'Paris 1944': How France embraced the Nazis, resistance, then themselves - review

On August 25, 1944, Charles de Gaulle delivered an emotional address to a large crowd at the Hôtel de Ville. Paris, he declared, had been “liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help and assistance of the whole of France, of that France which fights, of the only France, of the true France, of the eternal France.”

De Gaulle’s oration, according to Patrick Bishop, author of Paris 1944: Occupation, Resistance, Liberation was “only lightly anchored in the reality that those who heard him had lived through.”

In Paris 1944, Bishop, a journalist and author of several military histories of World War II, draws on the experiences of a large ensemble of locals and foreigners, collaborators and resisters, to provide an elegantly written, engaging, and enlightening account of that reality during the four years the Nazis occupied the city.

Following the sudden and inexplicable surrender of the French Army in 1940, German occupiers, Bishop writes, “pretended that Paris was still Paris.”

They reopened theaters, movie houses, nightclubs, and restaurants, and welcomed back entertainers “who exemplified Frenchness,” such a Édith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier. Although Nazis denounced jazz as degenerate, they “turned a blind eye” to performances of it.

Within months, however, the occupiers rationed food, malnutrition was rife, dinners that had been “observed with quasi-religious reverence” by Parisian families were reduced to “pit stops,” and coal shortages kept apartments bitterly cold. 

By 1942, the “numbness of defeat and occupation was wearing off,” the antipathy French citizens had always felt for “the Boche” was returning, and Parisians were “biting back.”

Meanwhile, many French citizens were embracing the collaborationist, authoritarian Vichy government, led by octogenarian Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of World War I who advised his countrymen to accept their punishment and get on with their lives. But under the guise of bringing the nation together, Bishop demonstrates, he “shrank the definition of Frenchness,” excluding communists, Freemasons, foreigners, and Jews.

On his own initiative, no doubt to curry favor with the Nazis, Pétain banned Jews from the army, government offices, and important professions. 

By the beginning of 1941, about 40,000 foreign Jews had been arrested and sent to detention camps. In 1942, Pétain complied with a German order requiring all Jews over the age of six to wear a yellow Star of David. In July, in what became known as “la grande rafle” (“the big roundup”), French police arrested over 13,000 Jews, most of whom were forced into cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz.

Many French citizens, Bishop points out, showed little curiosity about the fate of Jews. Far fewer went as far as Robert Brasillach, the fascist editor of Je suis partout. Every week, his paper revealed the names of Jews who had altered their identities and gone into hiding. 

“Antisemitism isn’t a German invention,” Brasillach maintained. “It’s a French tradition.”

By the end of 1943, as it became clear the Nazis would be defeated, the once tiny, poorly armed resistance became much “more than a nuisance” to the occupiers and was increasingly viewed favorably by the people of Paris, who had held back until they were certain which side would win. Parisians also looked to London, where de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, who had been condemned to death by the Vichy government, was building relationships with the British, Americans, and Soviets, and sending radio messages via the BBC that he would soon return home.

Paris 1944 is at its best when Bishop addresses how – and by whom – the city was liberated. American and British generals, he indicates, saw Paris as an “ink spot on the map,” with little strategic significance. Liberating the city would waste time, require house-to-house skirmishes, and saddle the Allies with feeding millions of hungry residents. While resistance leaders wanted Allied armies “to go hell for leather for Paris,” de Gaulle insisted that the city be seen as having liberated itself, with Free French forces leading the way. Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of German forces in Paris, knew he had neither the means nor the manpower to carry out Hitler’s order to reduce Paris to “a field of ruins,” feared either a summons from Berlin or post-war prosecution and sought to square the circle.

In the end, with more than a little help from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, de Gaulle got most of what he wanted. And Herbert Clark, an American network radio reporter, assured 15 million listeners that “Paris is still Paris. Her heart is still warm and young and gay. Nothing the Nazis have done has penetrated into the spirit of the city.” 

Paris’s “grand boulevards and the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter,” Bishop agrees, “look much the same today as they did when the bullets were flying.”

Then again, he acknowledges that over 80,000 French women gave birth following a liaison with a German occupier, and mothers and children lived with “sideways glances and whispered remarks for years to come.”

Bishop indicates that to restore unity, self-respect, and establish his right to lead the country, de Gaulle started “bulldozing away the landscape of recent memory.” He pushed the myth of self-liberation, downplayed the role of the resistance, and insisted that Vichy did not represent “the real France.” Convinced that “the sooner collaborators were forgotten the better,” de Gaulle commuted the vast majority of death sentences.

Bishop does not, alas, weigh in on whether these developments also provide evidence that Maurice Chevalier was right and that “Paris sera toujours Paris” [“Paris will always be Paris”]. 

Glenn C. Altschuler is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

• PARIS 1944: OCCUPATION, RESISTANCE, LIBERATION
• By Patrick Bishop
• Pegasus Books
• 374 pages; $35