and wounded refugees needing emergency care.
But, however well prepared the hospital might have been, almost everyone was shocked by the speed and efficiency of the German invasion. The Blitzkrieg began on 13 May and swiftly shattered the French faith in their heavily fortified Maginot Line. The Wehrmacht with its superior mechanized Panzer divisions, supported by Luftwaffe dive bombers, bypassed the fortifications and within one month Dutch, Belgian and Norwegian forces had all capitulated, sending refugees streaming over the border into France. British and French forces, similarly overwhelmed, were trapped at Dunkirk. Although in the nine days following 27 May a total of 338,226 soldiers were rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 boats, the British Expeditionary Force lost 68,000 soldiers during the French campaign and had to abandon nearly all tanks, other vehicles and equipment. Metcalfe always believed that the Duke of Windsor should have remained in Paris until the last minute, overseeing the evacuation on the Dunkirk beaches. ‘This would have made him seem a hero not a coward,’ Metcalfe’s daughter suggested. But the Duke and Duchess had fled Paris on 16 May and made their way to the Hôtel du Palais in fashionable Biarritz, where life was much calmer than in the capital.
On 10 June the government too left Paris for Bordeaux via Tours, the fight not necessarily entirely over, but giving the signal to the population that it was no longer safe to remain in the capital. ‘The streets were empty. People were closing their shops. The metallic shudder of falling iron shutters was the only sound to break the silence, a sound familiar to anyone who has woken in a city threatened by riot or war,’ was how the novelist Irène Némirovsky described the scene in her realistic account, Suite Française. Four days later, on 14 June, the French government declared Paris an Open City, a declaration intended to protect it as long as no resistance was offered by troops or by the population; otherwise the city would be treated as being in the war zone and liable to destruction. Hitler wanted Paris protected, preserved, so that Germany could forge an alliance with it, enjoy its attributes. While never admitting its superiority, and criticizing the depravity and louche habits of French women, he nonetheless wanted every German soldier to experience, once, the pleasures of Paris: ‘Jeder Einmal nach Paris’ (‘Everyone should have his turn in Paris’) was the popular phrase used by the Wehrmacht.
On that day, the day the Germans entered the city and hoisted the swastika over the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, there were fourteen recorded suicides in Paris, of which the best-known was that of Dr Thierry Martel, Chief Surgeon at the American Hospital. Martel, aged sixty-five, was a complex man, simultaneously anti-German and anti-Jewish, a decorated veteran of the Great War and a member of Maurras’s Action Française. The son of French aristocrats who loudly proclaimed their belief in the guilt of Dreyfus as well as their dislike of the number of nouveau riche Jews, he was also the uncle of Jacques Tartière, the Gaullist résistant married to the American actress Drue Leyton. But he had lost a son in the Great War and vowed after that never to speak to a German. Following Martel’s suicide, Dr Sumner Jackson took over as Chief Surgeon and directed policy. Already in May the hospital was sheltering downed US and British pilots. No decision was ever taken to become involved in resistance, but Toquette and her sister Tat, while refusing to leave France, agreed that it might be safer for Phillip if they moved south out of Paris and left Sumner alone in their flat.
The response to France’s military collapse was chaotic. No official plans had been issued for a mass evacuation, yet almost three million out of Paris’s five million inhabitants, including bureaucrats and diplomats, clamoured to get out of the city. Paris-Soir advised women to wear comfortable flat shoes and robust thick stockings rather than the elegant silk variety. But that did little to dispel the collective panic which was largely based on fear of being taken prisoner. On 9 June, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: ‘I took the German advance as a personal threat. I had only one idea which was not to be cut off from [Jean-Paul] Sartre, not to be taken like a rat in occupied Paris.’
Although some of the wealthier Parisians had left as soon as they realized things were going badly, the poorer ones, with no private means of transport, now flooded on to already overcrowded trains, using every inch of space, including the toilets, as additional seating. This use of the toilets caused intolerable problems on long journeys for passengers who needed to relieve themselves. Many women, in the face of dire need, lost their inhibitions and, on at least one occasion when a train stopped, strong men were seen to lift women out through the windows where they then proceeded to raise their skirts and crouch on the ground, embarrassingly close to the train which they feared might move off without them, as they urinated in a row along the railway line. Thousands of other Parisians tried to leave the city using whatever mode of transport they could commandeer. The roads, already congested with Belgian refugees, were now jammed with desperate families, using private cars if they had enough fuel, often with a mattress on the roof in the mistaken belief that this would lessen the impact of a bomb. Others took to bicycles, or walked, pushing prams and occasionally home-made wheelbarrows containing the frail elderly instead of babies. Some historians have estimated that up to ten million French people fled their homes in the wake of the German advance, not always knowing where they were going (south or west was the general direction rather than north, a route that was now impossible). It was a pathetic multitude, those on foot often going as fast as the red-faced, angry drivers uselessly honking horns.
Most of those who left Paris were women, children and the elderly – the men were either working in factories or serving in the army – as schools were closed down early and exams cancelled, family pets destroyed or else left to run wild and be shot by others. What women chose to wear for such a nightmare journey was much commented on. Some, given the extreme heat and believing they would not be on the road for long, wore summer shorts. Others, more cautious, decided that, despite the stifling weather, the only way to avoid carrying luggage was to wear a large proportion of their wardrobe. ‘It was quite common to see women wearing lots of layers of clothes, shirt over shirt, skirt over skirt, jackets covered with coats. The whole ensemble would be set off with scarf, gloves and a hat – the dress code for a middle-class woman could not be ignored even if the wearer had become a nomad.’
Although some took advantage of the sunshine to bring out picnics which they ate, once out in the country, by the poplar-lined roadsides, more commonly families ran out of food or were terrifyingly both strafed and bombed by German planes, which flew low over the crowded roads of civilians. Ditches provided little protection. Such cruelty seemed especially poignant because of the beautiful hot weather and clear blue skies. Yet so dangerous were the air attacks, and so exhausting the task of carrying weary toddlers, that several mothers accepted offers of lifts from strangers for their children and then, unable to track down their children, posted fraught notices seeking information, a clear indication that normal behaviour had been suspended since no one had any idea of the scale or outcome of the unfolding drama. Heart-rending messages begging for news of lost children appeared for weeks afterwards.
