As the Marshall Plan got under way in Europe, butter, cheese, eggs and other much needed goods at last began reaching ordinary homes, and fresh medical supplies filled hospitals. Every day, 150 or so ships were unloading in port, bringing cargo to Europe. As Paris was the headquarters of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), which was managing the Plan, the liners also shipped in the human cargo, the requisite bureaucracy. Almost 3,000 American men arrived in Paris in the spring of 1948, setting up offices in hotel suites, apartments and hôtels particuliers, along with hundreds of women, mostly secretaries but occasionally wives.
After a winter as harsh as any during the war, with coal and gas shortages exacerbated by frequent fog so thick ‘it gave you a vague sense of being suffocated’, somehow, in the spring of 1948, Paris blossomed again with hope as well as material goods. The cafés were bustling: Sartre, Camus, Picasso or André Breton, regulars at many a Left Bank table, and American jazz players including Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington were performing at other haunts. But it was, in spite of tentative bursts of sunshine, a mixed picture. Paris certainly had not recovered its pre-war status as the foremost centre for art dealers, while a major devaluation of the franc in January 1948 resulted in Americans feeling that Paris shops may have been full of bargains; yet as most, even luxury boutiques around the Place Vendôme, were still resorting to candlelight on alternate days, it was difficult to see.
The British, too, were facing these post-war years of austerity with ration books and stoicism, but a strong domestic Communist Party generating strikes lent an added complication to the French situation. There was a profound fear in 1948 that communism might win the ‘Cold War’, a new term now being used to describe deteriorating relations between America and the Soviet Union. Nancy Mitford told Evelyn Waugh about her terrors of the Russian invasion: ‘I am quite simply frightened. I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children, I can take a pill and say goodbye.’
The divisions in French society, even if not discussed, ran deep, not just between Gaullists, who argued that resistance was pure patriotism involving personal sacrifice for the public good, and communists, who believed that resistance embodied an idea of social revolution, but among the many in France who had suffered during the war years, including racial and political déportés, Jews who had been in hiding throughout the war, refugees, labour conscripts, foreigners who could not prove French nationality, Gypsies and a miscellaneous population of those whom Vichy had decided were undesirable.
New laws in August 1948 created two different titles for persecution victims: the more prestigious one of déporté or interné de la Résistance was reserved for resisters and involved higher benefits than the lesser one of déporté or interné politique, which was for victims without resistance credentials. This distinction meant that Jews, Gypsies and other racial déportés were classified as victims, who would not qualify for the higher title; and that women who might, for example, have sheltered evading airmen or others on the run but had not joined one of the officially recognized military formations, also might not qualify. In addition, there was also the question of what constituted a ‘combatant’ – a word which resonated with military glory from the First World War since resisters who could prove that they were combatants, rather than civilians, were able to claim not only higher financial payments but also certain privileges such as the useful carte du combatant. It was for that reason that one woman who had survived Auschwitz described her fellow camp survivors as ‘Combatants without Weapons’. She maintained that withstanding Nazi dehumanization was a type of combat. For most women, their activities may have been equally risky and dangerous and in Nazi eyes deserving of punishment, but that did not entitle them to use the word ‘combatant’.
The laws, far from resolving issues, merely pushed them aside for a while. Political divisions were also papered over rather than healed. Some believed that the capitalists had profited from the war, as shown by businesses such as Renault, which had collaborated to help the Nazi war machine and so had flourished, while the communists had resisted and suffered. But the communists were able to draw on extra support from, unpredictably, the anti-American right wing, who may not have objected so loudly to the German Occupation but who saw the United States as the new occupying power. Paul Morand wrote to Josée de Chambrun, still belligerently fighting to clear her dead father’s name: ‘What a tonic to see such magnificent pleasures in the midst of destitute Europe propped up by the Marshall Plan … and to enjoy splendid entertainments for which we are indebted neither to a couturier nor to an aunt, pimp, spy or the Coca-Cola Corporation.’ Morand’s friend, Misia Sert, similarly railed against ‘the banality of France becoming Americanized’, while the French communist newspaper L’Humanité asked: ‘will we be coca-colonized?’ Even the arch-British diplomat Harold Nicolson joined in, insisting it was not that the Europeans ‘were anti-American, just that they were frightened that the destinies of the world should be in the hands of a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate, the emotions of a spinster and the brain of a pea hen’.
But such negative attitudes did little to stem the appeal of Paris for individual American tourists, never sure if they were welcomed, envied or resented or all three, just hungry to enjoy its charms once more aided by the buying power of the strong dollar. The capital was, slowly, becoming a fashionable destination for well-heeled young American girls to visit as part of their education. Norine Murphy, just twenty, and her twenty-two-year-old sister Marilyn were in the vanguard in the summer of 1948 at a time when many American parents felt that the war was insufficiently distant for safety. The Murphy parents were, however, concerned enough that they sewed a supply of dollar bills into the girls’ shoulder pads, partly to ensure that they could buy food but also to bribe a border guard should they have to leave suddenly, a real worry at the time. On the Queen Elizabeth, the sisters noticed the teenage actress Elizabeth Taylor, almost the only other young woman on board, with her mother, and the three American girls took tea and played cards together most days.
