The Invention of Paris (43 page)

Here lived
Cadix Sosnowski
F. T. P. Français.
Shot by the Germans
at the age of 17.
Died for France
26 May 1943.

On the right side, framing the serious face of a boy of about fifteen, the inscription recalls:

The home of
Brobion Henri,
F. T. P. F.
Soldier with the Fabien brigade.
Fallen on the field of honour
18 January 1945
at Habsheim, Alsace.

It was perhaps Cadix who brought his friend Henri into the Resistance – I imagine him with the insolent look and fine Slavic features of Marcel Rajman on the ‘red poster' (‘The killer is a Polish Jew, age 20, seven attacks', including the execution of the SS general Julius Reitter in the heart of Paris, close to the Trocadéro). His parents had probably arrived from Poland in the 1920s, like so many others living in Belleville-Ménilmontant:

My father was what you call a gentleman's outfitter. He could make a jacket, a suit, a man's waistcoat, he could make an overcoat . . . This was a trade that Frenchmen didn't follow. At the Ramponeau school we were all little reds. We didn't know what the words ‘Communist' and ‘popular front' meant, but see a red flag, and all the kids would line up behind it! All our brothers and sisters, who'd arrived from Poland illegally, without papers, language, resident permit, trade or money, went to work on the sewing machine.
¹

It was only natural that the children of these immigrants should join the Resistance:

I spent my childhood there, Rue des Cendriers, my childhood until the age of eighteen, when I was wanted by the Vichy police and left for the unoccupied zone in order to hide and do forestry, as I was wanted for Resistance activities. In other words: distribution of leaflets, scattering leaflets in cinemas in Rue de Ménilmontant – the Phénix, the Ménil-Palace . . . There were two of us, me and André Burty, who was shot. My group was decimated and came to an end. There were three or four survivors out of a group that had sections in each of the four quarters of the 14th arrondissement: Belleville, Père-Lachaise, Pelleport and Charonne . . . It's a miracle, to have survived all that we went through in those days. One evening, we released a red flag with a system of metal hooks that fastened to the electric line above some waste ground between Rue des Panoyaux and Rue des Cendriers, and it was only the next day that the firemen came to remove it.
²

Poles – whether Jewish or not – were a regular part of the scene in Red Paris. The two best generals of the Paris Commune were Poles.
³
Dombrowski,
whom the Russians had condemned to death after the Warsaw uprising, was in command of the forces on the Right Bank at the moment when everything collapsed. Louise Michel, on the barricade of Rue Delta, found a phrase worthy of Victor Hugo to relate his end: ‘Dombrowski passed with his officers. “We are lost,” he told me. “No,” I replied. The next time he passed he was on a stretcher; he was dead.'
⁴
It was 23 May when Dombrowski was struck down on the barricade of Rue Myrha. His body was taken to Père-Lachaise to receive its honours, but during the procession, ‘the Fédérés stopped the cortège and placed the corpse at the foot of the July column; some men, torches in their hands, formed into a circle, and all the Fédérés, one after the other, came to place a last kiss on the brow of the general'.
⁵

Wroblewski, likewise a career officer and a participant in the Warsaw insurrection, led the only counterattack during Bloody Week, from the Butte-aux-Cailles which he defended with the 101
^st
battalion, ‘all citizens of the 13th arrondissement and the Mouffetard quarter, undisciplined, undisciplinable, wild, rough, their clothes and flag torn, obeying only one order, that to march forward, mutineering when inactive, when hardly out of fire rendering it necessary to plunge them in again'.
⁶

Thanks to plaques showing where those who were shot or deported lived and met, it is possible to sketch the outline of a Resistance Paris, northeast of a line running from the Porte de Clignancourt to the Porte de Vincennes, passing through the Gare Saint-Lazare, the République and the Bastille, and spilling broadly out into the banlieue, from Saint-Ouen and Gennevilliers to Montreuil and Ivry.