Georges Sadoul, a communist journalist, was one of those who mocked the flirtatious behaviour of young women he saw, and their determination, regardless of cost, to maintain their Parisian elegance. He spoke of a certain ‘refugee chic’ which involved wearing a shirt and narrow trousers with as much make-up as if for an outing on the town. Fellow writer André Fraigneau wrote about one woman he noticed sprinting out of her car to get hold of some precious petrol to use as nail-polish remover; apparently the colour of her hat did not match the colour of her nail polish. But refugee chic did not last long as this vast swathe of humanity could not wash, had little to eat and was barely moving forward. There were elderly women lying sprawled on the roadside, exhausted, unable to go on, and many younger women, promoted to head of the household in the absence of their husbands, simply could not cope. Among the rare accounts of women behaving well at this time came this from the diarist Anne Jacques: ‘I can tell you that the women are not destroyed by nerves or by weakness but are sensible and calm. They are helpful to each other and often heroic. School headmistresses have undertaken the evacuation of their schools with perfect calm.’
The desperate and terrifying flight across France, known to history as l’Exode, was captured in hundreds of memoirs. Violette Leduc, the novelist befriended and nurtured by de Beauvoir, wrote in her semiautobiographical novel La Bâtarde of how she and her mother had been so terrified of the enemy they were almost paralysed by the idea of moving, so they waited until the very last minute. Rumours were swirling of the enemy’s violent behaviour, with stories circulating that the Germans were ‘picking up’ boys as young as fifteen. So they left Paris at 5.30 one morning when there was only ‘silence in the streets, in the buildings a silence as heavy as the grave. Bricks, stones, tar, pavements, churches, benches, squares, bus stops, curtains, shutters all abandoned to their solitude, everything induced such pity. Paris was a human ruin. Where were the dogs, the cats, the flies? Where was everything?’
And then, as Leduc recorded, once families had left Paris behind, the chaos intensified: ‘We followed the line of people on each side of the road. Mothers breastfeeding in the ditch, flirty girls in Louis XV heels, chancers in trucks singing and throwing cigarettes at some old guy who ran into the road to pick them up … Mountains, complicated constructions on car roofs. A man alone carrying a mattress on his back.’ Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, an assimilated Jewish mother and writer whose husband had been called up, compared the scene as she fled Paris with her baby daughter Sylvie and nanny Marie to ‘a burning Pompeii, fleeing the German lava’.
Many contemporary accounts of l’Exode poked fun at women, portraying them as weak and vain, thinking only of what they should pack, and there clearly was an element of truth in the accusation. Once the Sandzer family had finally decided they must leave and abandon the lingerie factory, it was too late for Miriam’s mother to take any of her jewellery out of the bank as all the banks were closed. Instead, she brought silver cutlery and candlesticks in case it was necessary to trade them for food but decreed no personal luggage at all. The trunk of the car was to be filled with food and drink and several bottles of Napoleon brandy to be used as bribes. But, just as they were about to set off, some elderly family friends, the Sam-sonowiczes, arrived insisting they must be taken too or they would throw themselves from the Eiffel Tower. Such emotional blackmail was impossible to resist, but then the couple produced a large carton, which they refused to open but said had to come too. After the war, the carton was found to contain a fur coat. While the Sandzers delayed, two other women, former customers of theirs, begged for help as their husbands had been imprisoned in camps. They at least had a car but had not used it for months and neither of them knew how to drive. Then a factory worker with a baby came to plead as well. The Sandzer family group had now grown to ten adults with two unreliable cars, a baby and a large carton between them. In this way they set off to join the long, sad line of people desperate to get out of Paris but clueless as to where their destination should be. The baby did not survive the journey.
Patrick Buisson, author of 1940–1945: Années érotiques, wrote about l’Exode: ‘Most of them left in a great hurry and panic, feverishly shutting bags and suitcases. Others prepared methodically as if invited to a weekend house party in the country or an afternoon tea party as depicted by the impressionist painters.’ He cites Geneviève de Séréville, fourth wife of the actor Sacha Guitry, who packed dozens of bottles of nail varnish, face cream and perfume because she had at her disposal a Cadillac with a vast boot. Irène Némirovsky likewise writes of Florence, the fictional mistress of a writer struggling over how to pack his manuscripts and her make-up case. If she took both she could not close the suitcase. ‘She moved the jewellery box, tried again. No, something definitely had to go. But what? Everything was essential. She pressed her knee against the case, pushed down, tried to lock it and failed. She was getting annoyed … For a second Florence hesitated between her make-up case and the manuscripts, chose the make-up and closed the suitcase.’
Sir Edward Spears, Winston Churchill’s personal representative to the French government, was also scathing about the behaviour of those he saw fleeing, men and women. ‘In most of the convoys I saw there were also cars in which sat ladies whose ample proportions and commanding looks proclaimed them to be wives of senior officers.’ Every town and village he passed through appeared to be full of aircrews on the ground with their planes on enormous floats ‘or gaping, idle soldiers. They were not in formations, just individuals in uniform, hanging about’, wondering what to do or where to go, while the Luftwaffe, swarming overhead, was strafing those on the roads with their pathetic pramloads of possessions. Spears, observing what he called the paralysis of the French people, was deeply critical of Paul Reynaud, Prime Minister following the resignation of Edouard Daladier; concerned only to please his mistress, Reynaud allowed insults from the whole cabinet to pass without reprimand. As everyone was trying to reach Bordeaux, Spears believed that the machinery of the French army had completely broken down – a view shared by many French women who felt increasingly betrayed by the impotence of their men. One young woman* spoke for many when she said: ‘The invasion was like rape. To this day when I read about a rape trial I am reminded of the Occupation. This was really violation – violation of my country. It was impossible to remain passive.’ Once at Bordeaux, as Spears commented tartly, there were plenty of kept women among the stream of new political arrivals: ‘the mistresses of ministers who boasted of such attachments, and most of them apparently did, were here au grand complet’. And at the head of the stream was Georges Mandel, the brilliant Interior Minister with whom Churchill had hoped to work should the French government continue the fight from exile, also with a woman not his wife.