‘Paris was a shock,’ Norine recalled. ‘We arrived in the city in the middle of a coal strike so for several days in the week there was only candlelight. We were issued with bread coupons and told to keep a close watch on our passports because of theft.’ Nothing went quite as planned. The sisters were due to continue their travels, by train, to Switzerland, where they were going to study for a year. But after waiting at the railway station for several hours they discovered that their train had already left.
We tried to call the American Embassy and, not knowing how to use the pay phone, a gentleman stopped to offer his help. We had all kinds of do’s and don’ts from our mother and did not know what to do. We noticed he was not French – he told us he was from Russia, but was a White Russian. He kept repeating ‘I White Russian!’ and we had no idea what that meant but thought it sounded like a good thing. We knew that Russia was a big concern right after the war.
He offered to drive the girls to the American Embassy, and they accepted as he said he wanted to do something ‘nice for Americans’. He had a Volkswagen – a car they had never seen before, and it made a big impression on them. When they eventually returned home, Norine and Marilyn never dared tell this story as they knew their parents would be furious.
Then they discovered that the Hôtel George V, where they thought they had rooms, was overbooked due to a UN conference. Arrangements were made instead at the Plaza Athénée but the girls were young, it was after midnight and ‘we were very frightened … We had no idea that it was such a good hotel and complained. The clerk said if it was good enough for Madame Roosevelt we would be OK.’
Once settled, the girls went shopping, visiting stores whose names resonated from American magazines. They went to Hermès, which that day to their surprise was candlelit, to buy gloves for family and friends, and then on to a delicious lunch of roast duck at Maxim’s, ‘chosen because that was the only name we knew from catalogues’. Two ladies from the Embassy then took them to a Molyneux show – one of very few fashion houses showing at that time. At the end of their trip the sisters bumped into a schoolfriend from Illinois, Julie Loeffel, who spoke so little French that she could not even get her sunglasses fixed, so the trio went shopping together at Dior, where Julie was swiftly spotted and hired as a house model. Julie lingered in Paris and was selected to model one of the couturier’s most extraordinary ball gowns, the Venus, fashioned from grey silk tulle with a glittering overlay of scallop-shaped petals said to have been inspired by Botticelli’s Venus, and embellished with small pearl clusters, sequins and crystals. Reluctantly, after a year she returned to live in Glencoe, Illinois.
These young ingénues who knew nothing about life outside the United States may have been cosseted by their parents’ deep pockets, but nonetheless were imbued with a spirit of adventure, both excited and repelled by risk-taking. And Julie’s story illustrates the powerful, magnetic appeal to Americans of Paris as a thrilling city where dreams could still come true. Barbara Probst Solomon, in early 1948 a young American would-be writer, was obsessed by a certain idea of Paris which she had gleaned from books. She too had an adventurous spirit and was not bothered by strikes or lack of food. Barbara grew up in a privileged, cosmopolitan Jewish family in a magnificent house in Westport, Connecticut, where individualism was encouraged. The family were neighbours of ‘Jay’ Gatsby, or at least the man she believes was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s model for Gatsby. Both parents were highly cultured intellectuals whose lives had been damaged by the First World War, during which her father* had been badly gassed in the trenches near Amiens and so spent three years in an American field hospital recovering, while her older brother had served in the Second. As a sick child, Barbara had spent hours in bed reading illustrated books about Paris, especially Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, first published in 1939, swiftly graduating to the semifictional Proust. From the age of seventeen she had been desperate to go to Paris instead of college in the US; now her parents agreed under one condition: that her artistic mother would accompany her on the transatlantic voyage.
On board, Barbara and Mrs Probst befriended another mother and daughter, Mrs Mailer and her daughter Barbara, sister of the yet to be famous Norman, who was waiting to greet them as they docked in Cherbourg. Norman and his wife Bea were already settled in Paris, in an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, and it was there that the two Barbaras were introduced to a stimulating mixture of artists and intellectuals, including many exiled Spanish dissidents. The exiles were not communists but, according to Barbara Probst, anarchists and socialists, totally at odds with the communists, and therefore vulnerable in France, which could not place them.
Within weeks the teenage girls had been persuaded by Norman to undertake a daring adventure which involved driving across France to Spain in order to rescue two young students held captive in one of the most brutal hard-labour camps run by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Nicolás (son of the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, President of the Spanish Republic in Exile) and Manuel Lamana were being forced to work as slave labourers in Franco’s prison at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), constructing the vast monument that was to be Franco’s tomb. Escapes were extremely rare and firing squads still carried out executions long after the Spanish Civil War was over. Yet, somewhat bizarrely, the girls had agreed to attempt to free the two boys, urged on by Norman, ‘who told us he had a car and a plan but it needed Barbara and me to participate. We agreed. He thought two young girls would have a better chance of crossing the border through the mountains because we looked too young, too American to be suspicious. We were just American kids trying to see the world.’
