Early in 1941 Léontine Zanta, an influential Catholic intellectual and the first French woman to receive a doctorate in philosophy (in 1914), reminded her female students of their true patriotic duty at this time: to marry, have babies and find fulfilment in the domestic routine.
Let our young female intellectuals understand this and loyally examine their conscience. I believe that many of them, if they are sincere and loyal … will admit that … if they didn’t marry since they had not found a husband to their taste or because they were horrified by household work, which means that the poor things, in their blindness or their obliviousness, did not see that this was merely selfishness, culpable individualism, and that it was this sickness that was killing France. Today we need to accept the challenge and look life squarely in the face with the pure eyes and direct gaze of our Maid of Lorraine: it is up to you, as it was up to her more than five centuries ago, to save France.
Women, if they wanted once again to become the heroines of national recovery, needed only to make their education bear fruit at home, Zanta urged. ‘We are not telling you to give it up, but to give it to your husband for whom you can be the intelligent co-worker, and to your children. Have the courage to endure and be patient. Our leader also advises you to do this and, before criticizing it, act; action will show your true worth more than all your diplomas.’
Zanta’s counsel, however extreme it may appear today, was woven into the Vichy fabric of belief that moral collapse was at the heart of the French defeat. The republican slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité was now replaced by Travail, famille, patrie. Vichy passed unenforceable laws, clearly flouting the belief in égalité, such as that forbidding the employment of married women in the public sector (overturned in 1942 through necessity) and those insisting on a different curriculum for schoolgirls to cover cookery, laundry and domestic hygiene. Vichy’s socially conservative policy, reinforced constantly in speeches, placed ‘the family’ at the heart of policy and elevated the idea of women as mothers and homemakers, making babies and cooking, as the only acceptable version of femininity. For Vichy policy makers, women’s primary role was to uphold the family and look pretty to welcome home (an often absent) father. Anything which detracted from that ideal, such as smoking, wearing masculine clothes including trousers or having short hair, was discouraged in both propaganda and laws.*
Corinne Luchaire, no longer able to make films because she was suffering from tuberculosis, now gave similar advice to women from a less academic viewpoint. She now went regularly to a sanatorium in Haute-Savoie where she played bridge and poker, drank champagne, wrote newspaper columns – and still smoked. She was coughing blood, while getting thinner and weaker.
Even in her autobiography she barely spoke of these years in the mountains. She was so truly isolated from the world that it felt like a dream time. For her, the reality was her life back in Paris when she spent her days patronizing couturiers and accompanying her father to official functions. She recalled in her father’s weekly journal:
My first reaction was one of revolt against any idea of elegance or novelty. Yet one evening, while I was crossing from one bank to another and observing the Seine, I understood that it was normal to speak once again of elegance. It was impossible that life would not resume, that Paris would not continue with its tradition of elegance, the seduction of the arts and beauty. And for us Parisiennes, after completing our duty, as mothers or in our profession, our role was to put on the costume, the adorable and ridiculous hat covered with flowers, birds, ribbons and feathers whose panache was indispensable to us.
Not surprisingly, the Vichy belief that women were inferior beings who should stay at home made intelligent young women extremely angry, and ripe for recruitment by well-organized communist leaders such as Danielle Casanova, a charismatic dentist who lived on the Left Bank. When the Communist Party was banned, Danielle went into hiding as her husband, Laurent, was a prisoner of war in Germany and they had no children. She spent her spare time campaigning to help orphans from the Spanish Civil War as well as impoverished French workers. She and her friends Maï Politzer and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier were involved in running a pacifist, anti-fascist youth organization called the Union des Jeunes Filles de France (UJFF), which aimed through sporting and cultural activities to help get working-class girls out of their cycle of deprivation. At the outbreak of war they had more than 20,000 members, and many of these volunteered in autumn 1940 to distribute flyers or copies of banned news-sheets such as L’Humanité, either by hiding them in prams, giving them to friendly concierges or dropping them into shopping baskets as women queued for dwindling food supplies. By the end of 1940, twenty-five out of thirty women on the National Committee of the UJFF were active members of a fledgling resistance movement. Danielle herself, while still writing for the underground press, helped set up women’s committees in the Paris region, and was one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi demonstrations on 8 and 11 November 1940 outside the Collège de France to protest against the arrest of the brilliant physician Professor Paul Langevin. In addition, thousands of college and lycée students defied the ban on public assembly and marched down the Champs-Elysées. As a result, a number of protesters were killed or wounded and more than a hundred were arrested and sent to camps.
Already in February 1941, just six months after the setting-up of the food-rationing system – or le Systeme D, as it was known from se débrouiller meaning ‘to get by or manage’, since it largely referred to the way various people got round rationing – women, now responsible as heads of family, became desperate at the hours spent queuing for so little and seeing their families suffering from hunger. Many became ingenious in numerous ways, such as roasting barley and chicory to make ersatz coffee, or keeping guinea-pigs in their apartments to be killed and eaten, or discovering country cousins with vegetables. Making counterfeit food tickets was widespread but illegal, and anyone caught doing so was fined or called in for questioning. Even so, there were occasional food riots, with women turning up at town halls holding their babies high and demanding more milk. On Saturday 22 February there was serious trouble in the central market when the German authorities made a clean sweep of all the potatoes after women had been queuing for them for hours. A riot involving rock-throwing ensued, and as a result all potato distribution was banned for forty days. When potatoes were all there was, losing a ticket which represented a kilo bordered on being a tragedy, as one Parisian mother remembered. Although every patch of public space, including the Tuileries in the very heart of Paris, was turned over to vegetable production, food supply had scarcely improved by the summer. In July a correspondent for La Gerbe magazine wrote: ‘Eating, and more important, eating well is the theme song of Paris life. In the street, in the Métro, in cafés, all you hear about is food. At the theatre or movies, when there’s an old play or movie with a huge banquet scene, the audience breaks into delirious cries of joy.’
But alongside these largely youthful, more or less spontaneous resisters, the first organized resistance movement in France grew up around an unlikely group of middle-class museum curators and librarians. Thirty-eight-year-old Yvonne Oddon, whose father had died when she was a teenager, was head librarian at the Musée de l’Homme, a newly opened museum of anthropology in Paris. She and her Director, Paul Rivet, had decided in June 1940 not to join those fleeing Paris but to remain in the city, keeping the museum open, and in this way demonstrate their refusal to capitulate to the enemy. It may have seemed a small first step, but soon Oddon was sending books and clothing to French prisoners of war, then undertaking to shelter escaping prisoners and helping them cross the demarcation line from the occupied zone into the free zone, putting herself in grave danger. She discovered others who simply wanted ‘to do something’ – as fellow resister Agnès Humbert said, ‘I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something!’ – and established contact with the ethnographer Germaine Tillion, with whom she started to discuss possible actions. Working with an escaped prisoner of war, Boris Vildé, and a freed prisoner of war, Anatole Lewitsky, both Russians, the group at the Musée de l’Homme began their resistance activities initially with the sole purpose of defending the anti-racist ideology which was a founding principle of the museum. Mostly, these were not Gaullists, as few of them had been able to hear de Gaulle’s appel from London. Rather, they were a small group of men and women who met in the museum basement and, by December 1940, were busy distributing leaflets, posters and newsletters, as well as the first issue of their own journal, called straightforwardly Résistance.* But even this was hazardous, because it was hard to know who was trustworthy, and it was all too easy for copies of the journal to fall into the wrong hands.
Agnès Humbert, a middle-aged art historian working at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, who was divorced from the artist Georges Sabbagh with whom she had two sons, acted as secretary and typist for the group. She had heard de Gaulle’s appel and, as a natural anti-fascist, was determined to heed it when all around her it seemed that men, former soldiers, were behaving as if it was all over. Nonetheless, she was keenly aware of the ramifications of her actions. ‘Because of my meddling there will be widows, inconsolable mothers, fatherless children … where are all my lofty humanitarian ideals now?’ she asks herself. Moments later, when she sees German soldiers removing huge bolts of cloth and many boxes of shoes back to Germany, she knows the answer: ‘We simply have to stop them. We can’t allow them to colonize us, to carry off all our goods on the backs of our men while they stroll along, arms swinging, faces wreathed in smiles, boots and belts polished and gleaming.’