But Mandel’s ‘lady’, Béatrice Bretty, was in a different category from those mistresses scorned by Spears. Bretty, approaching forty-seven in 1940,† was one of the most senior actresses at the Comédie-Française and extremely popular with audiences. Born Béatrice Anne-Marie Bolchesi into a middle-class family, she decided aged fifteen to become an actress after watching Sarah Bernhardt. She took the name Bretty from soubrette, a nickname she was given to describe her type of light soprano voice when she joined the well-known theatrical troupe at around the age of twenty, by then already married to Clément Dangel. It was to be a brief marriage as Dangel was killed at Verdun in 1916, and she never remarried. After almost twenty years of widowhood, in 1935 she met Mandel through his work as head of the French Radio and Television Company and the pair almost immediately became inseparable. Both keen gourmets, they were widely sought after at fashionable dinners in Paris and were often seen together in the finest restaurants. Until Bretty entered his life, Mandel, a widower, had been regarded as a clever loner, dubbed ‘the monk of politics’. But, benefiting from Bretty’s warmth, he seemed to expand. She became Mandel’s regular companion on holidays in Europe as well as at official dinners and public functions. In addition, Bretty took charge of raising his six-year-old motherless daughter, Claude, ‘of whose existence almost no one had been aware until that time’.
From the moment of the armistice, Bretty had refused to stay in a theatre whose independence she felt would sooner or later be compromised. She did not hesitate to follow her lover out of Paris, not only putting herself in considerable danger but risking the loss of her valuable pension as a sociétaire, or full member of the Comédie-Française. From August 1940 she repeatedly asked for leave of absence rather than retirement, insisting that she was not asking for money because for the moment she did not need it. But at the same time, she believed she had no choice but to leave the state theatre since, once the Nazis were in control, it was impossible for her to live in Paris with a Jewish partner.
Spears, knowing of the couple’s deep attachment, assured Mandel that if he flew to England with him the next day, or went in the waiting destroyer, there would be two places. ‘There must be an authorised French voice, not pledged to surrender, to guide the French Empire,’ he urged. Mandel was torn, fully aware of the consequences for him, a Jew, if he remained in German-occupied France, and yet convinced he must remain precisely because he was Jewish. He believed that if he left France he would be accused of cowardice, of running away, of not being a ‘true’ Frenchman. But there was little time to debate the issue.
Spears observed a touching domestic vignette at this moment of crisis when he realized that Mme Bretty, ‘with her plump pleasant features’, was peeping around the door, a calming presence.
She looked at us both, then I heard her voice for the first and last time, a pleasant, gay, friendly voice which I have not forgotten. Its tone had an inflection of slight urgency and pleading like that of a child asking with arms upheld to be picked up. ‘Les malles sont faites, Georges,’ it said. The trunks are packed. Whether she had heard an echo of our voices in the great silent chamber and hoped Mandel would accept my offer and was thus hinting she would like him to agree to it, I do not know. The door closed. I never saw him again.
Spears, who believed Mandel to be ‘a great man’, departed instead with the little-known Under-Secretary for Defence in the French government, a man newly appointed to the cabinet, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, who for the moment left his wife, Yvonne, behind in France.
Marshal Philippe Pétain, in a speech to the nation on 17 June, said loftily that he was ‘giving to France the gift of my person in order to alleviate her suffering’. The eighty-four-year-old veteran of Verdun was now leader of the new government, the last of the Third Republic, which was to be based in the inland spa town of Vichy. With its myriad hotels and phone links, opera house, bandstand, park and air of unreality, Vichy was the antithesis of smart Paris, which Pétain maintained stood for vice, corruption and debauchery. The following day, broadcasting from the BBC in London, de Gaulle called upon French soldiers, engineers and specialized workers from the weapons industry to join him in London to continue the fight. Not many in France, even including his young niece Geneviève, heard his famous appel announcing in dolorous tones that were to become increasingly familiar to those who had access to a radio, ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ But for those who did, it was like a magic spell.
‘I remember my elder sister, Monique, came running into my room,’ recalled Vivou Chevrillon (as she was then), the excitement still in her voice today. ‘“It’s not over,” she cried. “There is a way we can resist.” She told me all about the appel and we told everyone we could. That’s how it spread,’ explained Vivou, then a seventeen-year-old violin student at the Conservatoire. The girls were both first cousins of Claire Chevrillon – André Chevrillon was their father’s brother – and from now on their life of resistance began.
On 21 June, Mandel, Bretty, the now ten-year-old Claude Mandel and their manservant, Baba Diallo, together with twenty-seven other passengers, mostly députés who hoped to continue the fight from the French colonies, embarked on the packet boat Massilia bound for North Africa. While on board they heard that Pétain had agreed terms for an armistice to be signed on 22 June 1940, at Compiègne, the place chosen deliberately by Hitler because it was the site of the 1918 armistice agreement between a humiliated Germany and a victorious France. There was now a zone of occupation established in most of northern and western France with the bulk of the remainder of the country designated a so-called free zone to be governed by the French. There was also an Italian zone and an Atlantic forbidden zone, as well as a closed zone to the east. An Ausweis (travel pass) was required to travel from occupied to non-occupied zone.
