CHAPTER 8

Wild Cards in Play

General de Gaulle’s success in rallying much of the Empire led to his becoming “obsessed” — his own word — with “vast schemes” to rouse resistance in France. But the questions of What to do? How? With what? reverberated in de Gaulle’s mind. He knew there was “nothing in Metropolitan France” for his Free French to seize hold of and that any actions there “would have to be drawn out of the void.” De Gaulle’s Deuxième bureau, named for the old French military intelligence, was up and running in London under Major André Dewavrin, now calling himself Colonel Passy. Its future as an effective force under the name of the BCRA — Bureau central de renseignements et d’action — offered but hazy and uncertain prospects. The British, meanwhile, were organizing a Special Operations Executive (SOE) of saboteurs and spies, spurred by instructions from Winston Churchill to “set Europe alight.”[1]

The first, mostly spontaneous protest against the German Occupation occurred in Paris on November 11, 1940, in commemoration of another armistice — that which ended the First World War with the surrender of Germany. In response to an underground tract calling on the “Étudiants de France” to honour the day, some six thousand marched down the Champs Élysées to Place de l’Étoile and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. German troops used rifle and machine-gun fire to break up the demonstration, killing many and arresting hundreds. These were wild cards playing against enormous odds; journalist Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, who would emerge as one of the early Resistance leaders, thought “one could be a resister only if one was maladjusted.”[2]

With de Gaulle detecting few signs that the French public was ready to take action — “the great majority wanted to believe that Pétain was playing a deep game” — he decided to ask for a demonstration of passive resistance on New Year’s Day, 1941. Stay home, empty the streets and squares between three and four o’clock, he asked, and pass a simple “hour of hope.” Thousands of people all over France responded by hurrying indoors at the appointed hour.[3]

Agnès Humbert, who had heard de Gaulle’s June 18 appeal while on the run in the Limousin along with a million other evacuees from Paris, was back at her job as an art historian at the Musée national des Arts et traditions Populaires, an affiliate of the Musée de l’Homme. She was forty-four years old, divorced, and the mother of two sons. Her friends thought her “impulsive, impetuous, pugnacious and irreverent, with an indomitable sense of humour.” Her father had been a senator and her mother an English author. She was writing faithfully every day in her diary, describing Marshall Pétain as “that ridiculous old fool” and recording her disgust at German soldiers being allowed free admission to the museum:[4]

The atmosphere of the museum has become absolutely stifling. I have been relieved of virtually every single one of my former responsibilities. My duties are now carried out by “volunteers” conjured up out of thin air: ladies of considerable charm, elegance and wealth … all boast of being at the very least “close to someone close to the Marshall.”[5]

Agnès Humbert had to do something, anything, and she leaped at the opportunity to join an unlikely mix of would-be résistants in what would become known as the Musée de l’Homme group, the first hint of a virus that would eventually infect and demoralize the German occupier. “I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something,” she wrote. She eagerly joined the group’s prime movers, Russian émigrés Boris Vildé and Anatole Levitsky, and with other recruits was soon engaged as “runner, coordinator, ferreter, and — of course — typist for the group.”

They disguised themselves as a literary society and their first mimeographed sheet of protest came out in September followed by the first issue of their paper, Resistance, on December 15. “Resist!” it beseeched Parisians. “This is the cry coming from all your hearts amid the distress caused by your country’s disaster.… To resist is to keep your heart and head. But above all, it means acting — doing something that will bring about positive results; rational and useful acts.”

