Collaborative Artists

The Shameful Peace
By Frederic Spotts
Yale, 283 pages, $35

A shameful chapter in French history, in some cases the coexistence, in others the collaboration, with Nazis when they conquered and occupied France in June, 1940, is exemplified by this quote attributed to novelist Jean Giono: "I prefer being a living German to a dead Frenchman."

France has not gone through the process of examining its national and individual behaviors during WW2. The national myth is that of resistance, and even when facts clash against that mythology (as when it came out that Francois Mitterand himself had collaborated) the French manage to squirm out of examining their actions and behavior properly.


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.

One would expect such things as the reserving of restaurants for soldiers of the occupying army.

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.

Why Hitler left half of a conquered land purportedly independent is a fascinating topic; I wonder if he did that with any other conquered nation.

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.

Collaboration took different forms; punishing, and steraling from, Jews was obviously something some French were all too happy to do.

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.

France had long been the preeminent cultural force in Europe; conquering it broke that.

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.

Perhaps even Hitler was something of a Francophile.

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

Seeing this picture makes it difficult to deny that some French not just made do with the German occupation, but lived in it. Of course, not all did so. The French Resistance was very real.

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.