But, just as swiftly as the resisters had got going, they were denounced to the Gestapo by a priest working as a double agent who had infiltrated the group. The arrests began in January 1941; Oddon and Lewitsky were captured on 10 February, the others a little later. It was Agnès who in this tense atmosphere nonetheless persuaded Pierre Brossolette, a brilliant teacher who had been sacked from his job by Vichy and was now running a bookstore with his wife as a cover for other activities, to write for Résistance. Amazingly, he managed to escape arrest when all the others in the group were picked up, and he took refuge briefly at the Collège Sévigné, where Claire Chevrillon was teaching. This was considered a place of relative safety as most of the pupils, children of academics, were anti-Pétain. But nothing could be taken for granted, even within families, and Claire and Vivou had other cousins on her father’s side, the Pelletiers, who were fervent Pétainistes and ‘thought it went without saying that all good French citizens were Pétainistes’. These Vichyites had harsh memories of their experiences during the Guerre de Quatorze and so put their confidence in Pétain as one who, they believed, symbolized all the values they had fought for then and ‘on which they’d built their lives … patriotism, Christian acceptance of suffering, morality tied to work and discipline, dislike of anything revolutionary or disorderly’.
In April Agnès Humbert was arrested while at her sick and elderly mother’s hospital bedside and was imprisoned in various Paris jails for the remainder of the year, first in the Cherche-Midi, then in Fresnes and finally in La Santé. After a brief, and somewhat bizarre, military trial, all ten resisters were sentenced to death, but the three women, Yvonne Oddon, Agnès Humbert and Sylvette Leleu, had their sentences commuted to hard labour for life and were deported to Germany. The men were shot on 23 February in a clearing near the fortress of Mont Valérien, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris, a site now preserved as a monument to the resistance. The German prosecutor remarked to Agnès: ‘Madame, if the French army had been composed of women and not men, we Germans would never have gotten to Paris.’ The presiding judge, Captain Ernst Roskothen, by all accounts a decent man who hated the job he was forced to do, was profoundly impressed by the courage and demeanour of all the accused. After the Liberation in August 1944, when Roskothen was arrested and briefly imprisoned, Agnès Humbert and Yvonne Oddon petitioned for his release, citing his humanity and respect for those who had appeared before him.
Just before her arrest Agnès had been agonizing over how to earn a living, having been sacked by the Vichy government from her curatorial post as art historian at the Musée des Arts et Traditions. She and a friend came up with the ruse that, before it was too late – given the new aryanization law whereby Jews were prevented from engaging in commercial activities or owning businesses – they should pretend to buy an art gallery belonging to a Jewish dealer while drawing up a private contract with him guaranteeing to return it after the Germans had left. ‘The extraordinary upturn in the art market should enable us to earn a very decent living over the months to come,’ she wrote. They never got around to it, but others were making fortunes from the frenzied looting of works of art and from the desperation not only of impoverished aristocrats but also of wealthy Frenchmen and women who saw an opportunity to sell heirlooms and raise cash. Paris became an antique-dealer’s paradise.
At the very start of the Occupation, a law was passed by the Vichy government declaring that French nationals who had fled the country between 10 May and 30 June 1940 were no longer citizens and their property could be seized and liquidated. The Germans had already passed a similar law for the occupied zone even though theoretically the French were still responsible for law-making. The Vichy administration, believing itself independent and wishing to show it was not merely a Nazi tool, had complained about this on the grounds that, according to the Hague Convention, an occupying power might not interfere with the civil laws of a conquered nation. But even though the German expropriation policy was putting Franco-German relations under increasing strain, Gestapo officers continued removing articles from abandoned Jewish shops and houses, with a list supplied them by Ambassador Abetz of the names and addresses of the fifteen principal Jewish art-dealers in Paris. With French police providing the vans, the Germans now set about removing whatever was still to be found on the premises of the Wildenstein, Seligmann, Paul Rosenberg and Bernheim-Jeune galleries, including books, furniture and even kitchen utensils, as well as the contents of a fine Rothschild residence in the Rue Saint-Honoré. These were taken first to the German Embassy in the Rue de Lille, then to the Louvre to be catalogued and stored. But there were so many thousands of works of art which had been stolen that it was decided instead to use the Jeu de Paume, a smaller museum but deemed by the Nazis to be a more suitable space once the Germany Embassy in Paris could hold no more. By the end of October, more than 400 boxes had been brought in under the overall direction of a taskforce known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to undergo a meticulous and systematic classification process in order to decide who was to have what. There were various destinations, but Göring himself, who came to the Jeu de Paume twelve times in 1941 alone, was especially greedy. He was looking for Old Masters, especially those Germanic in origin, both for his own personal collection at Carinhall, his home, and for the planned gallery at Linz, in Austria. Rembrandts, Vermeers and works by Cranach the Elder were favourites, while examples of impressionist and modern art, which the Germans dubbed degenerate, were sold to Swiss dealers in Lucerne and Zurich, who did a brisk trade. The Germans might barter them for Old Masters, while dealers in Paris, in exchange for supplying information, were allowed to choose a selection of paintings. Other works were ‘sold’ in shady French deals, supposedly to benefit French war orphans. While all the various interest groups were squabbling, the stupefied curator in charge of the Jeu de Paume was the unlikely-looking Rose Valland, a forty-two-year-old spinster who at first, amazingly, was allowed to make an inventory of everything that arrived there and where it went. Her cataloguing skills and attention to detail were to prove invaluable in the post-war search for stolen paintings.
Rose Antonia Valland was born in 1898 in a village near Grenoble, the daughter of a blacksmith. She was a clever scholarship child, winning places at a variety of specialist colleges with the plan of becoming an art teacher. She studied both art and art-teacher training, coming top in one of the competitive exams, and continued studying art history until 1931 when she graduated with a special diploma from the Ecole du Louvre. Finally, aged thirty-four, Valland became a volunteer assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume but, in spite of her myriad qualifications, as a woman she was not eligible for a paid curator’s job. By 1941, the ERR was appropriating whatever it could, its job made easier by another law of April that year which gave provisional administrators – officials installed by the Occupation authorities ‘to eradicate the Jewish influence on the French economy’ – the power to sell Jewish enterprises to Aryans or to liquidate them, with the proceeds going to the state. ‘Thus a number of Frenchmen [in the occupied zone only at first] became beneficiaries of an act of spoliation no less direct than the Rosenberg office seizure of Jewish art treasures in Paris at the same time.’ Jacques Jaujard, Director of the Musées Nationaux, did what he could to protect Jewish art that had been given to his directorate either as a gift or for safekeeping.
But his protests were largely ignored and, besides the rapacious Germans, French criminal gangs infiltrated as middlemen or informers wherever they saw a possible deal. But once the Nazis had taken over the Jeu de Paume it was Jaujard who ordered Valland to stay on and administer the building. She was there every day for the next four years – other than on four occasions when she was ordered to leave. Each time she managed to return. ‘I still don’t understand today,’ she wrote in her 1961 memoir, ‘why I was selected. But once asked, I was determined never to leave. I had no doubt what I had to do.’ She was subjected to gruelling questioning from time to time when things went missing, but the most she ever said later about this was that it was ‘very disagreeable’.
Effectively, Valland became a spy. Probably the Germans thought the dowdy, bespectacled academic posed no threat, or else they were distracted by other matters and largely ignored her. But although she could no longer openly take note of what came in or out, from March 1941 Valland secretly recorded everything she could, sometimes using shorthand, sometimes ‘borrowing’ overnight negatives of artwork that had been photographed and surreptitiously returning them, copied, the next morning. She also listened to everything (her ability to understand German helped), in order to send regular reports to Jaujard or his assistants, who had close links with the resistance. Valland noted absolutely everything she observed, not just cataloguing the looted art but recording details every day about who was packing or who was guarding, where the crates were going and when individual Nazis were coming to Paris. She even described the personal intrigues, of which there were many.
As the ERR swelled to a staff of at least sixty, Valland also cast her disapproving eye over all the complicated love affairs developing against a backdrop of increasing madness and secrecy. ‘Colonel von Behr had to get rid of his mistress, Mlle Puz, when the Baronne, his real wife, turned up,’ she wrote on one occasion. The glass-eyed Baron Kurt von Behr, chief of the ERR, was a notorious womanizer and, since the Baronne was English, matters were even more complicated. When Anne-Marie Tomforde married the ERR business manager, Lieutenant Hermann von Ingram, Valland wrote that ‘the young bride did not hesitate to fill her trousseau with objects from various confiscated Jewish collections and to take pieces of furniture from the Rothschild collection or a tea service from the David Weill collection’.
In this sinister atmosphere, in which Jewish dealers were mostly exiled or in hiding, Jewish artists described as degenerate, and the Pariser Zeitung – a newspaper conceived, written and handed out by Germans, which made its first appearance in Paris in January 1941 – regularly contained articles glorifying German art and describing all modern art as decadent, it took rare courage for galleries to exhibit works the Nazis decried and openly to support banned artists.