Within months, the identity of the group became known to the Gestapo, names and addresses having been leaked by a Vichy sympathizer. So the great paradox of resistance and betrayal was established, a pattern that would persist until the liberation. After producing only five issues of its paper, the Musée de l’Homme group was rounded up in April 1941 and its eight key members, including Mme Humbert, were sentenced to death. She escaped execution by being sent to a women’s prison. She was later transferred to a forced-labour camp in Germany, but she survived the war. Seven fellow conspirators died in front of a German firing squad at Mont Valérian, a military fortress overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. One is said to have shouted at the moment of execution: “Imbeciles, it’s for you, too, that I die.”[6]

The efforts of the Musée de l’Homme group were largely ineffectual, but they demonstrated one type of resistance that would be widely practised — the spreading of subversion through underground newspapers and pamphlets that instilled in French minds the idea that the fight was not yet over. More overt forms of resistance — helping downed British flyers to escape, hiding Jews, acts of sabotage, or gathering military intelligence to be passed on to the Allies — had to await the formation of more organized groups. They were not long in coming. The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, freed up loyal followers of the French Communist Party to join the struggle. They began a cycle of violence offering a strategy of à chacun son Boche (to each his German), knowing this would lead to deadly reprisals of a dozen or fifty, or a hundred French victims for every German killed. A Communist action unit that would become known as Francs Tireurs et Partisans (French Irregulars and Partisans) made the first move.

That original act of defiance was triggered by a young Spanish Civil War veteran, Pierre Georges, the son of a baker and a graduate of the International Brigade that had fought for the Republican side against General Francisco Franco. At a little before eight o’clock on the morning of August 21, 1941, Georges placed himself on the platform of the Barbés-Rocheouart Metro station in the Montmartre district of Paris. Spotting a uniformed German emerging from a carriage, he fired two shots before escaping with three companions into the rush-hour crowd.[7] The German, one Alphonse Moser, was a young naval subaltern. He fell back into the carriage, dead, his feet sticking out the door. He was the first German to die by act of the French Resistance.

Georges, a thin, undernourished, twenty-two-year-old, would go on to gain fame as Colonel Fabien, after whom a Paris Metro station is named. The killing of Moser opened a vicious new phase in the Occupation; by the end of the year, there had been sixty-eight attacks on individual German soldiers. In total, there were not more than a few hundred German soldiers assassinated in France during the war, but their deaths were avenged by the execution of some forty thousand French hostages. After the war, the Communist Party would anoint itself “le parti des fusillés” (party of the shot, or martyred), claiming to have lost seventy-five thousand members. The figure was clearly an exaggeration of the actual number, but the act of citing it became a powerful political tool.

General de Gaulle would have heard of the attacks on German soldiers with a mix of pride and concern. He mourned the “victims of German vengeance” and saw their loss as “equivalent to the sacrifice of the soldiers on the battlefield.” These emotions did not blind him, however, from the fact that sporadic harassment of occupying troops could achieve little and would bring only further massive retaliation. The national uprising he yearned for would have to be timed for the arrival of armies of liberation, still many years off. Any earlier action could lead to disaster, perhaps the creation of another Paris Commune. In a BBC broadcast on October 22, de Gaulle took up the issue of killing Germans:

It is absolutely natural and absolutely right that Germans should be killed by Frenchmen. If the Germans did not wish to receive death at our hands, they had only to stay at home.… Since they have not succeeded in bringing the world to its knees, they are certain to become, each one of them, a corpse or a prisoner.… For the moment, my orders to those in occupied territory are not to kill Germans there openly. This for one reason only: that it is, at present, too easy for the enemy to retaliate by massacring our fighters, now, for the time being, disarmed. On the other hand, as soon as we are in a position to move to the attack, the orders for which you are waiting will be given.[8]

The “easy” killings by the Germans were already epidemic. The day before de Gaulle’s BBC talk, forty-seven hostages had been shot at Châteaubriant near Nantes and fifty at a camp near Bordeaux. De Gaulle’s warning, however, was not well-received by the Resistance, now taking shape in the form of several organized groups in both the Occupied Zone and in Vichy France. A leader of Francs Tireurs et Partisans, Charles Tillon, rejected de Gaulle’s “lofty order” and declared that “duty required one to disobey the general.”[9]

By now, other Resistance groups were playing their wild cards. Surveillance was less rigid in Vichy France, and it was there, especially in Lyon and in the bruising port city of Marseille, where the first Resistance battalions became active.

