A history of Paris during Nazi occupation

A history of Paris during Nazi occupation

Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood. We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But just as Keith Lowe made plain in his magisterial “Savage Continent” (2012) that, in the years following Germany’s surrender in 1945, France was a place not of peace but of widespread hatred and violence, so Ronald C. Rosbottom leaves no doubt, in “When Paris Went Dark,” that the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation:

“Even today, the French endeavor both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty — known by all as the Armistice — had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

Rosbottom, who teaches at Amherst College, has written an unconventional account of the Nazi occupation, focusing on its thematic aspects rather than providing a standard chronological history. His book “aims to give an account of how the Parisians viewed the Germans and vice versa; of how the Parisian citizen figured out a code of daily conduct toward his nemesis and effected it; of how the citizen of the Occupation handled his psychological and emotional responses to the presence of a powerful enemy; and of how each side perpetuated real and symbolic violence on the other.” It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a vicious and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation” and that, Rosbottom persuasively argues, continued long thereafter.