Probst remembers many details of the rescue. Also in the car was a young Spanish student activist, Paco Benet, whose father had been shot dead at the beginning of the Civil War, who knew the country well and spoke French as well as Spanish. ‘We had prearranged a meeting place. Nicolás and Manuel had been somehow sent a message telling them to be last in line at the end of the day and that a car would be waiting for them. It helped that, because Spain was too impoverished to provide uniforms for prisoners, they wore regular clothes,’ she recalls. While the police searched in the immediate area, the girls drove off to the south with the ex-prisoners and escaped.
By the time the group reached Barcelona, Paco and Barbara Probst had fallen in love, and the pair separated from the others. What’s clear from photographs of the time is that Barbara was beautiful as well as clever and well read. She remembers Paco as tall with blond hair, intense dark eyes and ‘very brainy’. They returned to Paris, where Barbara enrolled at the Sorbonne and started living with Benet, a relationship which lasted for four years. Like many Americans in Paris at the time, she was shocked by the deprivation she witnessed, never forgetting the disparity between her cushioned life in Paris and that facing most of her fellow students in 1948. She felt guilty about the food parcels which her parents regularly sent, believing it was morally wrong for a foreigner to have access to luxuries denied to the native population, which had suffered so much already.
Alongside her studies at the Sorbonne, she worked hard learning to be a journalist, badgering various editors into taking her stories. ‘Nobody wanted to know about the struggle to end Franco’s dictatorship after World War Two had ended. It seemed as if everyone had had enough of torture and concentration camps. The Spanish drama was a non-story.’ But, as Barbara’s life in Paris revolved around groups of dissident Spanish students in exile, she saw her mission as telling the world the story she had learned first hand. One of the motivating factors for her in undertaking the Spanish rescue had been an acute awareness, as soon as she arrived in Paris, that the Jews had had no one looking out for them. ‘My mother had several French relatives who had perished in Auschwitz. Only one, Cousin Leah, had survived in hiding. I knew I did not want to look back and think no one had been there for these kids. That was very important for me. That’s why I couldn’t refuse.’
She felt passionately that the Spanish anti-fascists were now being similarly neglected, a particularly wicked dereliction since the early resistance in France had been fuelled by so many Spanish dissidents, often but not always communists, whose role in the liberation of France was now being downplayed and sometimes totally ignored. Back in Paris, Benet and Probst started a small underground journal together. Called Peninsula, it was smuggled out across the Pyrenees into Spain in an attempt to fight propaganda on both sides. Its motto was ‘Neither Franco nor Stalin’. But after four years together, the pair broke up and Probst returned to America, her Paris years remaining a defining fragment of her life from which she dates a lifetime of activism. ‘Paris is where I learned to respond to the horror in the world and do something about it. The rest of my working life has been framed by those experiences.’*
While Barbara Probst was feeling guilty about her food parcels, Caroline Ferriday was appealing for all Americans to become a ‘package parent’ for malnourished French children. ‘They are denied milk because there is not enough to go around, rice is an unknown delicacy, butter a luxury for the very rich.’ She recounted heartbreaking stories of children whose parents had been killed and who now lacked almost everything. They needed ‘kind thoughts as much as food’, and she encouraged her fellow citizens to become part of their own ‘personal Marshall Plan’.
These stories were in stark contrast to the experience of the thousands of Americans posted to Paris in autumn 1948, who not only had access to Embassy supplies but could afford to eat in decent restaurants. Paul Child, a middle-ranking diplomat married for the last three years to Julia, a native Californian of six foot two who did not speak any French, was expected to promote America to the French, ‘to build goodwill between our nations, to reinforce the idea that America was a strong and reliable ally, that the Marshall plan was designed to help France get back on its feet … and to insinuate that rapacious Russia was not to be trusted’. Meanwhile Julia, who during the war had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA), latterly in Sri Lanka and China, was left to explore the Parisian way of life. They experienced ‘annoying’ shortages – ‘coffee rations ran out quickly, cosmetics were expensive and decent olive oil was precious as a gem’ – and they had no fridge, so like most Parisians they had to keep milk on a window ledge. The Childs marvelled at being able to eat so well at numerous restaurants for as little as five or six dollars, including a bottle of vin ordinaire. Julia was immediately won over by the magnificence of French cuisine, drooling over sole à la Normande served with cream, mushrooms, wine, oysters and mussels: ‘I had never imagined that fish could be taken so seriously or taste so heavenly.’ And she learned how the Parisiennes shopped. ‘When you asked at the crémerie for a cheese you’d be asked at what time you wanted to serve it to get the ripeness exactly right. The owner would then open box after box, pressing the cheese until she found one that was perfect.’ The local marchand de légumes taught her not only which vegetables to eat, when and how to prepare them, ‘but also about snails and she’d fill me in on so and so’s wartime experience and where to get a watchband fixed’.
By August 1949, recognizing how enraptured she had become by French cuisine, her husband bought for her thirty-seventh birthday the 1,000-page Larousse Gastronomique. Two months later she enrolled at the prestigious Ecole le Cordon Bleu in Paris for a year-long course, designed for potential restaurateurs, where most of her fellow trainee chefs were former GIs funded to study cooking by the United States government. Julia Child thrived and, for the remainder of her time in Paris, studied the secrets of good French food until she was ready, with two friends, to set up her own cooking school in France. Later, in 1961, they completed their ground-breaking cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which became a bestseller and even today is often considered a must-have for newly-wed American girls. The book, along with the later hugely popular television show, demystified fancy French cuisine for generations of Americans and probably contributed as much as any diplomat to fostering good relations between France and America and to helping Americans to understand French culture.
