La France sous l'Occupation

Collaborative Artists
The French cultural establishment's inglorious response to Nazi rule
By MARK FALCOFF
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The Shameful Peace
By Frederic Spotts
Yale, 283 pages, $35

The history of France under German rule during World War II is a depressing
tale of collaboration, corruption and subsequent denial that taxes the will
of even the most determined Francophile. Perhaps not surprisingly it was not
a French scholar but an American one, Robert Paxton, who produced the first
serious examination of the period (1940-44), followed by the Swiss historian
Philippe Burrin and a group of young French historians working out of the
Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. Now comes Frederic Spotts, a British
writer known for his studies of German history. With "The Shameful Peace" he
lifts the lid on one of the least known -- and most shameful episodes -- of
the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied
France.

German officers among the customers at the Café de la Paix on the Place de
l'Opéra in late 1940

After the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940, armistice agreements
signed at Compiègne parceled France into two halves more or less along an
east-west axis. A supposedly independent (but collaborationist) French
government headed by the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain was based in the spa
town of Vichy, while Paris and its northern hinterland were placed under
direct German military rule.
The first effect of the armistice was to convert the French capital into a
kind of vacation paradise for the German occupier. Nazi flags draped
Garnier's opera house; German officers went on shopping sprees; some of the
capital's leading hostesses vied for the privilege of entertaining the new
authorities. Representatives of leading Nazi figures, notably Hermann
Goering, sacked the homes of wealthy Jews for masterpieces of art -- an
expedition in which some of the city's grandest art dealers were pleased to
assist. Even low-ranking German functionaries partook of the feast. "I never
lived so well anywhere," a secretary-typist later recalled. "We could buy
what we wanted. . . . [It was] the most wonderful and unforgettable time of
my youth."
"By the end of the decade several centuries of French ascendance in
European culture had been broken and with it several millennia of European
domination of Western culture." Read an excerpt from 'A Shameful Peace'
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In defeated France, Hitler pursued two quite different objectives. One was
to extract resources and manpower to wage war against Britain and later the
Soviet Union; the other was to integrate France into a subordinate role
within a European confederation ruled from Berlin. This was a complicated
task that the Germans did not always pursue coherently, since the two
objectives were often antagonistic -- it is difficult to pretend, while
pillaging a country, that it has even the slightest autonomy. One area where
the Germans completely understood what they were about, however, was in the
co-opting of the French cultural establishment.

The La Place Blanche café (in 1940) across from the Moulin Rouge cabaret was
reserved for the exclusive use of German soldiers during the occupation of
Paris.
What made the French experience of German occupation so different from that
of, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia or Greece was that Hitler, far from trying
to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction
from his other demands. During the years of occupation the German
authorities positively encouraged literature, theater and the arts -- as
long as Jews, Freemasons or (after June 1941) communists were excluded. The
country was also subjected to an inundation of high German culture. German
orchestras, musicians, artists and writers were constantly on furlough in
the French capital. The German Institute in Paris became the center of
cultural and social activities. And, it must be said, there was considerable
traffic in the opposite direction, with French musicians, writers and
artists making the pilgrimage to Berlin or other German cities.
The most obvious minions of Berlin were fascist or protofascist
intellectuals who had been at war with French democracy long before the
armistice. Their number included Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Paul Morand,
Louis-Fernand Céline and, most notably, the novelist and journalist Robert
Brasillach. Here there could be no surprises. Other writers, however, had
not been fascist proponents in the 1930s and simply went with the flow. As
novelist Jean Giono put it with great economy of words: "I prefer being a
living German to a dead Frenchman."

French author Robert Brasillach, an advocate of fascism, was prosecuted in
1945 for collaborating with the Nazis. He was convicted and executed by
firing squad.
At a time when both food and fuel were painfully scarce, many cultural
figures preferred to live well rather than poorly. The list here is far
longer -- a virtual "Who's Who" of the French artistic world -- and includes
pianists Alfred Cortot and Lucienne Delforge, publisher Robert Denoël,
playwright Sacha Guitry, singers Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf, the
comedian Fernandel, the opera singer Germaine Lubin, the film star Arletty.
Even as iconoclastic a figure as Jean Cocteau found it easy to adjust to the
new order of things. His record of the times, Mr. Spotts writes, "gives the
impression that the Germans he knew were visiting tourists rather than
officers of an invading army."
Not all intellectuals were so pliable. André Gide essentially turned to
inner exile. Jean Guéhenno refused to write under German occupation. A few,
notably André Malraux, joined the Resistance. Some simply let the war pass
them by. The most remarkable example is that of Pablo Picasso, who in spite
of his known Spanish Republican identity, was left alone by the Germans. In
fact, there seems to have been no censorship of painting at all in occupied
France -- Nazi collectors bought up valuable modernist works along with the
academic examples officially preferred in Germany. Even more paradoxical:
Censorship was lightest in the Vichy-controlled part of the country.
Cultural life there continued pretty much as before the war. This happy
circumstance came to an end after the Allied invasion of North Africa in
late 1942, which caused the Wehrmacht to extend its control to the whole of
the country.
After the Liberation in July 1944 there was, obviously, an attempt to settle
scores, but in a haphazard fashion that left no one satisfied. The only
writer tried and executed for his role during the occupation was Robert
Brasillach. Drieu La Rochelle avoided that fate by committing suicide.
Denoël was gunned down on the street. Cortot, Céline and Morand lay low
outside France until things cooled down.
The need to nourish the myth of la France combattante -- the cornerstone of
Gaullist ideology -- required far fewer collaborators than actually existed.
The myth was also necessary to wrest the nimbus of Resistance from the
communists, who claimed exclusive rights to it.
Then, almost before anyone knew it, anti-Americanism became the ideology of
choice for French intellectuals and artists, bringing both left and right
happily together. Carefully and authoritatively written, "The Shameful
Peace" peels back the pages of history and reminds us of events that many
would still prefer to forget.
Mr. Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise
Institute.
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