In the summer of 1940 the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory.  In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes.  Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat.  It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in the daily horrors of war. 

It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy.  It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves.  It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars and why a, very gaullist, Parisian girl was excited by the hostility of respectable French people when she pinned a German imperial eagle to her dress.  It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz.

‘an absorbing new book’
Economist

‘Vinen’s is an immaculately researched, well-written and original book… compelling’
Literary Review

'he produces a fat dossier of myth-puncturing detail'
Spectator

‘an utterly absorbing, eye-opening account’
Scotsman

A piece by Richard Vinen
Paris by Night: 1940-1944

For Paris, the years of the German occupation were 'dark' in a literal sense.  Like most wartime cities, it was blacked out to avoid providing an easy target for bombers.  In addition to this, the Germans imposed their own time on occupied France, so that French people were obliged to go to bed and get up at what many of them found to be an unnaturally early hour.  Most importantly, the Germans imposed a curfew.  This didn’t mean that Paris nightlife stopped entirely.  A few fashionable nightclubs just stayed open all night so that their patrons could avoid being arrested as they went home.  The Germans ran dreary clubs and cinemas for their own troops, but the more adventurous soldiers sought out French company.  The diaries of the writer Ernst Junger, posted to Paris with the Wehrmacht, are full of accounts of dinners at the Tour d'Argent and encounters with attractive women - a typical evening had him watching naked dancers and then talking to one of them, a White Russian, about literature.  Charged with arresting prostitutes in Montmartre one evening, he came across a pretty French girl of seventeen who stood to attention like the soldiers whom she frequented.  Junger kept her in his office for the evening to liven the place up 'like a canary'.

Most German soldiers were less worldly than Junger and, just as importantly, less fluent in French.  Encounters with French civilians provided many occasions for misunderstanding.  Naïve young men from small towns in Bavaria persuaded themselves that a few kind words from a cabaret dancer or bar girl meant that their affections were reciprocated.  When one of these young men shot himself outside the flat of a French girl, the Paris police wearily attributed his act to a 'chagrin d'amour'.  Drunken oafs made the mistake of being over familiar with girls who were under the protection of eminent Pigalle gangsters - long before the beginning of large-scale armed Resistance in August 1941, several hundred shots had been fired at German soldiers in Paris (mostly in bar room brawls).

However, after a certain time of night, the streets themselves were empty.  By the small hours of the morning, only French policemen, German officers, and those men (often criminals in the eyes of the French law) who had managed to obtain German passes were allowed on the street.  For the lucky few, walking in night-time Paris had its charms.  There were almost no private cars during the Occupation, so the city was quieter and less polluted than it had been for years.  By 1943, there was a particular frisson to walking around the empty streets of the Marais or the Latin Quarter.  Most people believed that the Germans would blow the city up when they retreated and consequently that its architecture would soon be consigned to the history books.

There were some odd meetings on the Paris streets after dark.  A French policeman complained that he had been groped by a German sentry on duty in the Avenue Foch.  Other meetings were less amusing.  Frequently, French policemen went to investigate gunfire or suspicious behaviour only to find that the objects of their suspicion were Frenchmen working for the German authorities.  Such Frenchmen often had long criminal records and had often been heavily armed by their new patrons.  All this put the French police in an awkward position.  One nervous, beat cop had to ask members of the 'Legion of Volunteers against Bolshevism' to check their sub-machine guns into the cloakroom before they entered a Paris cinema.  In the celebrations that accompanied the second anniversary of the Legion's formation, over seventy Paris policemen were injured.

One effect of the Occupation was to blur the line between policing and crime.  The Germans hired former criminals because such people could provide them with information, access to the black market and had a capacity for doing dirty work.  Henri Lafont had been a petty criminal during the 1930s, but during the Occupation (having formed an alliance with the former policeman Pierre Bonny) he became an eminent intermediary between the Paris underworld and the Gestapo.  He lived like a character in a Melville film - torturing, killing, spending money freely and maintaining a string of mistresses - including a black singer with a false Irish passport.  Other criminals had less formal associations with the Germans.  Some of them were deserters from the German army or from the various German-sponsored French agencies that had been set up during the Occupation.  Some had acquired German uniforms or the ability to mutter a few words in German.  Some had simply bought false identity cards in bars.  Such people found that they could support themselves by pretending to be 'German policeman' and blackmailing money out of the most vulnerable people in Paris - particularly foreign-born Jews.  The Paris police reported over one thousand crimes involving 'false policemen' and Marcel Aymé - so often the chronicler of the Paris black economy - even wrote a story about the phenomenon.

In August 1944, the Germans left Paris.  Ernst Junger, in a characteristically self-conscious gesture, left a rose on his bedside table at the Hotel Raphael, before joining the convoys or tanks and lorries heading east.  Most of those desperate men who had worked for the Germans, including Bonny and Lafont, were shot.  The German commander disobeyed his orders to blow the city up (thus ensuring that Paris, along with Prague, is one the two great European cities to have survived the Second World War almost unscathed).  Paris nightlife resumed its normal rhythm almost as soon as the first American soldier reached the Boulevard St Michel.  The writers and artists who had been exiled from their spiritual home for the past four years (from Ernest Hemingway to Lee Miller) converged on the Hotel Scribe.  One of the great rendezvous manqué's of modern times took place when Albert Camus failed to turn up for his meeting with George Orwell.

Curiously, the legacy left by the dark nights of wartime Paris was a literary one.  In 1943, the collaborationist Robert Brasillach wrote that the war provided an ideal atmosphere for a new kind of detective story.  After the war a new kind of detective story (the roman noir or 'dark novel') did emerge.  Its pessimism and moral ambiguity owed much to the war years and some of the best such stories - such as Didier Daeninckx's Murder for Memory (which was translated into English last year) still revolve around the legacy of the Occupation.