But it was not only Americans flocking to Paris. In May 1948 the newly-wed Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip paid a three-day official visit, which generated enormous crowds cheering them along the Champs-Elysées. Elizabeth was twenty-two and pregnant with the future Prince Charles. It was the first time in her life that she had left British soil. Some Parisiennes, unsure whether to believe rumours that all English women always wore heavy tweeds and carried shooting sticks, wanted to inspect her clothes. They were not disappointed. Her wardrobe had been chosen with enormous care and her jewellery too was admired because the previous year Philip had bought his bride a magnificent diamond bracelet from Boucheron in Paris, which she chose to wear outside her glove on her waving hand. Boucheron had been the favourite of Edward, Prince of Wales, when he was buying for his mistress Freda Dudley Ward in the early 1930s. But Wallis, wanting nothing that was reminiscent of Freda, instructed him to buy her jewellery elsewhere, so Cartier and Van Cleef were patronized. Now Boucheron were back in royal favour once again. Princess Elizabeth laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe and then, opening an exhibition devoted to displaying the cultural links between France and Britain over the centuries, delivered her speech impressively in fluent French. One evening she listened to Edith Piaf performing, another evening the Comédie-Française actress Béatrice Bretty was presented to her at a British Embassy reception. Bretty, now the darling of the company, reminded the Princess of a pre-war meeting in London and the Princess was polite enough to respond that she remembered it well. The only tension during the visit arose from Elizabeth’s express wish to attend a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s current play, Les Mains sales, but Embassy officials overrode her wishes, deeming so overtly political a play to be unsuitable.
‘Who can resist the legendary lure of Paris – Paris! – with the romantic appeal of its boulevards and buildings, its cafés and squares and bridges over the Seine …’ exclaimed the writer Emma Smith, who decided to spend the summer of 1948 living on the Left Bank of Paris in a cheap hotel on a corner of the Rue Saint-Sulpice writing her second novel. ‘I was totally in love with Paris and France and wanted to go back and impress Jean-Pierre [Geoffroy-Dechaume] with my success,’ she explained in 2014, by then in her nineties and very definitely a successful writer. However, Jean-Pierre had fled the city that summer and instead it was Denis who came to take her to the theatre where they listened to a tiny little woman standing in the centre of a bare stage, ‘a chanteuse who stuns her packed audience with the extraordinary, disproportionately loud harsh volume of her voice … singing defiantly, triumphantly’. Denis the resistance hero clearly did not question attending a performance of Edith Piaf even though she had sung to German audiences. Smith would occasionally drink that summer at the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, where she remembers glamorous girls with short cropped hair wearing full-length New Look dresses that contrasted with the little shrines appearing in walls with pots of flowers to mark the spot where a brave resister had been shot. ‘The flowers were always fresh but nobody would talk about the war. This was a new world and the new world had a great sense of excitement about it, a marvellous feeling of now we are going to do new things.’
By August, the city was in the grip of a heatwave, so Smith took to following ‘an undeviatingly simple’ daily routine to cope with the temperature. Immediately after a breakfast of croissants and milk at her hotel, she walked with her typewriter to the Ile de la Cité, where she would sit on the flagstones alongside the Seine ‘for a whole day of concentrated mental labour’. And there one day a wandering photographer snapped her for the weekly news magazine Paris Match. He was Robert Doisneau, and the picture of Smith with her typewriter balanced on her knees appeared on the magazine’s centre spread, an illustration of a Parisienne at work. ‘I never met him,’ Smith says now. ‘I would have loved to, because the photograph appears in all his collections.’ But the most remarkable thing about the portrait, she insists, is that she appears to have been sitting on stone ground for much of the day. ‘I checked the picture recently to see if there was a cushion,’ she says triumphantly. ‘There wasn’t!’
Corinne Luchaire was also writing a book, her self-justificatory memoir published in 1949, which she called Ma drôle de vie in obvious homage to her father’s newspaper, Toute la Vie. The entire book, written with the help of a journalist, was a none too subtle attempt to exculpate her beloved father, revealing how, blinded by the fairytale reflection of her own success, she had totally failed to understand the situation either during the war or five years afterwards. She was caught up in ‘a whirlwind of pleasure and easy life’, the pinnacle of her success being the opulent wedding, which preceded her ultimately disastrous marriage to Count Guy de Voisins-Lavernière.* Corinne never stopped to question the immense flattery heaped upon her and ‘became the agent of a male-dominated political system that knew how to use ingrained attitudes to perpetuate its power’. There was a time when her story, about how an ordinary Parisienne could become a countess, might have been admirable; no longer. She grew sicker and more fragile throughout 1949 and died on 22 January 1950 in a manner both pathetic and dramatic, after a dinner with friends where she could not swallow and was spitting blood. She collapsed in a taxi before she could get to the Parisian clinic which was treating her. She was twenty-eight, uncomprehending to the last, leaving a young child motherless.