Jeanne Bucher, a divorced grandmother in her mid-sixties, did just that. Several galleries remained open under the Occupation to exploit the flourishing art market, but Bucher was alone in taking the decision that collaboration with the enemy did not have to be a condition of commercial survival. The Jeanne Bucher Gallery was the only gallery during the Occupation to show cubists and surrealists. She dared not advertise her shows so they were never hugely commercial, but she believed it was vital to ensure that cultural and artistic life was not completely controlled by the Germans. ‘It is more than my passion – my interest in art is my deepest reason to live,’ she wrote to her daughter, Sybille Cournand, then living in America. Jeanne Bucher was born in 1872 into a middle-class Catholic family in Alsace just as the Franco-Prussian War was ending. This informed her understanding of the political situation, as she grew up experiencing the tension of living between France and Germany. Speaking two languages and understanding two cultures enabled her, in the 1920s, to discover German avant-garde artists and promote them. She always tried to help young artists at the beginning of their careers and in this way learned about new movements such as cubism, surrealism, abstraction.
She had married, aged twenty-three, Fritz Blumer, a renowned pianist thirty years older, but the marriage was not happy and in 1901 she fell passionately in love with the poet Charles Guérin. But divorce seemed impossible as Blumer, discovering the liaison, made her choose between her passion and her daughters. She refused to make that choice, deciding instead to wait until her children had grown up and remain on good terms with her husband. But Guérin died tragically young, in 1907, and after that Jeanne continued outwardly to lead an ordinary life, doing the sort of volunteer work at hospitals expected of women of her class during the Great War. But in a letter that she wrote at the end of her life, she explained that the enormous love which Guérin had stirred in her and which she had been forced to suppress had in fact nourished another, more powerful love which she had directed towards art and artists.
After she had at last divorced her husband, Jeanne decided to dedicate her life to modern art and, reverting to her maiden name, moved to Paris. Aged fifty, without significant financial means, she nonetheless embraced a new career and in 1925 opened her first gallery in an annexe of the exhibition shop of Pierre Chareau, the architect and designer. Her first show that year presented works on paper by Jacques Lipchitz, the Lithuanian-born Jewish sculptor, and she soon earned a reputation as one of the key leaders pioneering modern art in Paris. She never had enough money to keep artists under contract but instead used her instinctive ability to spot talent among young artists, and her wisdom to help support them, and to build up as many works as her meagre funds would allow.
In 1936 she moved to a new gallery in the Boulevard du Montparnasse where she displayed works by more established artists in the Montmartre and Montparnasse communities, including Picasso, Joan Miró, Kandinsky, Lipchitz and Max Ernst, as well as the lesser-known. But in 1940, following the invasion, even she was forced to close down and leave Paris for a while. She returned at the end of 1940, reopened her gallery and from then on, defying the Germans in numerous ways, managed during the Occupation to organize at least twenty exhibitions. When the right-wing press attacked the Lipchitz sculpture Prometheus and the Vulture (which had been commissioned in 1937 by the French government for the Grand Palais) and demanded its destruction, she responded by organizing an exhibition of his preparatory sketches. Usually, she did not announce her exhibitions in advance so as not to endanger the artists by asking for the required authorizations. But nor could there be any press coverage for her shows while they were running, because many critics were reduced to silence and others dared not express any enthusiasm for modern art.
Bucher’s house soon became a centre for intellectual resistance in Paris, visited regularly by Picasso (who was forbidden by the Germans from exhibiting), by members of his circle of painters and by surrealists such as Paul Eluard and Michel Leiris. The gallery took up the first floor of the house, which was set back from the road with a small garden in the front. Georges Hugnet, the multi-talented surrealist poet and graphic artist whom Bucher had met in the course of her first show, took over the ground floor for his printing activities, not least making false papers for other artists in danger, documents which Bucher would hide behind tapestries and under rugs.
In 1940 Bucher published one of the first essays calling for resistance, Non Vouloir, written by Hugnet, in a special edition which included four engravings by Picasso. Thanks to her prestige among artists, the house was frequently visited by German officers, usually not in uniform, who poked fun at the modern art on display but often bought it just the same. She wrote to her granddaughter in America about these visits, saying she did not object to the men’s nationality as long as they appreciated the art. But on one occasion she lost her temper and asked her visitors, in impeccable German, why they bothered to look at a painting if they thought it was ‘bad’. At the same time she took down a photograph of one of Arno Breker’s sculptures and stamped on it, shouting, ‘That’s German art, so look what I do to it.’
People were being arrested for much less. But Bucher was daring in everything she did. She had been exhibiting the paintings and gouaches of the Russian émigré and abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky since 1936 and saw no reason to stop now. But the Germans closed an exhibition of his work at her gallery after just one day. Sometimes, if the Germans removed from the walls art of which they did not approve, she simply put it away in drawers. Françoise Gilot, the young artist who was to become Picasso’s mistress, recalled that she liked Max Ernst’s work a lot. ‘So I’d go to Jeanne Bucher’s gallery before 6 p.m. and then, after it closed, she would show me her Ernst paintings.’ In addition, Bucher used the attic rooms of her premises as a safe house in which to hide resisters from time to time. A young medical student, on the run from the Gestapo, was both amused and scared to find he was sleeping in a bed with Braques and Picassos underneath his mattress. But one of her bravest activities was trying to protect the empty properties of those who had been forced to flee, such as Lipchitz and his wife Berthe, who in 1941 thanks to the efforts of the American journalist Varian Fry managed to escape via Marseilles to New York.* The home of the Lisbon-born artist Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, married to the Hungarian Jewish abstract painter Árpád Szenes, who managed to flee in 1940 to Portugal and eventually Rio de Janeiro, was similarly protected by Bucher, who installed friends she trusted to live there as a way of making sure the Nazis did not move in. Henri Goetz, the French-born surrealist, remembered Bucher for the way she disdained the style of fashionable wealthy dealers. ‘As for the previews she held,’ he recalled, ‘nothing could be further removed from the fashionable events of the time: the privileged few were discreetly asked into the kitchen where they were seated on a long bench and served tea and biscuits.’
Bucher found solace in her gallery among the art she loved. She was uncompromising in her determination to continue exhibiting, which she said mattered more to her than food. She refused ever to use the black market. As a long-term smoker she found that not being able to get tobacco – women did not have the right to buy this during the war – was a particular penance. Men could get one packet a week, so her friends, several of whom believed they owed their lives to her, gave her their allowance whenever they could.
*
‘You have to understand that the forms of resistance were innumerable,’ explained Jeannie de Clarens (née Rousseau), who had never spoken about her own particular story of resistance until she was ferreted out in 1998 by David Ignatius, a reporter from the Washington Post. Jeannie was not at first part of any organized group, but the moment she graduated in 1939 from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the Sciences Po – top of her class – she had asked the Director to find her some work where she would be ‘useful’. But then in 1940 her parents decided it was no longer safe to remain in Paris and her father, a civil servant and former mayor of Paris’s 17th arrondissement, took his family to the coastal village of Dinard in Brittany, near Saint-Malo, thinking the Germans would never reach that corner. But soon the enemy arrived in their thousands, preparing for a possible invasion of Britain. So when the local mayor approached M. Rousseau, his trusted neighbour, asking if he knew someone who could speak German to work as a liaison with the army, Jeannie’s father volunteered his own daughter, knowing her fluency in German and insisting, ‘She wants only to be useful.’
For the next few months Jeannie enjoyed her work. ‘The Germans still wanted to be liked then,’ she recalled. They were happy to talk to someone whose German was fluent enough to enable them to engage in conversation yet who, they concluded, was surely too young and pretty to understand all that they let spill about names and numbers and plans. Soon the British were receiving so much intelligence about German operations in the Dinard area, partly thanks to Jeannie who had been approached by a local resister, that some Germans believed there must be a well-placed agent there. In January 1941 Jeannie was arrested by the Gestapo and held at Rennes prison for a month. But when a German army tribunal examined her case, the Wehrmacht officers from Dinard defended their charming translator, insisting that she couldn’t be a spy. She was released, but clearly there was still some doubt surrounding her and so she was ordered in any case to leave the coastal area.
Now, having acquired the taste for resistance through listening, she went back to Paris where she quickly found a new job acting as an interpreter, this time for a French industrialists’ syndicate, a sort of national chamber of commerce for French businesses trying to sell in Germany, with offices on the Rue Saint-Augustin. Jeannie soon became a key member of the organization, a role which involved meeting regularly with the German military commander’s staff, whose headquarters were at the Hôtel Majestic. She would visit the Germans almost every day to discuss commercial issues, such as complaints that the Nazis had commandeered inventories and offers from French businessmen to sell strategic goods like steel and rubber to the Germans, and was accumulating a vast amount of basic intelligence. But she felt her information was going to waste.