Resistance leaders came from across the political spectrum. Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, the journalist who had diagnosed fellow Resisters as “maladjusted,” came from a family with right-wing views. He attended the Naval Academy after the First World War but resigned from the navy in 1923. D’Astier wrote for the monarchist journal Action Française, but turned to the left during the Spanish Civil War. He re-enlisted in the French navy in 1939 and quickly became head of naval intelligence before being dumped by Vichy for his political views. In Lyon in July 1941, he joined a noted Communist couple, Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, in forming their “Libération” Resistance movement, which was also known as Libération-Sud. They launched the underground newspaper Libération. Lucie, after sharing the dangers of their task, became d’Astier’s mistress.

It was at this time that Captain Henri Frenay formed a grassroots movement to support Marshall Pétain and his ideas for “national liberation.” Born Henri Frenay Sandoval, he had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in Alsace and made his way to Marseille in 1940. “We are passionately attached to the work of Marshall Pétain,” he declared. “We subscribe to the great reforms which have been undertaken.”[10] His views changed as the Vichy government’s pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish policies came to the fore. Frenay quit to launch the Resistance movement “Combat.” The movement would put out an underground newspaper, edited by a young Albert Camus, and would eventually become known by another name, Libération national. In Marseille, three Catholic law professors led by François de Menthon, organized the Resistance movement “Liberté” and published a paper with the same name.

In Paris, a notable socialist figure, Christian Pineau, launched Libération-Nord and later linked up with the d’Astier outfit. Pineau had been head of a bank workers’ union and enjoyed the support of the civil servants’ union. He knew something of government, having worked for his stepfather, the playwright Jean Giraudoux, who was minister of information in the French Cabinet before the war. The few thousand adherents of these secret organizations in the two zones, along with the Communist FTP and its political arm, le Front nationale, would carry the burden of organized resistance to the Germans and their Vichy vassals. In time, they would be joined by localized groups like la Voix du Nord in Flanders, and by the armed combatants of the Maquis, rural guerilla bands that would rise in the hills of the Massif Central, and in rural Britanny and the Alpine regions of southeast France.

General de Gaulle faced fierce opposition from the Communists and his support was far from firm in other branches of the Resistance. Too many saw him as enjoying a comfortable refuge in London where he had become, they thought, little more than a tool of the British. Most thought of him as either too pro-monarchist, too rightist, or with an eye cast on becoming dictator of France. De Gaulle was aware of these prejudices and did his best to counteract them. His painstaking defence of French honour and his readiness to snap back at the slightest rebuke from his British allies were calculated, in large part, to appease his critics. De Gaulle saw himself, as the head of Free France, the champion of all free Frenchmen. It was he who would give the orders and he who would shape the government that would be installed in Paris after the liberation. However, these hopes rested on finding someone who could organize the Resistance so as to demonstrate that de Gaulle’s support was as strong in Metropolitan France as throughout the Empire. Fate would entrust one man, Jean Moulin, with carrying out that task.

By staying in small, out-of-the-way hotels and riding night trains where there was less likelihood of being questioned by police, Jean Moulin moved freely throughout the Vichy zone in 1941. He had two main purposes: to secure introductions to leaders of embryonic Resistance movements, and to obtain documents that would allow him, when the time came, to get out of France. He sometimes stopped at what was now his sister’s farm near St. Andiol, but he also made frequent visits to Marseille, Lyon, Toulose, and other cities. As Jean Moulin, he remained part art collector, part retired prefect. Using his alias of Joseph Jean Mercier, and the false identity card, false passport, and false exit permit issued in that name, he made application for Portuguese and Spanish transit visas. He also extracted, in his own name, an American entry visa by convincing Hugh Fullerton, the U.S. vice-consul in Marseille, that he could provide the State Department with information vital to the defence of the United States. In March, he received a bank draft for U.S. $3,000 from Pierre Cot, while Cot’s wife, Néna, paid a steamship company for Moulin’s passage from Lisbon to New York. But for all Moulin’s success in opening doors in the United States, he made no effort to pass through them.