When the Massilia docked at Casablanca after three days at sea, those on board were treated not as patriots trying to fight on but as deserters. They were trapped. Pétain had Mandel stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and, now his long torment of arrest and imprisonment began, Bretty remained constantly with him as well as caring for Claude. As Spears recognized, she displayed ‘the utmost courage and devotion’. They became peripatetic from now on as the Germans seized and looted Mandel’s Paris apartment. Yet, in spite of her deep love for the stage, she never once contemplated returning to the theatre during the Occupation.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Reynaud, having refused the opportunity to go to England with Spears, was now, six days after the armistice, desperately trying to reach his holiday home on the Riviera, en route to Washington. The relationship between Reynaud and his mistress, the Comtesse des Portes, with whom he had been living more or less openly for years, was not just a personal scandal but had serious political consequences. According to the US diplomat Robert Murphy: ‘When M and Mme Paul Reynaud were invited to dine at the American Embassy, there always was a question which lady would attend? At one dinner both arrived, providing a neat protocol problem. Hélène des Portes was an exceptionally determined Frenchwoman, and her frenzied political activity and doubts about the war were the gossip of Paris. Even after war broke out, she persistently urged Reynaud and his ministers to negotiate peace with Germany.’
Hélène, a fascist sympathizer, ‘so violently anti-British that Hitler had once sent an emissary to woo her favours’, had long been urging Reynaud to surrender, even going to the lengths of intriguing with a key US diplomat. The disgusted Murphy later recalled: ‘I don’t think her role in encouraging the defeatist elements during Reynaud’s critical last days should be underestimated. She spent an hour weeping in my office to get us to urge Reynaud to ask for an armistice.’
Now that Pétain had taken over, Comtesse des Portes hoped that she and Reynaud could escape to a new life in Washington. But on the way south, with Reynaud at the wheel of a car dangerously overloaded with trunks, suitcases and other pieces of luggage, the car swerved violently when a hatbox was dislodged and fell into the front, obscuring the driver’s view. They hit a tree, killing Hélène des Portes instantly. Reynaud, who suffered a minor head injury, apparently told Bullitt: ‘I have lost my country, my honour and my love.’*
In the subsequent parliamentary debate in the Vichy Opera House on 10 July, Pétain exploited the absence of the opposition députés and was granted full powers as head of the new French state. The term l’État Français was chosen in deliberate opposition to the French Republic, which it was replacing. Pétain had long insisted that the morals of politicians of the Third Republic were rotten, as the death of Comtesse des Portes surely illustrated. Just a year earlier, when Pétain, then Ambassador to Madrid, was invited to return to Paris and assume political power he remarked, according to Murphy, the American diplomat, ‘What would I do in Paris? I have no mistress!’ – a somewhat hypocritical remark as he had been a bachelor into his sixties famous for his womanizing. Yet on 12 July he appointed two men to senior positions, neither of whom conformed to the ideal he was promoting of the perfect family. Pierre Laval, the swarthy self-made newspaper-owner who became Vice-President and his designated successor, had but one child, a daughter, Josée, while Fernand de Brinon, the Catholic aristocrat appointed as representative to the German High Command in Paris, had a Jewish wife, born Jeanne Louise Rachel Franck, a Parisienne socialite and divorcee who was to cause her husband some embarrassment in the months to follow.
At the other extreme from women who were preparing to give their lives to the nation were the young female actresses, the mythical and glamorous Parisiennes or ‘ambassadors of the new European order’, as the tragic, self-deluding actress Corinne Luchaire described them. In April 1940, two months before Italy declared war against France, the teenage film star was introduced to Count Ciano, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mussolini’s son-in-law. In her own faux-naïf account she maintained later that, although flattered by his amorous attentions and aware that he was married, she did not realize then that he harboured such dangerous ideas against her own country, merely that, in gallantly paying court to her, he was playing a sort of game. For a while they met daily, but she claimed later that she found herself involved in ‘things I did not understand’.
Corinne Luchaire spoke for many when she explained that of course at first she felt uncertain and apprehensive on hearing about the armistice. But within days the German soldiers she met calmed her by their noticeable demonstration of respect as they stood up and saluted. She learned from a hotel chambermaid that ‘the Germans in the hotel were not doing any harm, paid for their own drinks and dined at small tables without paying attention to the other clients of the hotel’. Corinne, because of a childhood spent with her mother among Nazis in Germany, was well placed to reassure French women that the Germans were not at all ‘the big bad wolves’ they had been portrayed as before the war, but were in fact civilized creatures who would bring a sense of order.
Even Youki Desnos, the artist’s muse and model at the core of the bohemian artists’ circle in Montparnasse, wife of the surrealist poet and journalist Robert Desnos, recorded in her memoirs that at first the sight of Germans and their swastikas made her legs so wobbly she had to sit down on the terrace of Maxim’s. Immediately, a German naval officer took a chair next to her, ordered champagne and proposed she should drive off with him to Rouen. According to her explanation, it was all too easy to fall into conversation. ‘There I was, having shared champagne with the enemy. Oh zut alors! But it was the gospel truth that he had a way with him, that admiral did.’ Youki loved Paris so much that she did not want to escape with Robert. ‘Having been so afraid, the people of Paris, regaining confidence, began to tease the invaders, harmlessly nicknaming them Haricots Verts or les Frisés. After the agony of defeat a kind of euphoria reigned.’
Throughout the capital that summer there were similarly easy and relaxed café encounters between well-mannered Germans, not always in uniform, and elegant Parisiennes eager to hear about life elsewhere, angry at being abandoned by their own menfolk and enjoying a mild flirtation. It was just such a chance meeting that led to Johann and Lisette* becoming lovers that summer, though Lisette insisted later that had Johann been in uniform she would not have engaged in conversation. Johann, aged thirty-one, was serving in the Wehrmacht Auxiliary Forces as an interpreter (he had excellent French), and so was often in civilian clothes, which made it easier for them to be seen strolling around the sights of Paris together, walking up the Eiffel Tower (the Resistance had put the lift out of action) and eating in romantic restaurants à deux. Although he was married with two children, something he probably did not immediately reveal to the twenty-seven-year-old Lisette, the couple soon began an affair. By the time Lisette brought Johann home to meet her parents her mother Françoise, a concierge in one of Paris’s nineteenth-century apartment blocks near the Hôtel de Ville, was delighted by the man she immediately started to call her son-in-law.
