Crucial time

AMERICANS IN PARIS: LIFE AND DEATH UNDER NAZI OCCUPATION 1940-44 By Charles Glass, HarperCollins, £15

“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas….

“Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?” inquired the Duchess.

“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Andrew Roberts, in his new history of World War II, commented acidly on Charles de Gaulle’s attitude towards Britain and the United States of America (without whose material and human assistance the liberation of France would have been impossible), that his chief diet was the hand that fed him. In the post-war years, the blatant anti-Americanism displayed by France was such that de Gaulle opted out of the military aspects of Nato. One of his reasons for opposing the entry of Britain into the then EEC was its “special relationship” with the US.

Only in recent years has Nicolas Sarkozy (the son of Hungarian immigrants) gone some way to revive what was once a very cordial relationship. The US remembered with gratitude the diplomatic and military support given by France to the 13 colonies perched precariously on the Atlantic rim of the new continent, while the Western world’s first democratic constitution owed much to the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers. The transatlantic love affair occasioned the gently caustic attention of Oscar Wilde, in the quotation given above, and led many Americans to fight on the Allied side long before their country joined World War I. Films and music celebrated the Franco-American “Entente” — notably George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, from which Charles Glass derives the title of this fascinating and detailed book.

The high point of this relationship was in the in the inter-war period. The Left Bank in Paris became the haunt of writers and artists — James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, to mention the most well known — and Ernest Hemingway, whose book summed up the spirit of the age: A Moveable Feast. And in the centre of this remarkable corner of this “unique and fertile realm” of Anglo-American letters was the bookshop and lending library, “Shakespeare and Comapany”, of Sylvia Beach. African-Americans like the singer, Josephine Baker, were attracted by the absence of colour prejudice; she became a star far from her segregated homeland. (She repaid France’s affection by using her fame to help the Resistance.)

Charles Glass has a grasp of history and gives the background to the story he has chosen to tell: the fate of those Americans who stayed in Paris during the years of Nazi occupation. As he has written elsewhere: “There are many histories of the Lost Generation who inhabited Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as of the Americans who settled there after World War II. This is the first book to look at those who stayed on during the most crucial period in the modern history of Paris.”

When war broke out, a great many Americans of varied backgrounds were living in Paris and actively supported the French cause. By the time the Nazi blitzkrieg rolled into Paris, so trusted was the American ambassador, William C. Bullitt, that he became the temporary mayor of Paris, handling its surrender as an open city — thus saving it from the fate of cities like Warsaw.

Many of Bullitt’s compatriots stayed on, taking advantage of America’s continued neutrality. Although Glass has given anecdotal evidence about lesser known figures — like the African-American Charles Anderson (who remained in Paris throughout the Occupation) — he has chosen to focus on a small group of people connected with the American Library and the American Hospital, Sylvia Beach, and the flamboyant and dodgy businessman, Charles Bedaux.

Initially, relationships were not unfriendly. Among the German occupiers were officers who had spent time in the US, and recognized acquaintances from the embassy staff. The reactions of Americans to the new occupiers were varied. Some chose to collaborate — until November 1941, this was not a dirty word — like Florence Jay Gould who ran a right-wing literary salon throughout the Occupation: among its habitués was Jean Cocteau. Others, like Sylvia Beach, wept as the Nazi jackboots marched into her beloved city, and tried to give covert help to Jewish friends in the Resistance. (After 1941, her bookshop was closed, never to reopen.) For Sumner Jackson, chief surgeon at the American Hospital, resistance was the only option, for which he and his family paid a very heavy price. Jackson emerges as a true hero among the Americans in Paris.

Count Adelbert de Chambrun, a direct descendant of Lafayette, and his wife, Clara, a relative of Franklin Roosevelt, were among the most prominent American residents of Paris, and closely connected to equally prominent institutions: the American Hospital and the American Library. Socially conservative, with close family links to the Vichy regime — their son, Rene, married the daughter of Pierre Laval, Vichy’s infamous premier — they used their connections to preserve these institutions, which remained open even after the US joined the war in December 1941. The family paid the price for this perceived collaboration. As Glass writes, “Rather than pay them tribute for having saved Paris’s two main institutions from the Nazis, the government curried favour with the Gaullists by distancing them from a couple who had been too close to Pierre Laval and Marechal Petain.” Their son and daughter-in-law had to go into hiding.

More ambiguous was the figure of Charles Bedaux — at whose chateâu the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been married. He flourished during the Occupation, using his French, German and American contacts. After the Anglo-American landings in Africa, he offered to work with the Americans but was accused of treason and committed suicide in despair. (According to Glass, many of the documents on Bedaux are still closed to public scrutiny by the FBI.)

Glass has chosen to focus on personal stories of individuals as they sought to negotiate their way through the perils of foreign occupation and the political morass of Vichy France. He has used a wide range of sources, from personal diaries to police files. Lest American readers feel virtuous for freeing France from Nazism, he has a telling anecdote: among the crowds who welcomed the American liberators was the African-American expatriate, Charles Anderson. He looked in vain for Negro [sic] soldiers in vain. Some things hadn’t changed since African-American soldiers had been banned from the victory parade in 1918. “Paris had been liberated. America would take longer.”

In the end, the reader cannot help but feel that Paris had a comparatively easy time, in comparison with the fate of Warsaw or Kiev, and the horrendous destruction visited on German cities such as Dresden or Hamburg. Nevertheless, this richly detailed book will illuminate a lesser known aspect of World War II. Its portrayal of the variety of human responses to war and occupation is as interesting as the grand narratives of titanic battles and campaigns.