There was little that Corinne’s remaining family could do to help. Her aunt, her dead father’s sister, Ghita Luchaire, married to Théodore Fraenkel, had troubles of her own. She had been in danger during the Occupation because of her Jewish name; now, even though she was Mme Fraenkel, she was scorned because of her despised maiden name. So, as the numbers of young American women visiting Paris grew and grew, in order to make ends meet Ghita Fraenkel, like many, took in American lodgers, one of the few respectable ways to eke out a living.
Reading accounts of the severe culture shock which several of these students experienced in Paris indicates clearly that the city about which Simone de Beauvoir had waxed lyrical when she had lectured in American universities in 1947 did not always measure up, especially so far as public conveniences were concerned. But de Beauvoir had in mind loftier matters, as her groundbreaking feminist work examining the history of female oppression, The Second
Sex – the standard tome on feminism for several years – was first published in 1949. De Beauvoir was encouraging women to throw themselves into lives that were not defined by gender, to challenge the myth of l’éternel féminin, which had predominated before the war, and which so many of them had demonstrably and dramatically destroyed during the war.
It was scarcely oppression, but some of the female students wrote home to express their horror at finding ‘squat toilets’ in restaurants where you had to carefully place your feet on two pads either side of a porcelain base sunk into the floor, and toilet paper was often nonexistent. Yet even middle-class apartments might have only one shared WC per floor at this time. It was not just that basic foodstuffs were still in short supply, but the city looked shabby and even the grandest buildings were dirty on the outside and dark inside. Almost all the young Americans, while they did not starve, experienced a sense of severe deprivation in Paris alongside the excitement, as well as frequent reminders of the recent war. According to Henriette Nizan, a Jewish writer and teacher who had fled to the US during the war, most American students in Paris tried to be more French than the French. They were the ones who ordered picon citron to drink (orange bitters with lemonade) while the natives drank Coca-Cola. ‘It was young American girls who influenced young French girls with the fashion for laced sandals and long straight hair, which no one had worn since 1900,’ wrote Nizan.
One unknown American who took lodgings with a French family in Paris that year was the twenty-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, in her junior year at Vassar College and extremely pretty. Finding that Vassar had no study-abroad programme, Jacqueline applied for one run by Smith College, and was accepted.* She was in a group of thirty-five students, several of whom lived in dormitories, but Jacqueline’s mother, Mrs Auchincloss, ‘being a terrible snob’, was delighted to discover that, following an introduction from a mutual friend, her daughter could stay in the home of a countess. Germaine de Renty lived in a large apartment with four bedrooms and one bathroom in the Avenue Mozart in the 16th arrondissement and, although she took two other American students at the same time, Jackie was given the largest bedroom. The de Rentys lived simply and Claude, the youngest daughter, who spoke excellent English as she had just returned from a year in the United States, became a close friend. It was, however, an absolute rule that French must be spoken. Claude was now completing her studies at the Institute of Political Studies and Jackie attended lectures at the Sorbonne. Several of the other Smith girls were staying in homes where strict rules about midnight curfews and no men applied, but in this respect Germaine de Renty was far more relaxed, perhaps because of all she had experienced in Ravensbrück. And she took Jackie everywhere, keen to show her the best of French culture. Jackie remained in Paris until early 1950, perfecting her French and allowing the culture to seep in so deeply that, for the rest of her life, her style in décor and clothes was always considered French.
At the end of the 1940s all branches of the arts were struggling to regain their wartime popularity and funds were scarce. The immediate post-war period was hard for Lily Pastré, the Noilly Prat heiress who had used her chateau to hide Jewish musicians from Paris, and she felt she had lost her sense of purpose. But in 1948, remembering the success of her Midsummer Night’s Dream extravaganza, she conceived the idea of a music festival near Marseilles, believing that opera lovers should not have to travel to Bayreuth and Salzburg where, in her view, the seats were in any case overpriced.
The first challenge was to find a suitable venue. Working with the impresario and pianist Gabriel Dussurget, she discovered the courtyard of the former Archbishop’s Palace in Aix-en-Provence, which they decided would be ideal. Lily funded everything out of her own pocket that first year, spending lavishly and working tirelessly to pull it off. Her inspiration was to engage conductor Hans Rosbaud and his South-West German Radio orchestra, Mozart specialists. ‘Three years after the end of the war! The teeth were gritted,’ remembered her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux, the journalist and resister descended, like Lily, from a distinguished Marseilles shipping family. But although this virtuoso idea was a success, one year later Lily Pastré stepped down from the Board of Trustees following disagreements with Dussurget, and from then on she had nothing more to do with the Aix Music Festival.