It was then that she met an old friend, Georges Lamarque, a mathematician several years older than her who remembered her gift for languages and suggested she might like to join him in his work. It was not an entirely chance meeting since Jeannie was travelling on a train to Vichy in a bid to find out what was going on there, instinctively recognizing that there might be an opportunity to use her knowledge but not yet knowing how. So in response to Lamarque’s invitation, she unhesitatingly said yes. She told him there were certain offices and departments at the Hôtel Majestic that were out of bounds because the Germans were working in those rooms on special weapons and projects, but she thought that because she was trusted – she was just twenty-one, headstrong and extremely pretty – she could get into those restricted areas. Lamarque made her part of his small réseau, or network, known as the Druids, and gave her the codename Amniarix.*
Talking about it later, she said that the information was there for the plucking. ‘It was very simple … I used my memory. I knew all the details about the plants and commodities in Germany. We were building up knowledge of what they had, what they did; we could keep an eye on what they were doing – “we” being me. And I couldn’t be dangerous, could I?’
For the next two years her luck held as she soon met several of the German officers who had been her friends at Dinard and who were now working on secret projects. Jeannie was overhearing the most sensitive possible information – tales of special weapons that were being designed in eastern Germany and whose uses she did not entirely comprehend. Both she and Georges Lamarque suspected that she had stumbled upon one of the great military secrets of the war and understood how crucial such information was for the Allies. Lamarque urged her to seek out every morsel she could. But such work came with a high risk factor at a time when most pretty girls her age would be dating, even starting a family. Yet Jeannie felt compelled to do this instead.
Claude du Granrut, now an octogenarian living in the centre of Paris within sight of the Palais-Royal apartment where Colette spent the war years, was a schoolgirl of ten when war broke out. Looking back, trying to understand why some chose the path to resist and others to collaborate, she believes that for her family too it was a straightforward decision. ‘My family took another route,’ she said. ‘I never saw a single German at my home. Pff no! That was very important … nor would my parents resort to the black market. But they were desperate for me, the youngest of the family, to grow up healthy so they often sent me away to the country where I could get fresh milk and vegetables.’ Mostly life continued as normal for young Claude, who still went with her class to weekly matinées at the Comédie-Française. But she was well aware of the ‘complications’ many in Paris experienced in making up their minds how to respond. Could one fight the Germans? Or was it best to put up with them in order to continue the cultural life of France with its books, movies, plays and haute couture? Her father, Robert, Comte de Renty, was a veteran of the Great War, a German-speaking businessman involved in agrochemicals, who, she thought in her childhood, went off every day to his office in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, perhaps lunching at the exclusive Jockey Club, the one place in Paris which German officers did not penetrate. Her immensely elegant mother Germaine, the Comtesse – so chic that all Claude’s schoolfriends told her they were jealous of her having such a glamorous mother, ‘une vraie Parisienne’ – was involved in social work, visiting underprivileged women in the 20th arrondissement in the east of the city, distributing clothes, and sending parcels to prisoners of war. She was not, as Claude wrote of her later in her memoir, Le Piano et le violoncelle, someone whose presence could be overlooked. ‘She was serene and welcoming to all.’ But Claude was only vaguely aware of the welfare visits. ‘She was working to maintain France in a certain way and to show solidarity with my father, who was doing much more in the way of resistance. But I did not know that at the time and it was certainly not discussed at home.’ In fact, Germaine de Renty and Jeannie Rousseau were friends, but that too Claude did not know until later.
The de Renty family listened to Radio Londres, the BBC broadcasts from London in French, organized by the Free French who had escaped there – ‘something we had to be very careful about when other families visited’ – and followed carefully what was happening in the rest of the world. What changed for many Parisians in 1941, Claude du Granrut believes, was first the German invasion of Russia in June, followed, at the end of the year, by the American entry into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘Little by little, families like ours believed that the war could be won and the Germans defeated.’ The Russian invasion not only freed communists to resist but also helped motivate waverers to do something. But there was also a deeper motive for women, she believes. ‘For the first time young women decided they had to do something for their country. They couldn’t vote or be in the army but they felt the country had been so damaged they wanted to show that as women they could s’engager. It was something completely unique.’
Another factor was that by 1941 almost everyone in Paris knew someone who had been arrested. As Germany limbered up in its attempt to eradicate all Jews, Vichy collaboration helped accelerate it. The first wave of arrests took place on 14 May 1941, when 3,710 ‘foreign’ Jews were arrested, followed three months later, after a raid on the 11th arrondissement, by a further 4,230 Jews, both French and foreign; in December 734 prominent French Jews and 250 immigrant Jews were seized. The victims were interned in four camps: at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, south of Paris, at Compiègne to the north-east (the only one not run by the French) and at Drancy, an unfinished municipal housing estate on the outskirts of the capital itself. Drancy, lacking basic sanitary facilities and still without windows, was never intended to hold more than 700 but, from the outset, was crammed with thousands of desperate, hungry people held in atrocious conditions.
Anti-Semitism in Vichy may have been different in tone from that in occupied Paris. As Professor Julian Jackson has observed, when Vichy issued its first anti-Jewish statute in October 1940, without any prior request from the Germans, it did so almost apologetically, insisting that the government ‘respects Jewish persons and property’ and that the statute would be applied in a ‘spirit of humanity’. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism for Vichy ‘was an autonomous policy with its own indigenous roots’. Pétain’s entourage included several fanatical anti-Semites for whom introducing anti-Jewish measures was both a deep-seated belief and a way of winning German favour. In order to coordinate anti-Semitic policy throughout France, the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ) was set up in March 1941 and run by Xavier Vallat, a zealous anti-Semite and veteran of the Great War in which he had lost his left leg and right eye. One decree followed another in 1941; within twelve months Vichy had issued twenty-six laws and twenty-four decrees* concerning Jews. The second statute against Jews, passed in June 1941, had serious consequences for businesses because it required authorization to sell or take over a company: Jewish businesses had to register, and receivers and administrators were appointed to monitor their conduct. There were criminal penalties for anyone caught engaging in the prohibited activities. Aryanization of businesses in the free zone now matched that in the occupied zone. Decrees imposing quotas on Jewish lawyers, doctors, students, architects and pharmacists were swiftly followed by laws excluding Jews altogether from any profession, commercial or industrial. No payments were ever made for Jewish property as these were regarded as ‘ownerless’.
In May 1941 the Germans requisitioned 21 Rue La Boétie, former home of the art-dealer Paul Rosenberg and, with deliberately painful irony, installed there a bizarre organization called the Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives (Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions) – IEQJ – to be run by Captain Paul Sézille, one of Vichy’s most uncouth and violent agitators. The IEQJ’s main task in 1941 was to arrange an exhibition at the Palais Berlitz entitled Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France), which was intended to show the harmful effect Jews had had on France. Sézille explained in the introduction to the catalogue: ‘By presenting the Jew in its various manifestations, showing through compelling and carefully selected materials how deep was the Judaic influence on all activities of France, showing the depth of evil that gnawed at us, we want to convince those of our citizens who are still of sound mind and good judgement, how urgent it was to take action.’ Ugly posters were displayed at Métro stations and on billboards throughout the city to advertise the exhibition, with further encouragement from loudspeakers strategically placed on boulevards between the Opéra district and the Place de la République.
During the four months when the exhibition remained open, some 200,000 Parisians paid the three-franc entry fee and many others were admitted free. Among those who attended were Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac, born in 1925 to an anti-Semitic French family of noble standing. When she was young, Marie-Pierre’s father instructed her: ‘Do anything you like, but don’t marry a Jew. We’re one of the only families of the French nobility not to be Jew-ridden.’ During the Occupation, Marie-Pierre’s mother hosted high-society parties for Nazi collaborators, gave her child Mein Kampf to read and took her to the notorious exhibition with unpredictable results.*
Years later, Paul Rosenberg’s granddaughter Anne Sinclair examined the few existing pictures of the IEQJ installation and listened to Radio-Paris describing with great pomp the Institute’s opening ceremony. ‘The wounding words of the speaker are unmistakably clear,’ Sinclair wrote. ‘“Today saw the rechristening of the building previously occupied by Rosenberg; the name alone tells you all you need to know.”‘ In the photographs and in the National Sound and Video Archives can be seen the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, ‘a star guest with impeccable far-right credentials, parking his bike in front of my grandfather’s gallery, on which the name of that formidable new office stands out in capital letters. The porch and the famous exhibition hall are easily recognisable. A huge panel on the wall shows a woman on the ground covered with a French flag, a vulture perched on her belly, with the caption “Frenchmen, help me!”‘
In November yet another organization was set up, a Vichy initiative called the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), arguably the most painful of all as it ultimately forced Jews to administer and take responsibility for their own misery and destruction. The UGIF, to which all Jews living in France had to pay dues, thus not only raised money to help Jews but also, inevitably, was in possession of lists of Jewish names and addresses; it therefore became something of a trap. Those who were saved by being removed from its lists because they ‘knew someone’ are often ashamed and cannot talk openly of their survival. Historians estimate that the cumulative effect of all these measures meant that already, by the summer of 1941, half the Jews of Paris had been deprived of any means of subsistence.
