When Paris Went
Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944 - Ronald C.
Rosbottom
I’ve figured that I’ve read enough in recent years about
war and its effects on society and individual soldiers and civilians. As I grow
older, I find that I’m more easily appalled at the terrible lingering effects
of war on survivors and less able to shake off the contemptuous sadness that
politicians don’t seem to get smarter or less irresponsible.
However, when I saw this book sitting in a little
library, I couldn’t stop myself. I felt curious about what happens when the
worst totalitarians in the world occupy a city known for its openness,
tolerance, and liberty. Surprise, surprise – the Nazis really liked the
whorehouses, drinking, and looting and plundering, but they did everything they
could make daily life impossible and hazardous for the French. They controlled time with
curfews. They controlled urban space with no-go zones and barriers. They had a made a of rules and regulations that made everybody guilty of some infraction if the authorities bothered to look. They
controlled behavior like eating with shortages, ration cards, and long lines
for food. A Latvian once told me the Soviet strategy was to keep people off-balance by making mere errands a huge tiring hassle, so people would have no energy left for protest.
Rosbottom describes the collective trauma imposed on the
French by the Germans. Deprived of information from the outside world, the
French were starved for facts about Allied progress in other theaters. The
French had no idea how long the Occupation was going to last, so they felt the
uncertainty that contributes directly to anxiety and depression. Over time, in
daily life it was often difficult to say where the boundary between
collaboration and adaptation to a new reality was set. This is an interesting
theme as our country wrestles with the lines between “collusion” and
“cooperation” and “conspiracy.”
He also tells about local police and authorities playing a
major role in, among other things, the implementation of the Holocaust. A
special squad of French police went hunting for Jewish people to deport. And
the French authorities were efficient in the summer 1942 round-up of Jewish people who
were imprisoned at Vélodrome d'Hiver and transported from there to death camps.
Rosbottom arranges the book both thematically and
chronologically. He did research with
printed materials and looked for perspectives in many different interviews. In
addition to soldiers, politicians, members of the resistance movement and
ordinary civilians, he gives capsule views of a number of well-known artists
and writers such as Picasso, Camus, Cocteau, and Duras, whose work and
production were involved in examining the occupation. Rosbottom is a professor
of French, not a historian, so his interests and expertise are more related to the
humanities, not economics or sociology.
Readers who want background to Albert Camus's The Plague and Anthony Beevor's Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949
may find this book interesting. Although many readers will find Rosbottom’s
prose easy enough to comprehend, readers who prefer history written
novelistically a la Erik Larsen should stay away.
I thought of The Plague while reading the review and then you referenced it at the end. I think readers of The Plague think that it is exaggerated, but really truth is stranger than fiction much of the time.
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