Certain vegetables have been having a bit of a comeback in France lately: the so-called légumes oubliés, or “forgotten vegetables.” At food markets, fruiteries, and hip restaurants, the unceasing search for new tastes has revived attention to vegetables not popularly consumed for decades—including the Jerusalem artichoke, which in French is called the topinambour. It is actually from North America, not Jerusalem; its name is a mutation of the Italian girasole, or sunflower, the family to which the plant belongs. The edible root of the plant is not an artichoke but a tuber, like a potato, although it has a slight artichoke taste that might explain its name.
Not that long ago, however, this vegetable was decidedly not forgotten in France. During World War II, most French people had to learn to live under Nazi rule—and with topinambour.
The horrors of World War I did not, in the end, prevent the recurrence of another, even more terrible war. Throughout the interwar period, the French worried that Germany would one day recommence hostilities, and this appeared even more likely with the ascension of Adolf Hitler and his escalating aggression: the resumption of armament production, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria. France’s preparations for a potential new war were constrained by economic weakness and domestic politics, with left-wing governments preferring an army of short-term conscripts rather than a larger professional army that could potentially back a reactionary coup.1 By the late 1930s, French military doctrine was largely defensive, based upon an elaborate series of fortifications known as the Maginot Line, which the French army could presumably hold against a German invasion for an extended amount of time. German forces would hopefully be worn down in fruitless attack, and eventually France and her allies could launch a counteroffensive and repel the invasion.
In 1938, Hitler moved to annex the Sudetenland, the heavily German region of neighboring Czechoslovakia, which France had enjoyed an alliance with since 1924. French prime minister Édouard Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich to negotiate the crisis. Daladier was under no illusions as to Hitler’s true intentions, presciently arguing that if Hitler were allowed to dismember Czechoslovakia, there would be no end to his continental conquest. But there was no appetite in France for war, and Chamberlain pushed hard for compromise, which Daladier eventually acceded to. He returned to France despondent, only to be greeted with cheers and accolades for avoiding a new conflict. “Ah les cons, si ils savaient!” he supposedly remarked to an aide: “Ah these fools, if only they knew!” His fears indeed came to pass, as Hitler annexed the whole of Czechoslovakia, signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, and prepared for all-out war.
The beginning of World War II in Europe is conventionally dated to September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. Both France and Britain then declared war on Germany, but eight months of “phony war” followed, during which France could do little but wait for the inevitable German invasion. This arrived in May 1940, with an astoundingly effective “blitzkrieg” offensive that utilized tanks, airpower, and innovative maneuver warfare tactics to smash through the Low Countries and the most vulnerable section of the Maginot Line. The British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from France in the great rescue operation at Dunkirk. The French army was unable to prevent the Germans from marching into Paris on June 14, a humiliating military defeat that left lasting scars on the French psyche. Two million French soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, and millions of French civilians fled south ahead of the German armies.
From London, General Charles de Gaulle urged the French people to resist the invaders, but in Bordeaux, the hastily evacuated French government decided to seek an armistice with the Germans. Under its terms, France remained a formally independent country, but it was divided into two zones: the northern half of France and its entire Atlantic coast was occupied by the Germans, while the southern half was ruled by a new French government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of World War I. Pétain headquartered his government at the spa town of Vichy, which gave its name to the extreme right-wing regime that replaced the Third Republic. Political parties and the free press were banned; Jews and communists were increasingly persecuted. In 1942, French collaboration in the Holocaust began in earnest, as both French and foreign Jews were rounded up and held in French concentration camps such as Drancy before being deported to the east. Conditions grew even worse at the end of 1942, when Germany occupied the whole of France. More than 75,000 Jews were deported from France, including more than 11,000 children. Most of them died at Auschwitz; it is thought that only about 2,500 of those deported survived.2 The last deportation train left France in August 1944, with the Allies on the brink of liberating Paris—an indication of the fanatical Nazi commitment to the Holocaust, even at the expense of German military efforts.
Germany instituted a harsh system of exploitation during its rule, using France’s considerable resources to fuel its mammoth campaign on the Eastern Front, its ongoing occupation of Europe, and the needs of its own citizens in Germany. The Nazis remembered the lessons of World War I, when a starving population supported the overthrow of the monarchy and the German surrender, and their efforts to keep the German population well fed and happy were largely designed to prevent another “stab in the back,” as they referred to it. More than 3.5 million French people were deported to Germany to work as laborers, in a work scheme called the STO, or Service du travail obligatoire. This led to a significant drop in the production of food and other goods in France at the same time that the country was expected to contribute materially to the Nazi war machine. The excessive requisition of food, combined with the drop in production and imports, meant that there was less and less food available for the local population, although this varied considerably by region.3 Wealthier citizens fared somewhat better, but even the well connected struggled to maintain a peacetime diet. In a postwar Life article on the state of French gastronomy, it was noted that Curnonsky, the “Prince of Gastronomers,” had dropped from a robust 277 pounds to 181 thanks to the deprivations of war.4
This memorial plaque in Temple Square, Paris, bears witness to the 11,000 children deported to Auschwitz by the Nazi regime, in collaboration with the Vichy government. Among them were 500 children from the 3rd arrondissement. The names listed on the plaque are those of the 87 toddlers who were deported, before they had even grown old enough to attend school. © Lillian Hueber, 2016.