If certain places are ambivalent in this respect – such as the Latin Quarter where Cavaillès could frequent the same café as Carcopino, or Saint-Germain where Antelme could have passed (and greeted?) Drieu La Rochelle in Rue Jacob – the other Paris, that of the Germans and their collaborators, closely corresponds to what it is customary to call the
beaux quartiers
. The Kommandantur Gross-Paris was on Place de l'Opéra, at the corner of Rue du Quatre-Septembre. The Gestapo had its headquarters in a private hotel on Avenue Foch, close to the Porte Dauphine, with a number of offices across the city, the most important of these being on Rue des Saussaies, in the premises of the Sûreté Générale. Its French
acolytes, the notorious Bonny and Lafont, established themselves on Rue Lauriston, near the Trocadéro. For some people, the very words Rue Lauriston or Rue des Saussaies still raise a shudder: ‘Certain streets in Paris are as degraded as a man covered with infamy,' as Balzac wrote at the start of
Ferragus
. The Propaganda-Staffel, where Ernst Jünger worked, was in the Hôtel Majestic, on Rue Dumont-d'Urville near the Étoile. General Speidel stayed at the Hôtel George-V. The pass office was a couple of steps away, on Rue Galilée. The German military tribunal
⁷
was on Rue Boissy-d'Anglas, and the recruitment office for the Waffen SS on Avenue Victor-Hugo. The (French) commissariat for Jewish affairs was on Rue des Petits-Pères, behind Place des Victoires. Brinon, ‘Paris delegate of the vice-president of the council of ministers', had his offices in the Hôtel Matignon, and he lived in a ‘little palace' on Avenue Foch.
⁸

‘When I think that I passed on my way the church of Saint-Roch, on the steps of which César Birotteau was wounded, and that at the corner of Rue des Prouvaires the pretty salesgirl Baret took Casanova's measurements in the back of her shop, and that these are just two tiny facts in an ocean of real or fantastic events – I am overwhelmed by a kind of joyous melancholy, a painful pleasure', Jünger wrote on 10 May 1943. Few Parisians would have been capable of such a diary entry, so disenchanted and accurate. But Jünger also limited his customary itineraries to the elegant quarters of the Right Bank and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He stayed at the Raphaël on Avenue Kléber, and frequented such luxury establishments as the Pâtisserie Ladurée on Rue Royale (3 June 1941), the Ritz, ‘along with Carl Schmitt who gave a lecture yesterday on the significance, from the point of view of public law, of the distinction between land and sea' (18 October 1941), and the Brasserie-Lorraine on the Place des Ternes, ‘after returning up Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré where I always experience a feeling of well-being' (18 January 1942). He dined at Prunier's (6 March 1942), at Lapérouse's (8 April 1942), at Maxim's (‘where I was invited by the Morands. We spoke among other things of American novels, in particular
Moby Dick
and
A High Wind in Jamaica
': 7 June 1942), and at the Tour d'Argent ‘where Henri IV
already ate heron pâté' (4 July 1942). He walked to the Bagatelle, where a French woman friend told him how ‘students are now being arrested for wearing yellow stars with various inscriptions such as “idealist” . . . These individuals do not yet know that the time for discussion has passed. They also imagine that the adversary has a sense of humour' (14 June 1942).

In the western part of the city, therefore, cultivated German officers, Francophile and even anti-Nazi, signed orders for the execution of young people who, in the eastern part, were making posters and throwing leaflets in the Ménilmontant cinemas.
⁹

The Champs-Élysées was the major axis of Paris collaboration, following an established tradition. Back in 1870, Louise Michel noted how café chairs and counters were broken there, after they had been the only cafés in Paris to open to the Prussians.
¹⁰
After the Popular Front, ‘the elegant crowd acclaimed Hitler in the Champs-Élysées cinemas at 20 francs a seat . . . The culmination of ignominy was perhaps reached in 1938, on this
cagoulard
Champs-Élysées where elegant ladies acclaimed Daladier's horrendous triumph and squealed: “Communists, pack your bags; Jews, off to Jerusalem”.' Later on, ‘the whole
cagoulard
elite of the country, hurrying back to its Champs-Élysées and its Boulevard Malesherbes, went into ecstasy over the politeness of the big blond Aryans. On this point there was only one cry from Auteuil to Monceau: the gentleman-executioners were correct, and even men of the world in their own way.'
¹¹
The changing of the Wehrmacht guard took place on the Champs-Élysées every day for four years: at midday, starting from the Rond-Point, the new guard paraded to music up to the Étoile, where it passed in review, before dispersing to the palaces of the general staff.