But Parisian Jews who had fled earlier were now realizing that life in the so-called free zone was little safer. Miriam Sandzer and her parents felt trapped in the south, unable to secure transit and exit visas and all the other necessary paperwork for the family group now swollen to eleven, or to pay for tickets and hotels. As her mother was already ill from the cancer that would soon kill her, it was Miriam who was sent regularly to queue at the Spanish and Portuguese Consulates in Marseilles to seek visas. But progress was agonizingly slow so she decided to visit the Chamber of Shipping, find out what destinations ships were still leaving for and then try to obtain permits for those destinations.
As soon as she learned there were still sailings from Lisbon to Java, she set off for the Consulate of Java where she was granted an interview with the Consul, ‘a very handsome man’. He offered to supply her with the necessary paperwork if she could supply him in return with a diamond ring for his mistress; she immediately took off her beautiful platinum and pearl one, but he rejected this as inadequate. Then she managed to secure and pay for eleven visas for Shanghai from the Chinese Consulate, but her plans were stymied because there were no more ships sailing to Shanghai. All the consulates were besieged with desperate people like her, many with forged papers and no money, trying to escape the Nazis. Every opening seemed to finish in a dead end, but only after more of the family group’s dwindling resources had been used. Eventually Miriam was persuaded to go alone to Lisbon because she was being watched. Months later most of the group joined her there, and in November 1941, twenty-four hours before they were threatened with expulsion yet again, the British gave them a permit to reside in Jamaica. However, her two brothers had to remain in Lisbon as they were of military age and were required to join the Polish army. The depleted family sat out the rest of the war in the Gibraltar internment camp in Jamaica.*
In Paris itself it was becoming almost impossible for Jews to earn a living in any field, but jewellers especially were in difficulty since they could not acquire the raw materials of their trade. If a client ordered anything in gold they had to supply 100 per cent of the metal themselves and if platinum then 135 per cent. There were ways around this, and much 1940s jewellery was either hollow or lacy openwork or relied on large, semi-precious stones such as amethyst. Cartier turned to making other objects such as clocks, while Boucheron was not the only jeweller to develop a line of mostly silver ‘beauty boxes’. Parisian women, determined to flaunt something new and elegant, would take in sufficient quantities of family cutlery to be melted down into a stylish evening clutch bag of silver, possibly with some gold and embellished with a small stone or two on the outside, with special compartments for cigarettes or make-up fitted inside. It was a decidedly outré object, announcing that the user not only was aware of the latest fashions but was demonstrating she was a modern woman, smoking and putting on powder in public, both activities frowned upon in pre-war society.
Bernard Herz, as a wealthy Jew with a large home in Chantilly as well as a Paris apartment and valuable stock, was an early target. It appears that he was harassed and picked up for questioning as early as 1940, but Suzanne Belperron managed to engineer his release through the influence of an actress friend called Rika Radifé, who was married to the actor Harry Baur.* She knew that if the company was to survive it would now have to be owned by her. By 23 January 1941 she had registered a new limited company in her name, Suzanne Belperron SARL, with one associate and with some money lent to her for the transaction by the interior designer Marcel Coard. But the Nazis were ever suspicious of such transactions and Belperron could be under no illusions that the business would from now on be ignored. She too was taken in for questioning and forced to prove through baptismal certificates that the Vuillerme family did not have any Jewish blood.
From 1940, Germans had been making inventories of Rothschild items. According to an 8 December 1941 report by the head of the foreign currency protection command – Devisenschutzkommando – Göring himself wanted to decide on the disposal of the Rothschild family assets when he came to Paris. Among the extensive lists of table silver, knives, forks, spoons and dishes, there were ‘pictures and objects of art which were found in a cupboard in the house of the Jewess Alexandrine Rothschild, Paris 2, Rue Leonardo de Vinci. These paintings and objets d’art are to be turned over to the Einsatzstab Rosenberg.’ There were a further fifty-two packages of objects of art and jewellery from the property of various members of the Rothschild family, twenty-one of which were to be turned over to the ERR, the other thirty-one to be kept until sent for by Göring ‘under lock and key of the foreign currency protection command’.
The Camondo family, known as the Rothschilds of the East as they had come to France from Constantinople in the mid-nineteenth century and were almost as rich, decided in 1941 to complain about the pillaging of their personal art collection and wrote letters to Paul Sézille and others. Léon Reinach, husband of Béatrice de Camondo, complained about ‘the spirit of hate and jealousy’ that was motivating such theft. But to no avail. The family mansion at 63 Rue de Monceau stands today, as then, just the other side of the highly manicured Parc Monceau. The park was developed by a pair of Jewish financiers, Isaac and Emile Péreire, in the 1860s as a suitable area for entrepreneurs and their families to live, and was surrounded by a number of sumptuous mansions owned by Jewish millionaires, including several Rothschilds and Ephrussis; the old-established Paris Jews, who regularly attended the opera, had fine horses and carriages and were determined patrons of the arts. Ironically, the area became something of a ghetto. The Hôtel Camondo is a gem of a house rebuilt by Comte Moïse de Camondo, who at the beginning of the twentieth century demolished the simpler house he had inherited from his parents, intending that the new one should resemble the Petit Trianon of Versailles. Moïse had a keen eye for furniture and objets d’art, especially fine French works of the late eighteenth century. As a young man he was considered something of a bon vivant, but after his wife, the beautiful Irène Cahen d’Anvers, herself the daughter of a wealthy banker, had deserted him in 1897 for the handsome Italian in charge of the stables, Count Sampieri, he became more reclusive. The terms of the divorce – divorce was still considered rather shameful at the time – gave him custody of the couple’s two children, Nissim and Béatrice, to whom he was devoted. But in 1917 Nissim, a pilot in the French air force, was killed in a dogfight with a German plane. Moïse, devastated, retreated further into his world of precious objects, often spending days sitting alone in the small room where he displayed his unrivalled collection of Sèvres porcelain.
Béatrice, distressed already by her parents’ painful separation, now suffered again with the loss of her beloved brother, and the year after Nissim’s death she agreed to an arranged marriage with Léon Reinach, scion of an intellectual and musical family that had been prominent in supporting Captain Alfred Dreyfus throughout his ordeal. They had two children, Fanny and Bertrand, and after her father’s death in 1935 they divided their time between an apartment in Neuilly and a luxurious villa on the Riviera, the Villa Kerylos, a magnificent re-creation of a Greek temple. Her father had already in 1924 bequeathed the Parc Monceau house to the state, hoping that such a generous donation would perpetuate the name of the family – motto, ‘Faith and Charity’ – and link it with the period in French history that he loved. When he died, Béatrice made sure that his wishes were carried out and that the family home, now a museum under the auspices of the Union Central des Arts Décoratifs, was opened on 21 December 1936.*
But Léon and Béatrice soon drifted apart. She was a good-natured woman but had few interests beyond her passion for riding. She became a member of the prestigious Monts et Vallons hunt as soon as women were admitted, and hoped that her life of horses and hunting would continue without interruption irrespective of the political situation. But in July 1941 the Germans had seized several cases of paintings from the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, left there for safekeeping by Jewish collectors, including the Reinachs. In one of these crates was the famous Renoir portrait of Béatrice’s mother Irène, commissioned by Louise Cahen d’Anvers while she was married to the banker Louis-Raphaël Cahen d’Anvers and at the same time the mistress of Charles Ephrussi.