In April, Moulin undertook a risky return to Paris that involved his illegal crossing of the demarcation line between north and south. He did it with the help of Joseph Paul-Boncour, a former premier of France who owned property spanning either side of the Loir-et-Cher River at Saint Agnan. The river served as the border at that point. Moulin crossed it by rowboat at night, while a guide awaited his arrival on the north bank. He returned by the same route, but not before meeting again with his old Cot confreres and letting it be known among art sellers that he was interested in pieces for a gallery he planned to open in Nice.

Back in Marseille — probably carrying paintings he’d picked up in Paris — Moulin checked into his favourite hangout, the Hôtel Moderne, using his own name. He often received mail there and he found a summons awaiting him to appear as a witness at the treason trial of Pierre Cot, about to start in Riom. He had no hesitation in testifying that Cot’s “patriotism was beyond question.” After picking up 140 francs for expenses, he returned to Marseille where Antoinette Sachs awaited him. His erratic travel pattern continued, often leaving the hotel for several days at a time while Antoinette would go to his room each night and muss the bed so as to make it look like it had been slept in. Unknown to her, he made visits to Aix-en-Provence where he had a new romantic interest in Jane Boullen, a nurse he’d met in Amiens who was now working at French air headquarters.[11]

Howard Lee Brooks, a minister of the Unitarian Church, arrived in Marseille from the United States that summer. He carried a list of introductions that included Moulin’s name. We cannot be sure, but he had probably gotten it from Pierre Cot. Brooks made contact with Moulin, and it was through Brooks that Moulin met Henri Frenay, the head of Combat. The meeting took place at the home of Dr. Michel Recordier in Marseille in late July. According to Moulin biographer Patrick Marnham, Frenay was not impressed with Moulin’s knowledge of the Resistance: “He knew nothing about it.”[12] Moulin’s apparent ignorance, however, was likely largely feigned. He had learned that Resistance activities were enveloped in a cone of silence and that identities and operations plans were closely guarded secrets that must be concealed from potential informers.

As Moulin learned more of the operations of Resistance groups — including the Communists — he was acquiring a deeper understanding of the makeup and tactics of the underground throughout France. All the groups were engaged, to varying degrees, in the stockpiling of arms, carrying out acts of sabotage, and collection of information on German military movements. What was lacking was a common commitment to a unified command, one that would declare its solidarity with General de Gaulle and the Free French. When Moulin finally got his Spanish and Portuguese travel permits in the name of Joseph Jean Mercier in Marseille in August, he was at last in a position to act. He boarded a Barcelona-bound train on September 9 and three days later checked into a cheap pension in Lisbon. De Gaulle’s Lisbon delegate had been arrested shortly before, and Moulin found no Free French presence in the Portuguese capital.

Moulin decided to visit the British embassy where he secured an interview with Major L.H. Mortimore of the Special Operations Executive. Moulin told Mortimore he was the emissary of three French underground movements — a statement not entirely accurate — and that he was in need of transportation to London. “His patriotism shone out of him, his personality compelled you to notice and admire him,” Mortimore wrote later to Moulin’s sister. The combination of British red tape and poor communications left Moulin lounging about Lisbon for six weeks. Between being robbed of his toiletries and an alarm clock and having to move to another pension, Moulin typed up a lengthy report that described the activities and needs of the Resistance. Mortimore had it translated and sent to the Foreign Office in London. The British studied it carefully, but declined to turn it over to the Free French.

When Moulin, still travelling as Joseph Jean Mercier, arrived by seaplane at Bournemouth, England, on October 20, he was the first important Resistance figure to come out of France. The British handled him with care, but put him through four days of questioning at the Royal Patriotic School. His interrogator was Captain F. Eric Piquet-Wicks, head of the SOE section assigned to collaborate with the Free French. After satisfying himself that Moulin was who and what he claimed to be, Piquet-Wicks took him to the De Vere Hotel in Kensington High Street, where he was met by the Free French intelligence chief, Colonel Passy. Moulin gave him a carbon copy of the report he had presented to Major Mortimore in Lisbon, as well as a coded message to be broadcast on the BBC confirming his safe arrival in England: “Henri Delacour se porte bien.”