‘It was a great injustice,’ commented Charles-Roux. ‘Without her, it would have been a different story.’ Dussurget now became sole director and ended the sponsorship from the Countess. He disliked her amateurism, the amateurism – or enthusiasm – that had made her chateau at Montredon such an extraordinary artistic haven during the war. He now dismissed her contribution as supplying the ‘house party’ atmosphere of the festival and was cruel in his criticisms of her, as his memoirs later revealed. Determined to make the post-war festival more professional, Dussurget secured funding from Aix-based institutions and today the event is considered one of the world’s top music festivals. His efforts are commemorated with a Dussurget prize, a Dussurget street in Aix and a marble bas-relief of his face. But, however successful, the festival lost some of the quirky charm and spirit of Lily Pastré herself. From then on, although she continued to visit each summer, the Countess appeared either imperious or eccentric to those who did not know her, occasionally even comic. Mostly her name was forgotten and none of her brave wartime deeds publicly recognized, even in her local area, until very recently.* Her last few years were difficult and lonely. She died in August 1974 and, generous to the last, donated a parcel of land next to her chateau to Emmaus, a Catholic organization for the homeless.
But in November 1949 Colette, today a controversial figure who had remained in Paris writing throughout the Occupation, was elected President of the prestigious literary institution, L’Académie Goncourt, the first woman ever to receive this honour. At the opening night of Chéri, her own dramatization of her famous novel, she was rewarded with a long and loud round of applause and cheering from the audience. ‘Elderly, arthritic, ensconced in a stage box from which only her head was visible – her still mordantly witty face surrounded by its nimbus of radiant hair – she received the acclaim of what is left of the three generations of Tout Paris,’ wrote Janet Flanner.
For those who were judged guilty of collaborating, appearing on stage was still considered risky. Mary Marquet, who had not been allowed to return to the Comédie-Française, found it hard to get work. Finally in 1949 she appeared onscreen in a mediocre comedy, but was offered little more than bit parts in second-rate television series. By contrast, her colleague Béatrice Bretty was more popular than ever. One of the longest-serving and best-loved actors in the company, she continued to work there until 1959. But in September 1949, learning that the former French leader Charles de Gaulle was due to speak at the dedication of a monument to her former lover, the assassinated politician Georges Mandel, in Lesparre, north of Bordeaux, she was roused to action. She now released her pent-up feelings of the previous five years and wrote angrily to the député, Emile Liquard, who had arranged the ceremony. ‘You are disturbing the dead to make of his tomb a political springboard,’ she began. Her heartfelt letter was published in full by the local newspaper Les Nouvelles de Bordeaux et du Sud-Ouest.
I am astonished that Gen. de Gaulle is associated with your plans, a man who did not feel obliged to bring from England the necessary aid for Georges Mandel’s escape; a man who since his return to France has never under any circumstances spoken the name of this martyr of the Republic; who never on any occasion felt it his duty to pay his respects at his tomb; who never in any fashion has interested himself in his orphan child of fourteen; in short, a man who, by his persistence in this attitude, has clearly shown a total indifference both to the life and to the memory of Georges Mandel. Besides, did he not declare in Algiers that he was not working to whiten sepulchres? Well truly here is one that has no need of it.
Bretty, having fought to support Mandel during the war, was now courageously fighting for his post-war reputation. Yet in his 1994 biography of Mandel, Nicolas Sarkozy criticized Bretty for not doing more, adding that, as she was not Jewish, she had not been in danger. What more could she have done beyond giving up her own career, begging to marry him and share his fate in a concentration camp, looking after his orphan child and writing letters to newspapers pointing out what little effort de Gaulle had made to rescue him? Few women did half as much.
By the end of the 1940s, material conditions in Paris and the rest of France had improved dramatically thanks to the success of the Marshall Plan. According to the renowned Yorkshire-born American journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘anyone who compares the picture today with that of 1947 can hardly believe that such progress could be made … a miracle of recovery has been performed’. Her views were echoed by the New Yorker journalist Joseph Wechsberg, who wrote in September 1949 that he was pleased to find for the first time since the end of the war that ‘my Parisian friends had stopped griping about the black market and rationing and were again discussing passionately and at great length the heady mysteries of La Grande Cuisine which, next to women, has always been their favourite topic of conversation’. Not only were Parisians eating well again, but Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, and her friends were buying jewels and couture clothes once more.
In 1948 Wallis bought the star item in Dior’s autumn–winter collection, a blue silk velvet gown called Lahore because of its heavy Punjabi-style pearl embroidery. And Cartier’s Jeanne Toussaint was busy making jewellery that she knew the Duchess would wear with great panache. In 1948 Wallis bought a panther brooch made of gold and black enamel created around a large emerald. More panthers would follow, including one just a year later; this time the big cat was perched atop an enormous cabochon sapphire. But these were difficult years for Chanel, Toussaint’s close friend, who did not show a new collection until 1954, when she staged a comeback of sorts. With her friend Misia Sert, Chanel was by 1949 making regular trips to Switzerland to replenish their drug supplies, journeys they had been undertaking since the 1930s for morphine, relatively easy to obtain in Switzerland.*
But better food and plentiful material conditions failed to hide a sense of foreboding, because much was still not spoken aloud in the continuing battle to decide on the legacy of the war. The overriding establishment view was that in order to preserve unity and keep communism at bay, France had to be seen as a nation of resisters, where resisters were in de Gaulle’s phrases ‘l’immense majorité’ and collaborators a small minority, ‘une poignée de misérables et d’indignes’. But the Communist Party was no monolith, as Agnès Humbert, the early resister who had spent the war in German camps, discovered when in 1949 she was awarded the Croix de guerre. Later that year she travelled to Yugoslavia, publishing her impressions and voicing her admiration for its leader, Josip Broz Tito, then estranged from the Soviet Union. As a result she was not only expelled from the women’s organization of which she had been President, Les Amies de la Paix (Friends of Peace), but also denounced in the French Communist daily L’Humanité.*
Lisette and Johann, the forbidden lovers who had both had to face up to punishment, were now trying to rebuild their lives in a postwar world. They were still young, and believed, as they wrote in their passionate love letters, that they were ‘entitled’ to find happiness after all they had been through.