For many of the profoundly demoralized French, the arrival of the German army in June 1940 was almost a relief. What they had feared had now happened and it was not too bad. The German soldiers, well dressed, amiable and often French-speaking, were ordered to behave with restraint and good manners – as many Parisiennes could not fail to notice. ‘More than any Frenchman ever did, German soldiers invariably stepped aside politely in the street or in the Métro for us in our nursing uniforms,’ recalled the Viennese-born Gitta Sereny, then a teenage nurse without a home and already embarked on the life story in the course of which she would deny her Jewishness. It was a complex part of her survival mechanism which allowed her to comment later that ‘the German officers with whom I had to negotiate for food, clothes or documents were always courteous and often extremely helpful’.
The most noticeable and most immediate changes for all Parisians were the daily displays of goose-stepping power as the Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Elysées, the change of time as the clocks were brought forward by one hour so that Paris was on the same time as Germany, the night-time curfew from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m., and the exchange rate, which was fixed at the hugely favourable twenty francs to the Reichsmark, which meant that everything German soldiers could buy in Paris was at a bargain price, especially attractive because much of the produce was unobtainable back home. A few shops took advantage at first by dramatically raising prices. Lancel, for example, upped the price of a suede bag from 950 francs to 1,700 over ten days but were later penalized when the Préfecture de Police, charged with carrying out inspections, discovered the increase. Native Parisiennes were distraught at being priced out of the market by the new German buyers. Helmuth von Moltke, the aristocratic German lawyer drafted into the Abwehr intelligence service (though he was opposed to the Nazis), wrote home to his wife in Berlin telling her how he felt that the influx of Germans, both civilians and army representatives, in Paris made an ‘ugly impression … One sees high party functionaries with their wives, traversing the town in big cars on shopping expeditions.’ He was appalled, he told Freya, by stories of generals travelling to Paris and buying several fur coats. ‘The most disgusting are the people from Berlin who come to Paris for a day to stock up on everything imaginable.’ On the other hand he described the attitude of the native population as ‘reserved … but on the whole sickeningly friendly … Everybody confirms unanimously that the women … were positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed, evidently from a feeling that he was the stronger and that it was more fun with the stronger man.’ Germans played on this attitude, with posters displaying a handsome German soldier gazing at a lost child above the slogan: ‘Populations abandonnées – Confiez-vous au soldat allemand!’ (You have been abandoned – put your trust in the German soldier).
As the well-brought-up, half-Jewish Simone Kaminker remarked when she first noticed German soldiers: ‘They were fantastic – tall, tanned, Wagnerian.’ Simone Kaminker, still a teenager in early 1940, not yet the world-famous Simone Signoret she would soon become, was living in Brittany some five hours away from her Paris home when war was first declared. One day four German soldiers from Hanover came to live in the house that she and her mother and younger brothers were renting. Their father, André, had escaped to join de Gaulle in London, but they lied about his whereabouts, insisting that they had no idea where he had gone, he had just disappeared in the upheaval. Her mother assigned the German soldiers tasks such as fetching the water and feeding the rabbits and then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. In September 1940, Mme Kaminker decided it was time to reclaim the family apartment in Neuilly, just outside the centre of Paris, seven rooms in a splendid, deserted building in a deserted city. Surprisingly, the little Kaminker boys found their toys were still where they had left them. The only other inhabitant of the building was the disagreeable concierge, who complained that the family had not paid their rent for months.
Mme Kaminker now set about organizing Protestant baptisms for the boys while Simone, the eldest child, who had just passed her baccalauréat in Brittany, was sent out to look for work. She felt alone in this smart part of Paris where Pétain was ‘a perfect symbol of reassurance for the good French bourgeois’ and where so many lives went on as before. ‘By which I don’t mean to say that they were bad. They were waiting.’ The well-to-do Jewish families who might have shared her anguish had left Paris and not returned, whereas the poor Jews of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements had remained. ‘But the 4th arrondissement is far from Neuilly-sur-Seine and I knew no one there.’ Although Simone harboured dreams of becoming an actress, she needed first to work as the family breadwinner. Remembering a classmate from Neuilly who had become a famous actress while still a schoolgirl, Corinne Luchaire, she went to a premiere to celebrate her success, and Corinne had lightly tossed off a suggestion that she should call her.
Corinne’s father was the journalist Jean Luchaire, an old friend of Otto Abetz, the Francophile former teacher who in November 1940, aged thirty-seven, became German Ambassador in Paris. Abetz had married Luchaire’s former secretary, Suzanne de Bruyker, so when Luchaire was asked to edit a new evening paper it was Abetz who ensured that he was paid an enormous salary of 100,000 francs a month, plus expenses, which enabled him to live in great luxury, lunch at La Tour d’Argent and keep expensive mistresses – none of which, according to his loyal daughter Corinne, he had done in the past. Now Luchaire needed an assistant. ‘Which is how, without professional qualifications, without knowing how to type and without Jean Luchaire’s asking me “where is your father?” … I was hired at 1,400 francs a month as the assistant to the personal secretary of the future director of the big collaborationist newspaper, which was to be called Les Nouveaux Temps.’
Simone insists she was little more than a glorified office girl who, with her notebook in hand, followed Luchaire around, organized flowers for famous actresses such as Zarah Leander who were passing through Paris, and answered the phone. More than once she took a worrisome call which announced: ‘I’m a friend of his sister’s.’ Simone understood what that meant as Luchaire’s sister had a Jewish husband, Théodore Fraenkel. Simone saw many women – ‘a whole raft of ladies’ – who called in person begging for a personal favour, usually to arrange the release of their prisoner husbands. Simone survived working for this collaborationist paper for eight months, but feared that before long everyone in the office would know about her Jewish father. Her position was therefore dangerous and may also have lost her friends, but crucially it helped her family – so poor that their phone had been cut off after her mother failed to pay the bill – to get through another harsh winter without starving. In September food-ration cards were introduced and everyone had to queue for hours to be given one. But often there was little to queue for other than mangel-wurzels, the dreaded root vegetables. Simone frequently saw her famous friend Corinne breeze into the office on her way to a party, always superbly dressed by Jacques Fath; she ‘never failed to remember a kiss for her poor friend relegated to her cubbyhole’.