A few days later — the precise date is unknown due to the disappearance of de Gaulle’s appointment books — Moulin founding himself standing in the general’s office at Carleton Gardens, ready to pledge the loyalty of the Resistance movement to Free France. De Gaulle would have towered over Moulin, but the two men met almost as equals; in fact, Moulin’s position as a prefect was the equivalent of a major general, which meant he technically outranked de Gaulle. Their conversation went unrecorded, but if this first meeting was like many others, de Gaulle would have risen to his feet, positioned himself over Moulin, and extended his hand. “Tell me about France,” he might have said, as he did to Christian Pineau when the leader of Liberation-Nord reached London some time later.

Moulin was not entirely convinced that de Gaulle was the leader France would wish to follow in peacetime; he had doubts about the general’s democratic principles but asserted, in a conversation with one Resistance leader: “For the moment one should support de Gaulle, later we will see.”[13] None of those doubts would have been on display at this meeting. Each man had what the other needed. Moulin’s access to Resistance leadership in France matched de Gaulle’s ability to fund and equip their activities, making them natural partners.

De Gaulle respected Moulin as a product of the French administrative class and realized he had before him the most credible figure to have come out of France since his own departure from Bordeaux. He admired the “firmness and dignity” Moulin had shown during his mistreatment by the Nazis in Chartres. Moulin, de Gaulle thought, had been “kneaded from the same dough as the best of my companions.”[14] During the meeting, Moulin was so overcome by emotion that without realizing it, he found himself speaking in a barely remembered southern accent.

The report Moulin had brought to London described three movements — Liberté, Libération Nationale, and Libération — “born spontaneously and independently of the initiative of a few French patriots who had a place in the old political groups and parties.”[15] He said they had entrusted him with reporting on their operations. The claim was somewhat self-serving; Patrick Marnham says Moulin had met only two leaders, Henri Frenay of Libération Nationale and François de Mentheon of Liberté, and that “neither had appointed him their delegate.” Moulin identified the various newspapers being published by the résistants and described each group’s work in counter-espionage, sabotage, military activities, and in “meting-out of justice.” His most emotional section was an appeal for help: “This ardent mass of Frenchmen, which has remained under the yoke, is champing at the bit and is only awaiting the opportunity to shake off this yoke. It would be mad and criminal not to make use of these soldiers.… Without aid in all spheres of activity, the influence of the movements will be in vain.”[16]

De Gaulle met with Moulin several times before appointing him as his representative to the Resistance in the Unoccupied Zone. His directions to Moulin were to meld the three groups into a single organization, one willing to accept the instructions of Free France. If they did so, they would be financed and supplied from London.

Moulin was in London, having another meeting with de Gaulle, when news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. Like de Gaulle, he was heartened by the arrival of the Americans in the war following the attack, and he immediately redoubled his preparations for his return to France. Throughout December he took parachute training near Manchester. Colonel Passy, anxious to brush up his own jumping techniques, accompanied him. After rigorous physical training and two parachute jumps with Passy, Moulin was considered ready. At 3:30 in the morning, January 2, 1942, a Royal Air Force Whitley twin-engine bomber parachuted Jean Moulin and two other agents onto the south slope of the Alpille mountains whose jagged peaks bisect Provence from west to east. He was unaware that the Vichy Intelligence Service knew of his coming — the result of the arrest of an SOE agent weeks earlier in France.

Moulin had asked that he and his operations officer, Captain Raymond Fassin, and his radio operator, Hervé Montjarret, be dropped near an old stone farmhouse, La Leque, on the olive plains adjacent to the perched village of Egalières. Moulin had bought the property, a bastidon in Provençal patois, in 1941 in the belief he might someday need it as a safe refuge. The farm lay near of the family home in St. Andiol and close to the ruins of a medieval castle called Romanin, whose grounds Moulin had roamed as a boy. He later adopted its name as a pseudonym for his drawings and paintings. Their RAF Whitley had run into heavy flak over the French coast, but by the time they reached the target zone they were well beyond reach of the German coastal guns. The moon was full, the temperature in the aircraft was dropping, and Moulin, huddled in a blanket, wrapped a scarf around his head as he nibbled on a sandwich and sipped tea. Montjarret would remember that the getup reminded him of “someone suffering from a toothache.” Moulin told him, “I never liked the dentist’s office, either.”