But as far as the Camondos were concerned the Nazis wanted more than simply objects. When Renoir painted Irène Cahen d’Anvers in 1880 he turned her into a beautiful little French girl with golden curls who had left her Jewishness behind. One critic had written rapturously about the portrait at its first showing: ‘One cannot dream of anything prettier than this blonde child, whose hair unfolds like a sheath of silk bathed with shimmering reflections and whose blue eyes are full of naïve surprise.’ But the same year Degas, who disapproved of what he saw as Renoir’s transformation into a Jewish society portraitist, wrote: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Charles Ephrussi. Next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirliton with Bouguereau!’†
This tension in French society was never resolved and was now being played out with tragic consequences. Reinach, schooled in the long years of fighting for justice for Dreyfus, believing that rational protests worked and that the Germans would see reason, explained at length to the authorities how both the Reinach and Camondo families had enriched the French artistic patrimony. But when Jacques Jaujard, Director of the Musées Nationaux, doing his best to protect thousands of works of art during the Occupation, forwarded Reinach’s letter to Xavier Vallat, the one-eyed head of the CGQJ, the response was that the too-clever-by-half Reinach was arrogant. In any event, the Renoir had already been moved on through dealers, earmarked for Göring’s collection in spite of its Jewish subject. Families like the Reinachs now urgently switched from worrying about saving their possessions to saving their lives. Reinach père soon moved to Pau with Bertrand while Béatrice, who lived with Fanny, continued for a little longer to ride daily in the Bois de Boulogne and to take part in horse shows and hunts, convinced that she was protected by her equestrian and German officer friends. More than that, the Camondos had given their son as well as one of the most beautiful homes in Paris to the French state, of which they believed they were a part.
It is impossible to quantify how many Parisians were poisoned by the anti-Jewish propaganda and how many were repulsed. But from now on the choice became starker: resist or collaborate. Yet although the majority of the French population entered neither active collaboration nor active resistance – the majority remained ‘attentiste’ (wait and see) until the end of the war – there is a notable shift at this point. The support for Pétain started to diminish from mid-1941 onwards and the support for de Gaulle and the résistance slowly grew from that time.
But whereas in Vichy there was official collaboration, in Paris the ideological collaboration, entertaining the enemy, was becoming more nuanced and complex. In August Premier Rendez-Vous starring Danielle Darrieux became the first successful film of the Occupation produced by Continental Studios, the German-financed film company based in Paris. Continental, set up by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to give the Germans control over the French film industry, produced thirty full-length films between 1941 and 1944, including some of exceptionally high quality such as Le Corbeau and Au Bonheur des dames. Almost all were recorded at the Paris Studios Cinema in Billancourt, and several renowned directors worked for the company. The intention was partly to rival Hollywood, as no American films could be shown during the Occupation, and partly, as with fashion and opera, to demonstrate German superiority not only militarily but culturally. Darrieux remarked later that she remembered these years as a time when she was ‘totally carefree’, when she and her actress friends would have their ‘feet done’ and ‘go to the beauty parlour all the time’, a clear indication that Corinne Luchaire was not alone among actresses and performers who had failed, or refused, to realize the gravity of their situation and believed that entertaining was in some ways different.
It was one thing to perform on a French stage but quite another to perform in Germany. From 1941 Goebbels was constantly trying to organize visits by artists to Germany. The first such propaganda trip, a three-week junket touring the country, included Abel Bonnard, Robert Brasillach and Marcel Jouhandeau, the writer admired by Irène Némirovsky (admittedly before he had published in 1938 his notorious pamphlet Le Péril juif). Yet even Jouhandeau was not without doubts and wrote about the trip in his diary: ‘Why am I here? Because from the time I knew how to read, understand and feel, I have loved Germany, her philosophers, her musicians, and I think that nothing could serve humanity better than our understanding with her.’ As Jean Guéhenno commented acidly: ‘The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species. Incapable of surviving for long in hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print.’
Yet Jouhandeau was now beyond the reach of Némirovsky, living in Issy-l’Evêque, a village in the Burgundy countryside close to Vichy but in the occupied zone. The days when she had been close to those writers, when she had been part of a literary circle where she was lionized, seemed part of another era; she was now reduced to selling some jewellery and furs – mostly her mother’s purloined by Irène when her mother fled the capital* – but was unable to publish any of her writings.
Life in the village appeared on the surface to be calmer for Jews, but through friends and family who were still in Paris and because of her own personal situation Némirovsky would have known of the dramatically deteriorating situation for Jews in the capital. Her publishers, Albin Michel, were sending her monthly payments of 4,000 francs but were nervous of publishing her work. Although her name did not appear on the infamous ‘Otto List’ (a list of books banned by the Germans which took its name from Otto Abetz), Robert Esménard told Irène that his firm was no longer able to publish her books and ensure their sale. In the circumstances, Irène saw the payments partly as a gesture of compassion and friendship and partly as an advance against sales of her work which they hoped to make after the war. But when Jewish bank accounts were frozen in 1941, Irène and her husband, Michel Epstein, deeply in debt, were worried about how they would continue to live. At this point Irène ingeniously invited Julie Dumot, her father’s trusted former companion and an Aryan, to live with them. She told her publishers that this same Mlle Dumot was the author of a novel which in fact she herself had written and therefore it was agreed that payments could be made to Mlle Dumot, who subsequently paid Irène. Némirovsky had now lost her own identity as an author and at times despaired of ever again being published; nonetheless she continued to write every day. Julie Dumot was instructed, in the event that she and Michel were arrested, not only to take care of their two small daughters but also, when the money dried up, to sell the fur coats and silverware.
Later in 1941 other propaganda trips to Germany were arranged. One of the most famous, because the participants were photographed as they departed from the Gare de l’Est standing alongside uniformed German officers, comprised eleven artists including André Dérain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Paul Belmondo (father of the actor Jean-Paul). They all argued (after the war) that they had agreed to go in exchange for the release of some prisoners of war. However, there is no evidence that any releases followed. One further trip was made in 1941, this time composed largely of musicians, persuaded to go to Vienna in early December as part of a delegation officially intended to celebrate Mozart Week. But the trip ultimately had little to do with Mozart, as even the fascist writer Lucien Rebatet admitted afterwards.
If it was a difficult path for entertainers, the hostesses, especially the three Maries – de Noailles, Bousquet and de Polignac, all pillars of 1930s café society and regulars at Le Boeuf sur le Toit or Maxim’s in pre-war years – now found entertaining Germans in their drawing rooms came rather naturally. A number of women made themselves useful to the authorities in this way by introducing Francophile Germans such as Ernst Jünger, Gerhard Heller and Otto Abetz to writers, musicians and artists such as Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Sacha Guitry and others ready to socialize with their new masters. Several regular attendees, having made the connections, then agreed to visit Germany. The outspoken anti-Semites, such as Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and even Rebatet, mostly did not frequent these fashionable salons.
Few of these hostesses were quite as aristocratic as their names might indicate. As a recent study of café society makes clear, many of the French elite had married American or Jewish money in the previous decades, so there were now few ‘pure-bred’ aristocrats. Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac was the daughter of the self-made dress designer Jeanne Lanvin and heir to the fashion house her mother had created. Marie-Louise Bousquet, no beauty, was famously derided by Chanel for having the face of a monkey and the mouth of a sewer, but she was the immensely influential editor of the French Harper’s Bazaar, and a wide variety of cultural and political figures including the cellist Pierre Fournier attended her musical soirées at 3 Place du Palais Bourbon, where her (almost next-door) neighbours were the extremely influential de Chambruns.
Josée de Chambrun, Pierre Laval’s adored only child, was stylish and attractive, with olive skin, dark hair and an engaging smile. She had been well educated, spoke excellent English and could play golf and ride, both useful accomplishments. The bond between father and daughter was intense and when she accompanied him, aged twenty, to the United States in 1931 on his triumphant visit as the new French Prime Minister, the American press went wild in their praise for this chic, gay Parisienne. Three years later, at a dinner party, she met an aristocratic lawyer with dual French and American nationality, Count René de Chambrun, known as Bunny, a descendant of the original Marquis de La Fayette, the French aristocrat who fought for America at the time of the Revolutionary War. De Chambrun ran a successful international law practice which boasted Chanel among its clients. His mother was Clara Eleanor Longworth, a relation by marriage of President Roosevelt, who managed to keep the American Library in Paris open during the war. Josée and René were married in 1935, did not have children and were soon indulging in a frenetic social whirl of partying and race-going at the centre of Parisian social life. They knew everyone. As an indication of how useful these evenings were for smoothing Franco-German relations at various levels, the de Chambruns helped provide financial assistance for the Bousquet salon, and Josée introduced the popular film actress and former music-hall singer Arletty to a handsome young Luftwaffe officer, Hans-Jürgen Soehring. Though he was ten years younger than Arletty, she fell passionately and publicly in love and they were seen eating lobsters and oysters together, quaffing champagne and attending the opera, as well as visiting Megève, the ski resort in the Haute-Savoie favoured by Germans and wealthy collabos. On one occasion Soehring even introduced Arletty to Göring, on one of the latter’s famous shopping trips to Paris. Arletty’s collaboration may have been romantic, but that of her friend Josée went deeper than merely accepting and enjoying a way of life in the capital and eating with her father at the best restaurants.