Slowly, the terms of the armistice began to sink in. The French had to pay for the 300,000-strong German Army of Occupation, amounting to twenty million Reichsmarks per day, paid at the artificial exchange rate. This was fifty times the actual costs of the occupation garrison. The French government was also made responsible for preventing citizens from fleeing into exile. Germany took almost two million French soldiers as prisoners of war – one of whom was Jean Herz, son of Bernard – and sent them to work in Germany. In Paris itself it took little time for new, bold black German signage to appear, with enormous swastikas displayed on the grand boulevards as well as flying from key public buildings such as the Chambre des Députés and the Sénat. On the streets German soldiers patrolling with bulldogs replaced elegant ladies window-shopping with poodles, while the best hotels and houses were swiftly requisitioned and thousands of hotel and restaurant staff were suddenly required to serve Germans.
The Musée du Louvre, which had closed in September 1939 after transporting 3,691 paintings to pre-arranged destinations (mostly chateaux in the Loire), for fear that they might be destroyed by bombs, was now ordered to reopen to give a semblance of normality to the city. But it was only a partial reopening, as few treasures remained and many galleries were entirely empty. Nonetheless the Germans produced itineraries which occasionally led the new visitors to stare at blank walls.
In June 1940, when Hitler made his one and only visit to Paris, flying in suddenly and secretly the day after the armistice agreement had been signed, he briefly visited the mighty art gallery. He is pictured standing among some of the enormous sculptures considered too big or too dangerous to move, all that remained. But the visit was intended to make a statement, because one of Hitler’s key war aims was to expropriate French culture, proving the superiority of German culture in every possible way from music to fashion. He wanted to create his own art gallery in Linz, his home town, and this required the expropriation of Jewish-owned art on a massive scale. Later, the Louvre served as a temporary warehouse for artwork stolen from Jewish collectors. A 1943 image shows 170 canvases stacked against a wall, while another shows a hall cluttered with crates containing sculptures and other large pieces. Expropriation, or spoliation, was both an economic necessity – the objects could be sold – but also an essential part of the procedure of dehumanization preceding extermination. It was part of the mechanism of genocide, to disorientate, slowly destroying any sense of belonging by depriving Jews of what they owned. Removing the art was a stage in the process of sucking the lifeblood from Jews, most of whom saw themselves as French first, French above all else, so entrenched in French soil that many of them had fought in the French army or given their sons to the country or even bequeathed their homes to the state.
But nowhere were the effects of the Occupation felt more acutely by Parisians than in their stomachs. After August 1940, when stringent food rationing was introduced, people had to register first with the authorities, then again with an individual baker and butcher, and then had to collect coloured stamps, which the French called tickets, from the local Mairie. During the phoney war several restaurants still seemed to offer, as one American journalist reported, ‘a choice between seven kinds of oyster and six or seven kinds of fish, including bouillabaisse followed by rabbit, chicken or curry and fruit salad, pineapple with kirsch or soufflé à la liqueur’. And even in 1940 a select number of Parisian restaurants such as Maxim’s, La Tour d’Argent and Le Boeuf sur le Toit seemed able to offer menus that offered similarly fine dining on a grand scale for those in power. But for the bulk of the population, already suffering the effects of a poor harvest made worse by the invasion, once the Germans started to requisition food along with everything else, daily life for those not willing or able to enter the black market involved a painful mixture of hunger and queues. From the outset, the products that were rationed included bread, sugar, milk, butter, cheese, eggs, fats, oil, coffee and fish, and the list lengthened as the war dragged on. And of course the rich, with access to country cousins or the black market, not only did not suffer in the same way but made light of the difficulties. One customer commissioned from Boucheron, the Place Vendôme jewellers, a charm bracelet comprising small cars, each one engraved with the name of a rationed foodstuff. Janet Teissier du Cros, the Scotswoman married to a French soldier, described long queues for food, full of grumbling women often standing unprotected in the rain as they inched forward. ‘We all spoke our opinion without restraint,’ she wrote, ‘and I never even attempted to conceal my origins for it only made them more friendly. When at last my turn came and I was inside the building, going from counter to counter, from queue to queue, for the various cards, I was always in a fever lest some mistake be made and I come away with less than my due.’ Those whom Janet resented above all were the women behind the counters, women no doubt as underfed and overworked as the rest. ‘They were most of them tasting power for the first time in their lives.’
On 11 October 1940 Pétain made a radio speech in which he alluded to the possibility of France and Germany working together once peace in Europe had been established. In this speech, he used the term ‘collaboration’, linking the word to the idea of peace with Germany. And that month the Vichy government, on its own initiative, showed what being a collaborationist government meant when it published the first in a series of anti-Semitic measures, the Statut des Juifs, which authorized the exclusion of Jews from the professions, the civil service, the military and the media. It was the beginning of a series of ever harsher exclusions which made living in Paris for Jewish women close to impossible. On 24 October Pétain conducted an historic meeting with Hitler at Montoire, 125 miles south-west of Paris, at which he and Laval discussed with the Führer how Franco-German collaboration would work in practice. For Pétain and Laval, collaboration with Germany, which they believed would soon be the dominant force not just in France but in European affairs, was the means by which France might secure a better place in a post-war Europe. In the short term they also hoped that collaboration would lead to some immediate improvements: the return of most prisoners of war, the continuing safety of the French population, a decrease in the war indemnity France was obliged to pay and, of course, an assurance that Vichy’s sovereignty over the occupied and unoccupied zones would be respected.
Thus, as autumn approached, the severity of the new Vichy laws against the Jews forced Suzanne Belperron, like many businesswomen, to understand that if her company was to survive it would now have to be owned by her. Yet such was her determination to remain in Paris that she declined an invitation from Paul Flato, the flamboyant New York jeweller, to move to America. Many others realized that they should now try to escape, although it was fast becoming impossible. Picasso’s friend and art-dealer Paul Rosenberg, having already moved out of Paris to the country and having tried to conceal or send abroad as many canvases as possible, left for the United States via Lisbon on 20 September 1940 with his wife and daughter. Seventy-five years later his granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, once more back in Paris, would tell his story. The family still have not recovered all their pictures.