When the Whitley encountered difficulties with its navigation system, the green light to jump came on as the plane flew over the south side of the Alpilles rather than the north. Moulin went first, followed by Fassin and Montjarret. A fourth parachute carried a radio transmitter. All four chutes came down in a boggy marsh in the scrubland between Fontvielle and Mourié, some twenty kilometres off target. It took an hour for Moulin and Fassin to hook up with Montjarret, who made his presence known in the dark by whistling the tune of a popular song: “There’s a nest in the pear tree, I hear the magpie sing.” By now, it was raining hard, the Mistral — the bitter wind off the Rhone Valley — was blowing, and they faced a difficult hike along a lonely road through a pass in the mountains. The rain first turned to sleet, then to snow. Moulin had lost a bag of sandwiches when he landed, and by daybreak — alternately walking and running to keep warm — they reached the village of Aureille where they could smell coffee being brewed. Fearful of being found out, they resisted the temptation to seek breakfast. Nearing the next village Egalières, they encountered two policemen who showed up on bicycles. Montjarret convinced them he was a student from the University of Montpelier on a winter holiday with his professors. The gendarmes departed, “more confused than convinced” by the agent’s explanation.[17]

The trio reached La Leque early in the afternoon. Moulin retrieved a key from under a stone and, after resting, they split up.[18] Montjarret found his way to a neighbouring village where he caught a bus, eventually reaching Marseille. Fassin set out for Lyon and a rendezvous with the Resistance organization Combat. After dark, Moulin walked into St. Andiol where his arrival was met with astonishment.[19] The next morning, he collected ration coupons from the mairie and set off by train to Megève in the French Alps. There, incredibly, he spent ten days skiing with yet another young woman in whom he had a romantic interest, Colette Pons.

The next months were a blur of intrigue and dissension as Moulin held meetings with Resistance leaders and began to impose controls on their operations. He checked up on their radio contact with London and how they spent the funds that were being received via air drops. By now, it was becoming difficult to separate his Resistance role as “Max,” the code name under which he was now operating, and his role of a retired prefect, which he continued to carry on as Jean Moulin.

In May, he was summoned in his own name to Vichy, where Pierre Laval, back as premier after a brief period out of favour with Marshall Pétain, invited him to return to the ranks of government prefects. Moulin discreetly declined. At the time Laval met with Moulin, the report in the hands of the Vichy intelligence service identifying Moulin as a Resistance agent had not reached him. It had disappeared somewhere into the files, not to be seen until after the war.

While Jean Moulin was building his Resistance network, Free French forces were finally able to fulfill Charles de Gaulle’s insistence on the “reappearance of our armies on the battlefields.” For the first time since the Battle of France, French troops were in combat against German forces. The 1st Division of Fighting French (the term de Gaulle was now using for his Free French) came to the support of the British 8th Army by fighting a stubborn defensive battle against General Erwin Rommel — the “Desert Fox” — at the remote Libyan oasis of Bir Hakeim. General Pierre Koenig’s 3,700 men — including several Foreign Legionnaire detachments of refugees from Nazi-conquered lands — held off German and Italian attacks from May 27 to June 11. Their stubborn defence of the old Turkish fort, which they abandoned only when water and food supplies ran out, gave British General Bernard Montgomery time to regroup his forces for a successful defence of Cairo and an ultimate counter-push across the North African desert.[20]

The achievement — de Gaulle thought his troops had “covered themselves with glory” — not only led to the Free French becoming the Fighting French (La France Combattante), but also to a jubilant meeting with Winston Churchill. De Gaulle used the occasion to speak of “dangers to our alliance” caused by recent disagreements between the two. He was referring to problems in Syria and Madagascar, French territories where common aims of the Allies had been lost in a cloud of mutual suspicion.

Responding to de Gaulle’s criticisms, Churchill jumped to his feet, protesting “I am the friend of France!”