After her head-shaving, Lisette had been sent briefly to Drancy but was released when she showed the authorities that she had also helped the resistance by providing some useful lists. Johann, having deserted in 1944, had been handed over to the Americans who sent him to Laon, in Picardy, where he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers in France, and then transferred to another camp at Baden-Baden in Germany. Lisette could not bear to remain in Paris alone, ‘full of anguish’, so she first pursued him to Laon and then, enterprisingly, succeeded in getting herself a secretarial job with the Army of Occupation in Baden-Baden. Finally, in February 1949, Johann won a bitter divorce from his wife and married Lisette, and the couple lived in Germany, trying to earn a living as hoteliers for the next thirty or so years. But his children did not want to see him nor meet their new French stepmother and, according to relatives, life was hard, a far cry far from the wartime dream Lisette had nurtured.
The story of Lisette and Johann is in some ways emblematic of the myriad ways French women and German men colluded over the period of occupation merely in order to survive, and the unhappiness that usually followed. That their relatives, even in the twenty-first century, have denied permission for their real names to be used is an indication of the sensitivity still aroused by stories such as theirs. They did not have any children together but, according to some estimates, as many as 200,000 children were born to French mothers fathered by German soldiers during the Second World War. Most never knew their full identity, and, if they did, were ashamed of their German parentage. It was only in the twenty-first century that some started to apply for German citizenship and search for their German fathers before it was too late, which it often was. Fabrice Virgili, author of the most recent study of Franco-German babies, believes there were probably 100,000 of them and that most will have been brought up not only in shame by their mothers alone but never knowing who their father was, ‘as in the vast majority of cases these “amours de guerre” ended with the Liberation’.
There were still occasional trials before the decade was out, such as that of Jacques Desoubrie, alias Jean Masson, among others, the traitor and double agent who betrayed Denise Dufournier and was responsible for the capture of as many as 168 Allied airmen. He was arrested in Germany where he had fled soon after the end of the war, swiftly tried and executed in December 1949. And Otto Abetz, Hitler’s Ambassador to France, the young man who won his position largely because he was such an admirer of France, was sentenced in 1949 to twenty years’ imprisonment for war crimes, in particular for his role in arranging the deportation of French Jews to be gassed. Abetz was released in 1954, but he and his wife Suzanne were killed four years later in a road accident in Germany, which some believe was an assassination organized by former members of the French Resistance. It’s not clear what motivated Jacqueline Bouvier to visit Dachau, where she went at Christmas 1949 with one of her friends, not accompanied by her hostess, Comtesse de Renty. Yet perhaps her decision had something to do with the de Renty family conviction of the need for rapprochement between the two age-old enemies. Claude and her mother, unusually for surviving deportees, had already visited Germany in 1946, taking advantage of a cousin working in the army who invited them. Germaine de Renty believed, in spite of everything she had suffered, in the premise of the Marshall Plan that ‘we needed to recover alongside Germany with the help of America. My mother always said that’s what has to be done. The German people suffered too. Even in Ravensbrück there were German women who suffered.’ At all events, Dachau in 1949 was not yet a museum, nor even a memorial, with parts still in use as a camp for Czech refugees and its future a matter of controversy.
How posterity would memorialize the war years was becoming a critical issue. As the 1950s loomed it was clear that the atmosphere was radically shifting. Picasso’s Dove, still today the international peace logo, first appeared on posters for the communist-sponsored Peace Congress in Paris in 1949, and remained the iconic symbol of hope and peace in the Cold War years to follow. Yet peace – what so many of those who had engaged in the war now craved above all else as they raised young families – was far from a certainty as the Cold War took hold. Some Americans blamed the French for not repelling the communists in their midst, while many French people criticized Americans as imperialistic.
Even if active fighting was in abeyance, the battle for reputations in 1949 was far from over. As Julia Child and Emma Smith both noticed, there were a few marble plaques now being erected around the city commemorating brave resisters at the spot where they had fallen. But reputations can change over a long period, and in 1857 the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s highly erotic poems about decadent women in Paris, Les Fleurs du mal, had been greeted with shock and outrage. Baudelaire as well as his publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes moeurs – ‘an insult to public decency’. Six poems from the work were suppressed and the pair were fined 300 francs. Now, in 1949, the ban on their publication was lifted and Les Fleurs du mal was finally published in France, in full, for the first time.