But some of those who had initially fled Paris now returned to a city which many of them felt had had its soul excised. Rosemary Say, a well-brought-up young English girl who had been working as an au pair in Avignon in 1939, left it too late to escape from the country so that when she finally decided to flee, against the surging crowd and with suitcases and her much treasured hatbox, she could get only as far as Paris. On the train she shared a carriage with a young soldier returning home to his dying mother. After a long and hot journey he suddenly jammed his rucksack against the train door, lifted her, unprotesting, on to the carriage bench ‘and without a word being said, we made love. It was brief, perfunctory and almost totally silent. We both felt comforted.’ After that, Rosie went on to work at the American Hospital, swabbing down corridors and waiting at table, a post which lasted only three weeks as the Americans decided that employing a British national was a liability. The woman who found Rosemary a new place to stay was Hoytie Wiborg, an American heiress and well-known lesbian in pre-war Parisian artistic circles, who proved a good friend.
A silence prevailed in the capital, breached occasionally when a black Citroën Traction Avant – the favourite Nazi car in Paris – screeched terrifyingly out of nowhere. Jean Guéhenno, a writer and teacher who decided he would write, in private, for himself but publish nothing during the Occupation, found the silence of Paris with no birdsong unnerving. All the birds had died when the city’s large oil and gas tanks were set on fire as the Germans approached. As the black smoke spread out over the streets and parks, it poisoned everything. ‘What is certain is that nothing is moving or singing in the trees behind the house … and that adds to our sadness.’
It was the same desperate sadness which young Cécile Rol-Tanguy experienced. In early June, just over a year after her marriage to the Spanish Civil War veteran Henri Rol-Tanguy, their first child, a daughter named Françoise, had suddenly fallen dangerously ill from extreme dehydration. Cécile, twenty-one and alone as Henri was fighting at the front, rushed the baby to the nearest hospital where she died on 12 June, just a few months old. ‘I can still remember the terrible pall of burning smoke over Paris and wondering if that was what had made my baby ill. I left her in the hospital overnight and when I went back the next day there was another baby in her bed,’ recalled Cécile, closing her eyes as if the shock were yesterday. Still today she cannot talk about the death of her first baby without reliving the agony. To make matters worse, Henri was then arrested as part of a round-up of communists following a French decree, issued by Reynaud’s government, imposing the death penalty for those accused of ‘demoralizing the army’ as the Germans closed in on Paris. Her father, François Le Bihan, an early Communist Party member, had already been arrested. As the country was plunged into chaos, Cécile agreed to resume work typing political pamphlets for the Metal Workers’ Union, now forced underground. ‘Françoise was buried on 15 June, the day after the Germans entered the city … It was only later I realized how work had helped to assuage my terrible grief,’ she said.
Towards the end of 1940, following the French surrender, Henri was freed and returned to Paris. But his reunion with Cécile was short-lived. After two comrades had been arrested, he realized he had to go underground, moving around constantly, so the couple spent the rest of the war living apart, meeting whenever they could. Henri, a keen amateur cyclist before the war, mostly stayed with loyal cycling friends who in general were not politically active and therefore not suspect. Cécile from now on was living mostly with her mother.
Although there was not yet any organized Parisian resistance movement, and the most likely resisters, the communists, had been neutered thanks to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, women in Paris nonetheless found they had to adopt an attitude. In little more than a month at least a million and a half French soldiers had been captured and taken as prisoners of war to Germany. Although some would be released over the next four years, often as a result of bribery, favours owed, blackmail or bargaining, others had escaped to England or were in hiding, and those left behind were often the elderly and infirm. Paris became a significantly feminized city, and the women had to negotiate on a daily basis with the male occupier. Many of those whose husbands were prisoners of war had no cash to buy food because in pre-war days it was the husbands who handed them housekeeping money each month from their wages. Stories of women who did not have their own chequebooks and who had to fight with banks and prove their husbands were still alive and held captive were legion. Most decided they would simply try to get along with daily life as best they could and obtain enough food to feed their children, while hoping they would never come into contact with Germans. But if they encountered them there were stark choices to be faced between making friends with the occupiers, especially if they believed Germany was likely to win the war, and indulging in minor acts of resistance such as walking out of a bar if Germans came in, or misdirecting them if they asked the way. Actual sabotage was rare in 1940.
And there were still English women in the city, often governesses or nannies such as Rosemary Say, who after her sacking from the American Hospital was doing the best she could to survive until she could find a way home. She was working a fifteen-hour day, mostly washing up greasy plates, in one of the many police canteens established all over Paris to feed policemen whose families had fled to the countryside to escape the Germans. She received no wages but was fed at the canteen and lived with the concierge. ‘The Canteen quickly divided into pro-German and pro-English groups … there were fierce arguments and even fights as the pro-German police would curse the English as I served them at table.’ Rosemary was desperate to tell her parents she was alive but could not even send them a letter from Paris as these were banned. She begged a favour from a policeman called Laurent who was often in Paris although based in Toulouse. ‘The price, of course, was that I was to go to bed with him. We both honoured the arrangement. We walked to a brothel near the canteen and made love in a small room surrounded entirely by mirrors. I still have the letter he wrote … from Toulouse.’
The socialist journalist Jean Texcier, shocked by everything he saw in Paris, wrote a list of more than thirty suggestions for women not brave enough to resist actively yet ready to convey to the occupiers that they were not welcome without antagonizing them. For example, a shop with a sign announcing ‘Hier Spricht Man Deutsch’ was to be avoided even if it was where basic underwear had previously been bought. Go elsewhere, he urged, choose a shop where they did not speak German. Colette, too, advised in her columns that Parisian women should go out only to find food and should stay at home as much as possible. But some, such as waiters, Jews and prostitutes, were denied a real choice. On the day the Germans took control, the best-known brothel in Paris, Le Chabanais, once frequented by royalty, announced with a notice on its door: ‘The house will open at three o’clock.’ Yet in another part of town a popular brothel for German soldiers behind the Gare Saint-Lazare doubled as a place of safety for downed British airmen on their way to the free zone because ‘the Madam and her daughter are ardent supporters of de Gaulle’.