According to the author William Stevenson in his exposé of wartime spying, A Man Called Intrepid, Pierre Laval had used his daughter in November 1940 as a courier to take messages to the Vichy Embassy in Washington because she had diplomatic immunity through her husband’s work.* He believed she would not attract attention to herself and that her bags, containing documents revealing Vichy post-war aims for France to join a victorious Germany, would not be searched. But when the flying boat was delayed overnight in Bermuda, her possessions were seized.
Stevenson recounts how Josée, ‘cold with anger’, protested: ‘This is an outrage against diplomatic protocol.’ But while the arguments proceeded, the papers were photographed for the British before being returned to her, revealing Laval’s conviction that Britain was finished. In early 1941 René de Chambrun returned to France, having had little success in his mission to persuade President Roosevelt to send food shipments to alleviate hunger for many thousands of refugees as well as displaced French in Vichy. Disappointed, he returned to Paris with Josée where the couple were swiftly engulfed in a round of lunches and dinners with Otto and Suzanne Abetz, as well as the German consul-general, Rudolph Schleier, and, of course, Arletty. ‘For a soldier who resisted the German invasion and a lobbyist who opposed the Germans in the United States, René adapted quickly to the new order that his father-in-law and his wife were introducing him to.’
Marie-Laure de Noailles had the most fascinating, if potentially dangerous, background of all the hostesses who entertained Germans: her father was Maurice Bischoffsheim, the affluent banker of German-Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers was the Marquis de Sade, and her maternal grandmother, Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Chevigné, inspired at least one character in Proust. It was Bischoffsheim money that enabled the Vicomtesse de Noailles to live in such splendour at 11 Place des Etats-Unis in a magnificent hôtel particulier built by her grandfather Bischoffsheim and which was high on the German list for requisition. Here Marie-Laure danced, placing herself at the centre of Parisian avant-garde style and acting as the patron and muse of artists, filmmakers and musicians such as Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Cocteau, Salvador Dalí and Francis Poulenc. Marie-Laure had remained in this house where she had grown up, with Serge Lifar as house guest, during the invasion and, thanks to help from Ambassador Bullitt, who claimed that the property was American, managed to keep hold of her unrivalled art collection of Goyas as well as paintings by Watteau, Van Dyck and Mondrian and several modernist sculptures.
Most notable among the other salonnières who contributed to the illusion that life in Paris was continuing as normal was the glamorous Florence Gould, born to an American mother and a French father in San Francisco in 1895. Florence Lacaze had trained as an opera singer but, after her first marriage ended in divorce, married in 1923 the much older, fabulously wealthy Frank Jay Gould, son of railroad millionaire Jay Gould, and gave up her operatic studies. The Goulds lived mostly in the south of France where the couple had built several enormous hotels and casinos, and entertained a wide swathe of society at their villa in Cannes. When the Occupation began, Frank bought tickets for them both to go back to America – as Americans they had ample opportunity to do so. But Florence refused to leave, and in 1941 she returned to Paris while Frank remained in Juanles-Pins. When she discovered that the Germans had requisitioned both her Parisian homes – a Boulevard Suchet apartment and her Maisons-Laffitte villa – she brazenly took up residence at the Hôtel Bristol on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a hotel with a reputation for being able to acquire black-market food.
At forty-six, Florence was still fascinating and beautiful with many male admirers, and it was now, at the Bristol, that she started her legendary hostessing career, becoming extremely close to a number of men, especially Marcel Jouhandeau, whom she first met at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s salon. In order to hide their relationship from his jealous wife Elise, Jouhandeau invented stories about giving Latin lessons to a rich American whom he had met at a restaurant called Chez Florence. History does not relate whether or not she believed him. Bousquet also introduced Florence to Gerhard Heller, head of the Propagandastaffel, and Heller in turn brought the renowned German writer serving in Paris, Captain Ernst Jünger, whose wife Gretha had remained in Hanover. Jünger had written one of the most powerful memoirs of the First World War, Storm of Steel, an account of his time fighting in France and Flanders in 1914–18, a book which Hitler admired. Jünger had been wounded several times, once in the chest by a British bullet, and even though his loyalty was obviously to Germany, he was more philosopher than politician and no mere anti-Semite. Jünger was immediately smitten with Florence and out of delicacy hid her real name in his diaries, referring to her as ‘Lady Orpington’.
It was Jouhandeau’s suggestion that Florence, who always admitted that she liked authors more than books, established regular Thursday literary salons. These salons, effectively co-hosted by Florence and Jouhandeau in a sumptuous apartment at 129 Avenue de Malakoff, were highly sought after, and sometimes there were as many as fifty guests, ranging from secret resisters such as Jean Paulhan, the artist and designer Christian Bérard and the artist Marie Laurencin* to influential Germans in uniform. Florence herself, rarely seen without several pieces of fabulous jewellery, was a magnetic attraction, almost as much as the free-flowing champagne, cognac and lavish black-market food. Discussion at the salons veered between literature, politics and gossip, the latter often focusing on discussion about Florence’s latest affairs. Her behaviour was complicated – behaviour she would have to explain at the Liberation, behaviour for which others were punished when it was described as collaboration horizontale. But although Florence was never heard to utter anti-Semitic or even pro-German remarks, it was clear that, thanks to her fortune and her connections with high-ranking Germans, she enjoyed many favours not available to most Parisiennes, including a rare permit to use her car at night during the curfew and a permanent pass allowing her to cross into the unoccupied zone to visit her husband in Juan-les-Pins.
But, despite her cool exterior, Florence Gould was not left entirely undisturbed. According to documents unearthed after the war, there was an unsavoury episode when Göring’s henchmen inspected the cellars of the Gould villa early in 1941 on the pretext of searching for weapons. None was found, but a valuable triptych and two precious single pieces were discovered, ‘everything very old, carved in ivory’. These were taken by the ERR amid protestations from Florence that she had not known of the presence of these objects.
No doubt worried by what else they might seize, ‘Mrs Gould declared on the spot that she wanted to contribute the entire stock of wine for soldiers on the eastern front; all the copper and brass, which filled an enormous cellar room, was to go to the German war industry.’ But the matter did not end there. A few days later there was a conference with Kurt von Behr of the ERR at which a deal was agreed that, although as an American citizen she was not obliged in any way, she would offer the triptych to Göring, who would in turn present it to the Cluny Museum in Paris, ‘to which the Gould family had intended to will it’. In gratitude to Göring for donating the triptych, he was then to have the two single pieces as his private property. But when Göring finally inspected the entire haul he decided that he liked the triptych too ‘and ordered that all three were to be brought to Germany’.
Florence and her lawyers had further talks about the collection, but as the author of the report commented, ‘they beseeched me to refrain from any further undertaking in order to avoid any difficulties for Mrs Gould … such as the possibility of her being sent to a concentration camp’. Florence had been outmanoeuvred. Such threats were especially worrying because in September Vichy’s newly established Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), convinced that Gould was a Jewish name, had been causing difficulties for her husband, who now had to provide baptismal certificates from America proving that he was Christian.
And while Vichy was helping the Nazis with much of the bureaucratic dirty work by forcing registration as a preliminary to rounding up the Jews, suave German officers in Paris could enjoy all that the city had to offer, gastronomically, culturally and erotically. In four years of occupation the Germans spent six and a half million francs on opera tickets alone. They claimed opera as their own, especially Wagner, and there were fifty-four performances of Wagner at the Paris Opéra during the Occupation compared with thirty-five of Mozart. In May, Herbert von Karajan, the young German conductor and Music Director of the Berlin Staatsoper, came to Paris with his Berlin Staatskapelle to perform for the first time at the Paris Opéra. The stars for this gala occasion – two performances of Tristan und Isolde celebrating Wagner’s birthday on 22 May – were the German tenor Max Lorenz and the French soprano (and Hitler favourite) Germaine Lubin. Staging the opera was an enormous undertaking in wartime as it involved moving scenery, instruments and hundreds of people from Berlin to Paris. Hans Speidel, Chief of Staff of the Military Command in Paris, considered the enterprise a triumph for German logistics as well as culture, always an important goal, and was so enamoured of Lubin that he invited her the following year to perform a concert of Schubert songs, including ‘Let Us Make Peace’, for his own farewell party when he was posted to the eastern front. ‘Now I can go off to war with happiness,’ he wrote. Speidel was to remain a friend and supporter of Lubin to the end of his life.