This was true, de Gaulle admitted. He added: “You even had the merit, after Vichy’s Armistice, of continuing to play the card of France. That card is called de Gaulle. Don’t lose it now!” It was a thinly veiled warning, but it worked. The meeting ended with nutual assurances that they would be together one day in France.

Churchill followed de Gaulle out of No. 10 Downing and onto the sidewalk. “I shan’t desert you,” the prime minister promised. “You can count on me.”[21]

That night, according to biographer Jonathan Fenby, de Gaulle encountered two French prostitutes on a London street while walking with his aide Maurice Schumann. One recognized de Gaulle and took a photo of him from her bag and asked him to sign it. When de Gaulle asked her name he found out that she and her companion were both married to Englishmen. He good-humouredly signed the photo by noting she had “worked for the entente cordiale.”[22]

The card of de Gaulle might by now have been having some effect on the course of the war in Africa, but it meant little to the thousands of French Jews who suffered harsh oppression in the Occupied Zone. On July 16 and 17, Paris police, operating under orders of the Gestapo and with the concurrence of René Bousquet, secretary-general of the Gendarmerie nationale, conducted two lighting raids. The first, begun at four o’clock on the morning of the 16th, swept 27,361 foreign Jews — refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied lands — from their homes throughout the city. They were lodged in Drancy Prison, in suburban Paris, and held for shipment to German death camps. The next day, police targeted French Jews. Émile Hennequin, the Paris prefect of police, instructed his 4,500 men to act with “maximum speed, without pointless speaking and without comment.” By afternoon, they had rounded up 12,984 Jews — including 4,051 children — and detained them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium (commonly known as the “Vel d’Hiv”), where they would await transfer to Germany.[23]

The raids, carried out under the code name Operation Spring Freeze, had been carefully planned in meetings at the Nazi SS office on avenue Foch. Adolf Eichmann had been among those in attendance. The Germans knew who to pick up because the Gestapo had their names from a list of the 150,000 Jews in Paris and its suburbs who had registered to obtain the yellow stars all Jews were being forced to wear. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the former French army officer (and Jew) who had been recording the descent of his brothers and sisters into hell, noted in his diary a letter from a young female social worker assigned to the round-up:

Fifteen thousand Jews have been “parked” in the Vel d’Hiv. It is horrible, demonic, something that grabs you around the throat so that you can’t cry out. When you come in, you can hardly breathe at first on account of the stench. Then you come into the big velodrome, which is black with people piled up against one another, some with bundles already dirty and grey, others with nothing at all.… The handful of toilets are stopped up, there is no one to fix them. Everyone is forced to go to the toilet along the walls.…

The state of mind of these people … is indescribable: hysterical screaming, cries of “Let us out!,” suicide attempts. Some women try to jump from the top of the bleachers. People throw themselves at us. “Kill us!” — “Don’t leave us here!” — “An injection so we can die!” … There are three doctors for fifteen thousand people, and not enough nurses. Our medical unit doesn’t know which way to turn. Not a single German here — they’re right, they would be torn to pieces. What cowards they are to make the French people do their dirty work.… If those who are guilty of these things don’t pay for them one day, there is no justice.[24]

Of the estimated 350,000 Jews living in France at the outbreak of the Second World War, some seventy-six thousand would be deported to Germany. Only around 2,500 would survive. It would take fifty-three years for the French government to acknowledge collective responsibility for the roundups.[25]

Another set of wild cards — those French who collaborated eagerly with the Germans — dominated art, culture, and business in Paris during the Occupation. Motion pictures continued to be made and nightclubs redesigned their shows to appeal to German troops. The Comédie Française and the Paris Opera barely skipped a performance, and only the Louvre, its most famous paintings having been sent for safekeeping to the Château Chambord in the Loire Valley, suspended normal operations.