Paris was quickly dubbed the sex capital of the German Reich as more than 200 brothels, famously known as les maisons closes, remained open during the Occupation, some offering special effects or catering to unusual requirements, but all of them places of illusion where the social and moral rules of the outside world had been dropped. So deep-rooted were the legalized brothels in France that one Madam was famous for allowing First World War veterans free access on Thursdays. There was an entire specialist lingerie business called Eva Richard built around the brothels as the girls had to buy approved items of alluring underwear from the brothel-owners who made an additional profit. A handful of the most breathtakingly opulent among them – Le Magueryon, Le Sphynx, the One Two Two (at 122 Rue de Provence), as well as Le Chabanais – were reserved exclusively for German officers, although Hermann Göring had his own favourite, Chez Marguerite at 50 Rue Saint-Georges. Luckily, the Jewish Madam at the Chabanais, Marguerite Nathan, swiftly fled to Nice, leaving the house under the control of a deputy, just before the Germans took over the city. There was even a guide specially printed for officers with detailed photographs explaining what they might expect in each and with advice on how to avoid the risk of infection. But at the other end there were some extremely rough, less hygienic houses, and plenty in between, where the girls harboured few romantic illusions. One explained: ‘I’d get there at 9 a.m. [and stay] until 2 a.m. After a hundred and seventy tricks your head is spinning around … it takes seven minutes a trick – undressing, dressing and sex included. You give the guy a glass of water, he has an erection, done.’
The brothels, nightclubs and gentlemen’s clubs all offered various kinds of entertainment important for the German sense of wellbeing. Some were even called maisons d’illusions, an acceptance that they were places where all the social and moral rules were dropped and the girls were trained to make even the guiltiest man feel cleansed. They provided such a thriving mini-economy that one young boy, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, scraped a living, unsuspected for almost two years, with false identity cards stating he was Robert Metzner from Alsace, a not uncommon ruse for those with Germanic accents.* His job was to show German soldiers the sights around the Place Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district at the foot of Montmartre.
As soon as I saw a soldier approach I’d go up to him and say, ‘Would you like me to show you a place where you’ll be very well entertained?’ All the small places wanted more customers. There were two particular cabarets – one called Paradis and the other called Yves – where we got a commission for taking German soldiers depending on whatever they consumed. It saved my life.
The brothel-keepers may have been confident that war would not diminish their clientele, but it was a testing time for Parisian couturiers and jewellers not yet sure who their customers would be in the months ahead, nor where the precious raw materials would come from. Should they close down, or move south to Vichy and protect valuable stock in the face of the German Occupation? Trading in gold was effectively forbidden by the Bank of France after 1940 unless the client supplied the metal themselves; and similarly, if women wanted new fur coats they were required to bring their own furs to be remodelled. But although many ordinary retailers had little stock and empty shelves, haute couture and luxury were far from dead. The designer Nina Ricci, who reopened on 1 July 1940, explained, ‘My clients, who had lost everything during the exodus, came to see me to replenish their wardrobes.’ At the end of October Lucien Lelong, President of the Chambre Syndicale, presented his new collection, insisting that ‘women desired only to dress wisely and with dignity’. This was true for the most part, and from now on clothes for cycling – slacks or divided skirts – were de rigueur, as were warm hoods and windbreakers. (By 1943 there were two million bicycles on the streets of Paris, which had a notable effect on fashion.) Lelong won a prize for Parisian elegance by designing a divided skirt ensemble in red, white and blue, the three colours apparently giving a defiant signal to the Germans. However, as the bicycle became the favourite mode of transport for women in the resistance, so their outfits had to attract as little attention as possible.
But from July 1940, when five officers arrived at the Chambre Syndicale headquarters and helped themselves to an archive about the creation and export of Parisian designs, Lelong was constantly fighting. Just as Hitler wanted to steal French art, he also wanted to move Parisian haute couture to Berlin to ensure that Paris was no longer the fashion centre of the world. Lelong, believing that he was defending not only a French workforce but French culture, insisted that Parisian haute couture must be in Paris or nowhere. He went to Berlin in November 1940 to argue his case, claiming that the designers and workers would not be able to produce anything if they were removed from their familiar surroundings, and he won that battle, saving a workforce of roughly 25,000 women, often seamstresses working in specialized fields of embroidery or beading.
By the end of 1940 a round of fancy-dress balls given by the Germans offered an opportunity to sample the best of French couture. One of the most lavish was a New Year’s Eve reception at the German Embassy for le tout Paris: literature, the arts, politics and the theatre were all represented. Corinne Luchaire, the child turned into a femme fatale by the press, was wearing only white and thought she looked ‘very virginal’. Suzanne Abetz, she noted, her father’s former secretary now married to one of the highest-ranking Germans in the city, ‘was dressed in a rather striking manner, loaded with heavy jewels which had just been bought and to her mind marked her rise in the world’.
* This woman began the war as Marie-Antoinette Morat but, when she became a résistante, gave her identity to a young Jewish girl on the run and, using false papers, took another name herself, becoming Lucienne Guézennec.
† According to some Comédie-Française documents she was born in October 1893, but there are other dates in the files.
* After his discharge from hospital, Reynaud was arrested on Pétain’s orders and imprisoned at Fort du Portalet, where the Germans held him until the end of the war. Reynaud was liberated by Allied troops on 7 May 1945.
* Names have been changed to protect the families but the original letters between this couple are in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. See Caroline Moorehead, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’, Intelligent Life, September/October 2013.
* Freddie Knoller, at the time of writing aged ninety-three and living in London, was eventually denounced (by a jealous girlfriend) and deported to Auschwitz in October 1943. He survived there until Liberation in 1945.