The first performance of Tristan und Isolde was reserved entirely for German officers in Paris, and the auditorium became a sea of grey-green uniforms. The second was also quickly sold out, mostly to Parisians with influence who were keen to hear German music. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law and a friend of Hitler as well as of Lubin, attended both and was guest of honour at the glittering after-party. Lubin received rave reviews for her performance of Isolde. Véronique Rebatet, wife of Lucien, a true Wagner connoisseur, was in the audience for the second performance and commented afterwards, ‘I never saw a better performance of Tristan than the one with Germaine Lubin as Isolde.’ Cocteau wrote to Lubin: ‘Madame, what you have done for Isolde was such a marvel that I lack the courage to remain silent.’
But not everyone rushed to praise Lubin. The writer of one anonymous letter (the sort that was becoming all too familiar in Paris) accused her of being an ‘adored artist who has sold herself’. She always argued that art was not a matter of politics and that she lived only for her art. But there was a fine line between performing and being used by those for whom you were performing. Arguably, Lubin crossed it, but she believed that her friendship with many in the German hierarchy – including a German lover, Hans Joachim Lange, a Wehrmacht officer introduced to her by Winifred Wagner, whom she liked to entertain at her chateau near Tours – gave her useful influence, all the more necessary because everyone now had friends suddenly arrested. Lange was indeed helpful to Lubin personally, securing the release of her son who had been in a German prisoner-of-war camp since 1940. But Lubin’s later claims, when facing trial after the Liberation, that she in turn had used her influence to help release her elderly Jewish singing teacher, Marya Freund, from Drancy, were to prove unfounded.
At the end of the year, Corinne Luchaire, having spent the previous six months recovering in a sanatorium, married the French aristocrat Guy de Voisins-Lavernière. He was a shady character who had business relationships with the powerful and dangerous Bonny-Lafont gang, part of the Gestapo Française, the network which supplied the Germans with a wide variety of material objects through black-market contacts and worked with German police to chase Jews and resistance fighters.* There was a ridiculously lavish wedding party but it was the prelude to an extremely brief marriage. Although Mary Pickford had hailed Corinne as ‘the new Garbo’, she later wrote pathetically: ‘No doubt it was my destiny to be involved in major international events without understanding them.’
On Sunday 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and within days the United States was at war with Germany. Americans were now enemy aliens in France and subject to arrest. Drue Tartière was allowed to remain in the country since her husband (albeit away fighting) was French and the Germans had not realized that she was in fact the American actress Drue Leyton, for whom they had five times issued a death warrant on air because of the pro-British, anti-German messages she had been broadcasting on Paris Mondial right up until the fall of France. Drue had decided she would engage in whatever small acts of resistance she could undertake, based in her farmhouse just outside the capital at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, from where she could make regular trips to the centre of Paris to keep in touch with other women who were starting to resist. In September she learned that her husband Jacques had been killed fighting in Syria for de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. He had been shot in the back in Damascus by a French Vichyite prisoner-of-war whose surrender he had just accepted. Drue did not know these details immediately but she understood that she had to keep his death a secret from all in her village. If it was known that Jacques had been with the Free French, she would immediately be a suspect herself.
The final months of 1941 saw the resistance, emboldened, now taking to armed action on the streets and organized sabotage. What started in August with a young communist firebrand firing two shots into the back of a German naval cadet, as he stepped into a departing train at Barbès Métro station, continued with further acts of escalating violence in Paris and Lille, as well as strikes at the Renault motor factory in Paris, which meant that Renault were producing a quarter of the vehicles intended for Germany. The repercussions were swift and dramatic. On 20 October, after the Feldkommandant of Nantes had been shot in the back, the Germans put up posters around Paris and elsewhere in France announcing the immediate shooting of fifty hostages, with fifty more hostages to be taken if the guilty persons were not arrested by midnight on 23 October. Almost 150 Frenchmen, mostly communists, were shot in these reprisals and, although both Pétain and de Gaulle urged restraint on both sides, the atmosphere had now changed irreparably. In December the Nazis came up with a further demand, as retaliation for these resistance activities: that French Jews should pay a fine of 1,000 million francs to be collected by the UGIF and that a thousand Jews should be arrested prior to deportation for forced labour in the east. When Otto Abetz, who had a French wife, was informed of the plan he immediately telephoned the German Foreign Office to make sure that the hostages were described not as Frenchmen, but as ‘Soviet and Secret Service agents of Judaeo-Communist and de Gaullist origin’.
And so, on 12 December, the Gestapo came for Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s Jewish husband, one of 753 picked up that day; he was ‘charged with the crime of being a Jew, of having served voluntarily in the last war and of having been decorated’, explained a distraught Colette. Writing openly for several occupation and Vichy organs had not been enough to protect her husband. Now, on discovering that Maurice had been taken to the camp at Compiègne, Colette was horrified at the fate that might befall him and used every collaborationist contact she could muster to free him. Her most valuable ally was Suzanne Abetz, who had been introduced by mutual friends and was a keen admirer of her writing. In early February Maurice was released, thanks to the Abetz intervention, and there followed an effusive exchange, with thank-you flowers from Colette and some books from Suzanne Abetz which were delivered by chauffeur and which she wanted signed, along with an invitation to tea for Colette and Maurice. They were well aware this was not the end. For most of the others picked up that day, who finally left Compiègne for Auschwitz on 27 March 1942 with the unhappy distinction of being the first 1,112 deportees from France, it very definitely was.
* The law against women wearing trousers, never enforceable since its introduction in 1800, was finally rescinded only in February 2013, after 213 years. From August 1941 women were not allowed to receive ration tokens for tobacco for reasons of ‘moral regeneration’ which caused considerable stress for some. See here for example of Jeanne Bucher.
* The title was Oddon’s suggestion, in homage to the actions of Marie Durand, one of the great icons of the French Protestant world, who resisted religious intolerance in the eighteenth century.
* Fry volunteered for the Emergency Rescue Committee, which had been set up shortly after the fall of France to rescue intellectuals and others hunted by the Nazis in Vichy, and which saved at least 2,000 people.
* The French resistance comprised many different movements and networks, often containing smaller units called réseaux, each of which had a specific purpose such as gathering intelligence, sabotage or helping evading airmen find an escape route.
* A statute, or ordonnance, was effectively a law which would normally be ratified by a parliament while a decree was secondary legislation, usually complementary, and gave details of how the law should be interpreted. However, given that Vichy was an authoritarian regime, it did not always follow correct constitutional procedure.
* In 1945, she fell in love with Simon Nora, a French Jewish resistance fighter. Her furious family managed to have her interned in a Swiss psychiatric clinic, but Nora and some of his resistance comrades freed her and in January 1947 they were married, whereupon Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac’s family disowned her (Benjamin Ivry, ‘Confronting Father’s Mountain of Exaggerations’, Forward, 13 October 2012).
* Miriam finally came to London in 1945 and married her fiancé Ben Stanton.
* Baur, thought to be Jewish because of his name, was arrested in 1942. But although he was released when no Jewish origins could be proved, he died shortly afterwards.
* The Cahen d’Anvers family had also donated a villa outside Paris and a great-aunt, Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild, had bequeathed the rose-pink villa at Cap Ferrat to the Académie des Beaux Arts.
† A reference Degas intended to be insulting by comparing him with the popular painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau and suggesting he might frequent the cabaret-café le Mirliton in Montmartre, owned by Aristide Bruant, friend of Toulouse-Lautrec.
* When Irène’s mother, Fanny, learned what had happened to the furs and jewellery she complained, but Irène responded through an intermediary that she had assumed her mother would be thrilled to help her daughter survive.
* Count René de Chambrun, godson of Marshall Pétain, son-in-law of Pierre Laval and cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, was impeccably well connected. He served as a captain in the French army until the collapse of France in May 1940 and, from that experience, believed that Britain’s Royal Air Force was superior to the Luftwaffe and would ultimately stop Germany from winning the war. He was therefore sent, at the request of U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt, as special emissary to Washington to stiffen his cousin’s resolve in providing arms for Britain to resist the Nazis.
* In 1952 she was commissioned by Paul Rosenberg to paint his four-year-old granddaughter, Anne Sinclair.
* Henri Lafont and Pierre Bonny, part of the corrupt Parisian underworld, took advantage of the Occupation to set up a criminal gang known as the Bonny-Lafont gang headquartered at 93 Rue Lauriston, where they carried out numerous acts of interrogation and torture.