A miniature opera scene designed by Christian Bérard from the ambitious Petit Théâtre de la Mode exhibition, which used 170 child-size dolls made of wire armatures with porcelain heads, dressed in clothes made by the great Parisian fashion houses and intended to reassert the dominance of French couture immediately the war was over.
Repatriation of women prisoners in Paris, April 1945. Many of those who survived Ravensbrück were barely able to walk and required months of medical treatment.
A former prisoner receiving treatment at the Hôtel Lutetia, transformed from its days as Abwehr headquarters to repatriation centre, where many women spent hours hoping to find deported family members.
Demonstration in Paris on 1 May 1945 – seven days before the Second World War was celebrated – for women survivors of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen.
Parisiennes celebrate the end of the war by wearing dresses representing the four Allied flags (Great Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union). Colourized later.
Parisian women casting their vote for municipal elections on 13 May 1945. However, the first national election in which women in France were able to vote was not until November 1946.
Two SOE agents posthumously awarded the George Cross: Noor Inayat Khan, the part-Indian, part-American children’s writer raised in Paris who was murdered in Dachau; and Violette Szabo, killed at Ravensbrück.
Trial of former actress Corinne Luchaire on 4 June 1946. She was sentenced to ten years of dégradation nationale for what the presiding judge termed collaboration horizontale.
Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, testifying about conditions at Ravensbrück shortly after her return to Paris.
Christian Dior’s New Look, after years of shortages and restrictions, caused a sensation by using yards of material to create a look of opulence and ultrafemininity.
Not everyone admired the New Look; a group of older women, scandalized by what they saw as the waste of fabric in such a full skirt, tried to tear it off one model during a photoshoot in the Rue Lepic.
Catherine Dior, sister of Christian, shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in May 1945.
A pre-war photograph of Nusch Eluard, who died suddenly in 1946, modelling a Suzanne Belperron bracelet with matching ring and brooch. It was signed and inscribed by Man Ray as a present to Lee Miller upon the birth of her only son, Antony Penrose, in 1947: ‘Pour notre amie, Lee, et son petit garçon nouveau.
Susan Mary Patten, glamorous wife of US Diplomat Bill Patten, lover of British Ambassador Duff Cooper, wearing a grey sequinned dress by the Paris-based designer Robert Piguet, who trained Christian Dior. Susan Mary was often loaned designer dresses for publicity purposes.
Paris was hit by a wave of strikes in 1946 and 1947 in protest against low wages, shortages and high prices for basic foodstuffs. Working-class women, such as these milliners, showed their solidarity by demonstrating throughout the country, and pressure from the female population had a considerable effect in improving social benefits.
English writer, Emma Smith, taken by surprise as she was working on her novel on the banks of the River Seine on a hot July day in 1948.
Julia Child, whose passion for French cuisine changed the way thousands of American women cooked, standing in the small Paris kitchen of her Left Bank apartment.
15 May 1948: the newly-wed Princess Elizabeth, speaking in French as she opened the ‘Eight Centuries of British Life in Paris’ exhibition, was scrutinized by Parisiennes for her fashion sense. The three-day official visit with her husband Prince Philip (seated) was the first time that she had left Britain.
The Murphy sisters crossing to Paris in 1948 on the Queen Elizabeth, where they became friends with the teenage actress Elizabeth Taylor.
A serene-looking Countess Germaine de Renty, résistante and Ravensbrück survivor who, as a post-war widow, hosted American students in Paris including Jacqueline Bouvier, later Kennedy.
Si l’écho de leurs voix faiblit, nous périrons
(If the echo of their voices weakens, we will perish) Paul Eluard
Gisèle Casadesus
Rachel Erlbaum
Renée Fenby
Jacqueline Fleury
Rosa Lipworth
Madeleine Riffaud
Noreen Riols
Cécile Rol-Tanguy
Marceline Rozenberg
Emma Smith
Barbara Probst Solomon
Arlette (with Charles) Testyler
* Anthony Probst, a lawyer, had started his career as Woodrow Wilson’s campaign manager before serving as a private in the US army.
* Paco Benet became a distinguished anthropologist, killed in 1966 while on a dig when his jeep crashed in the desert. Probst studied at Columbia, married a law professor, Harold W. Solomon, and wrote a steady stream of novels, essays and memoirs. But she never shed her love of and concern for France and in 1987 reported on the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons.
* Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who has long been fascinated by Corinne’s life, created in his 1974 screenplay for the film Lacombe, Lucien an amoral aristocrat he calls Jean-Bernard de Voisins, who actively worked with collaborators to enjoy the benefits of the black market with his mistress, a failed actress reminiscent of Corinne.
* Smith College had been sending women for a year of study in Paris since 1935, but the programme had stopped during the war and did not pick up again until 1947–8.
* In 2013 there was an exhibition in Aix devoted to her work, Le Salon de Lily.
* For Chanel it may have been little more than a useful sedative, but Sert appeared to need it for oblivion and forgetfulness and had even spent twenty-four hours in prison because of her habit.
* Agnès Humbert died in 1963 and is buried in the cemetery at Valmondois, the village in northern France where the Geoffroy-Dechaume family lived for generations.