To control the situation, the government issued ration tickets. An adult person living only on these ration tickets would consume between 1,000 and 1,300 calories a day, far below the necessary average of 2,400 daily calories.5 As the war went on, the rations became smaller—especially in the lead-up to D-Day in 1944, when the Germans wanted to make sure that they would have enough food to feed their army during the long battles ahead.
And as if rationing wasn’t bad enough, simply having ration tickets did not mean that you would actually be able to get food. Especially in towns, stores could remain empty for quite a while due to a lack of supplies. A massive black market (marché noir) developed, as farmers and tradesmen tried to sell as little as they could on the official market, where prices were set artificially low. Some sold their products at extortionate prices and became rich, at the expense of their social legitimacy. Others kept prices reasonable, with their primary aim merely being to reserve food for hungry French people rather than the Germans (this informal exchange was often called the gray market, or marché gris). In an intriguing reversal of the usual dynamic, city dwellers were now much worse off than rural residents. Many survived only thanks to food packages sent from relatives in the countryside, or through trips (usually by bicycle) to the country to buy or barter products from farmers.6
This difficult situation was described in a remarkable remnant from those years, a small booklet titled Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, produced by the Foreign Office for troops participating in the Allied invasion.
Remember that continental France has been directly occupied. In consequence it has been stripped of everything by the Germans. Almost all French civilians (including French children) are undernourished, and many have died from exhaustion and hunger, because the Germans have eaten the food. The Germans have also drunk the wine or distilled it into engine-fuel . . . You have known something of rationing at home, and seen temporary shortages of various things to which you were accustomed to. But you have never known, as the French, thanks to the Germans, have known, a lasting dearth of the commonest articles. Food, drink, clothes, tobacco—everything has been rationed, but to have a coupon has not meant to get even the meagre ration. Women have queued up daily for vegetables from four in the morning till the market closed at 8.30—and gone away without any because the Germans had robbed the lorries on the way. Bread has often been unobtainable and often nearly uneatable.7
The only positive aspect of rationing (if one could use the term positive in those dark times) was that people could not smoke or drink as much, as tobacco and wine were rationed. Thus, the number of deaths from smoking-and drinking-related diseases fell during the war years.
Even with a vibrant black market economy (who said the French have no word for entrepreneur?), food remained scarce. People started eating pigeons and crows instead of chicken; some people ate cats. They would make mayonnaise without eggs, if you can imagine. People strove to find substitutes for what was lacking, and as the French language has a sense of black humor, a German word for this phenomenon seemed appropriate, and so these substitute products were called ersatz. It was a particularly traumatic situation for a nation whose gastronomy was such an important element of identity, a marker for the superior civilization they felt they possessed.
This is when topinambour had its moment of gastronomic glory. It had never really caught on with the population after being introduced from America in the seventeenth century and was considered a food for the poorer classes.8 But now this vegetable was not being requisitioned by the Germans and was not rationed (unlike potatoes, which were meticulously seized by the occupying forces). And as it is also a vegetable that grows in poor soil and with little care, suddenly people were growing Jerusalem artichokes everywhere and eating them a lot. It was a filling vegetable, and its leaves could also be used as ersatz tobacco (although it was not a very nice ersatz). Unfortunately, as topinambour is not very easily prepared or digested, it did not make for a very pleasurable substitute.
Other overlooked foods were resorted to as well, such as the rutabaga. Previously used only to feed animals, it was now grown in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris and throughout the countryside. The Germans had no inclination to requisition rutabagas, perhaps because they reminded them of their own experience of wartime famine, the Steckrübenwinter (rutabaga winter) of 1916–17.
While France was not as harshly occupied as other countries, it was still a miserable era, and after the war, all the dire food products that had sustained the population were put aside. As an elderly lady once said to Stéphane, when he was working at a Nantes fruiterie that began selling topinambour: “Really, topinambour! We had them all the time during the war. I could not eat a bite of it now even if you paid me.” In fact, they were not being given away for free—they were actually four times as expensive as potatoes, due to their recent hipster-food quotient. They remain best eaten as a potato substitute—mashed with plenty of butter and salt, or lurking in winter soups—but the distinct artichoke flavor remains off-putting to some diners. Only time will tell if topinambour will be forgotten once again.