Otto Abetz, now the German ambassador to France, organized a Groupe Collaboration that attracted forty-two thousand members by early 1944. Its tentacles reached into every aspect of French cultural life and the economy.[26] Industrialists were bought off with large orders from Germany. Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, purveyors of haute couture, were among the many who profited from the Nazi presence. Chanel, the grande dame of French fashion and the perfume industry, had benefited from the influence of officials in high places before the war and she continued to enjoy their protection after the fall of Paris. She moved into the Ritz Hotel with a German intelligence officer and laid claim to Parfums Chanel, the company manufacturing her Chanel No. 5, citing it as “property of the Jews,” which had been “abandoned” by its owners.[27] Christian Dior found success in dressing the wives of Nazi officers while in the employ of couturier Lucien Lelong. His sister Catherine worked for the Resistance, was captured and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Dior would go on after the war to establish his own house and give the world the New Look in 1947.

Actors and singers faced difficult decisions, confronted with the choice of accepting roles that required German approval, or leaving their chosen fields. Their reputations rested on the degree of enthusiasm they brought to their new engagements at the more than one hundred nightclubs that flourished in Paris. Maurice Chevalier returned to the Casino de Paris in September 1941 in a revue called Toujours Paris. The Germans took advantage of him having gone to Germany to sing for French prisoners of war, publicizing his presence in Berlin without mentioning the reason for his trip. For this and other indiscretions, Chevalier found himself under sentence of death in 1944 by a Free French court sitting in Algiers. He would later be exonerated.

Josephine Baker, the American black singer who held dual U.S. and French citizenship, described Chevalier as “one of those Frenchmen who believed that the Germans had won the war and that it was time things returned to normal — on German terms.” Ms. Baker, meanwhile, helped her French lover, a captain in the military intelligence, feed information to the Allies via Lisbon. She spent much of the war in North Africa and performed from Casablanca to Beirut, always as a supporter of Free France. In contrast, Edith Piaf and the equally legendary Mistinguett — born Jeanne Bourgeois — performed regularly in France during the war.[28]

More than entertainers, it was authors and journalists — from the young Albert Camus, who wrote for Combat, to Robert Brasillach, editor of the most reviled of the collaborationist press, Je suis partout — who most sharply etched the divisions between collaboration and resistance. Brasillach, one of the more vicious of the French fascists during the 1930s, served briefly in the French army before returning to Paris after ten months as a prisoner of war. The French government had closed his newspaper in May 1940 over its anti-war editorials. Relaunched under German auspices in 1941, Je suis partout under Brasillach was quick to applaud Nazi anti-Semitism. After the German roundup of Jews in the Vél’ d’Hiv episode in July 1942, he wrote, “We must remove the Jews in a block, and not keep the young ones.” Brasillach was fired in 1943 after a dispute with the owner, and was succeeded by Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, elder brother of the explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.[29]

Respected Paris newspapers such as Pierre Brisson’s Le Figaro shifted operations to the Vichy zone and others simply stopped publishing, but some adjusted to the new reality and embraced the occupier. The prominent French rightist Maurice Bunau-Varilla was proprietor of the Paris daily Le Matin. He prided himself on possession of one of the finest wine cellars in France. With his brother Philippe, he had made a fortune with a mouthwash and all-round tonic, Synthol, packaged in a black box that adorned the shelves of thousands of French stores. Maurice Bunau-Varilla believed with many other French rightists that Germany was better positioned to resist Communism than the Third Republic, which he saw as having been dragged down by leftist influences and “decadent” cultural practices. Before the war, Le Matin had flaunted its pro-appeasement sentiments with its headline hailing the Munich pact: “La victoire de la paix.” Bunau-Varilla welcomed the German Occupation with the headline: “La vie continue” (Life goes on). Seeking to justify its stand, the paper published an editorial that declared: “The duty of a newspaper is to inform public opinion, and search for truth.”

French literature needed a place to recover and revive, and it found it in Quebec. Between 1941 and 1945, more than twenty new French language publishers sprang up in Montreal. Catering to a global market — especially the United States and Latin America — they published French classics as well as new works by such writers as Jacques Maritain, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Jean Wahl, who had taken refuge in the United States. These writers and their new Quebec publishers pursued what they thought to be an exalted mission: to keep the flame of French thought and literature alight throughout the world.[30]