This political division of Paris goes back a long way. On 20 May 1871, just before the Versaillais entered Paris, Lissagaray took an imaginary friend, ‘one of the most timid men from the timid provinces', on a walk through the city. In the popular quarters – on the Place de la Bastille, ‘gay, animated by the gingerbread fair', at the Cirque Napoléon (Cirque d'Hiver) where five thousand people filled the place from the arena to the dome – the revolutionary festival continued despite (or because of?)
imminent catastrophe. The fashionable quarters were silent, plunged in darkness – even though, by an irony of fate, it was here that the shells fired by the Versaillais from Mont Valérien and Courbevoie fell, and the arch of the Arc de Triomphe had to be walled in against the gunfire coming up the Champs-Élysées. Their inhabitants, who only yesterday had animated the salons of the Empire, in the Tuileries and at Compiègne, expressed their feelings with no beating about the bush. Edmond de Goncourt, in the first few days: ‘The quay and the two large streets leading to the Hôtel de Ville are closed by barricades, with lines of National Guard in front of them. One reacts with disgust at the sight of their stupid and abject faces, on which triumph and drunkenness have the shine of a radiant villainy.'
¹²
And later, while Thiers was bombarding Paris: ‘Still waiting for the attack, for the deliverance that does not come. It is impossible to depict the suffering we experience, amid the despotism on the streets of this scum disguised as soldiers.'
¹³

For Maxime Du Camp, awarded the cross of the Légion d'Honneur for his conduct at the time of the ‘criminal insurrection' of June 1848, the Commune was ‘a fit of moral epilepsy; a bloody bacchanalia; a debauchery of petroleum and cheap spirits; a tempest of violence and drunkenness that made the capital of France into the most abject of swamps'.
¹⁴
For Théophile Gautier:

Under all the great cities there are dens for lions, cellars sealed with thick bars in which savage, stinking, poisonous beasts are kept, all the refractory perversities that civilization has been unable to tame, those who love blood, those who enjoy real fires as if they were fireworks, those with the taste for theft, those for whom an assault on modesty represents love . . . One day it so happened that the distracted keeper forgot the keys to the menagerie doors, and the wild animals spread out across the city with savage cries. It was from these opened cages that the hyenas of 1793 and the gorillas of the Commune broke loose.
¹⁵

Two subjects aroused particular hatred: women, and Gustave Courbet. Arsène Houssaye held that ‘with a kick to their skirts we should cast into the hell of malediction all these horrible creatures who have dishonoured
women in the saturnalias and impieties of the Commune'. For another writer:

Their women, these nameless harpies, roamed the streets of Paris for a whole week, pouring petrol into cellars and lighting fires everywhere. They are hunted down with muskets like the wild beasts that they are . . .
¹⁶
This infamous Courbet, who wanted to burn the Louvre museum, not only deserves to be shot if he has not been already, but the filthy pictures that he sold to the state should also be destroyed.

It was Leconte de Lisle who expressed himself in these terms. And Barbey d'Aurevilly, in
Le Figaro
for 18 April 1872:

The atrocious bandits of the Commune, with Monsieur Courbet as their clown, are not political enemies. They are the enemies of any society and any order. Can you say what their political ideal is? Of course not! Any more than you can say what is Monsieur Courbet's aesthetic ideal. Their ideal is to steal, and to kill and burn if need be, just as his ideal is to brutally paint the concrete fact, the vulgar and even abject detail.

In the great tradition of intelligence with the enemy against Red Paris, the Versaillais right were collaborators. The same men who pressed for the capitulation of Paris in the face of an army of inferior numbers, begged the Prussians to assist them against the Commune. Bazaine, under siege in Metz, wrote to Bismarck that his army was the only force that could control the anarchy – and indeed, it was the arrival of prisoners freed by the Prussians that gave the Versaillais, from the first days of May, a decisive advantage. On 10 March, even before the uprising of the Commune, Jules Favre wrote to Thiers:

We have decided to put an end to the strongholds of Montmartre and Belleville, and we hope this will be done without spilling blood. This evening, judging a second category of those accused for the events of 31 October, the council of war condemned Flourens, Blanqui, and Levrault
to the death penalty in their absence; and Vallès, present, to six months in prison. Tomorrow morning, I shall go to Ferrières to meet with the Prussian authorities on a number of points of detail.
¹⁷