It's hard to imagine the streets of Paris so bustling with life today once under foreign military rule, with curfew at 9pm and few people leisurely strolling the streets. I can hardly picture the busy, confident, well-dressed residents of today replaced by hungry (okay, they still are pretty thin), scared, and run-down people secretly raising chickens and rabbits in their apartments for a bit of extra food. But that was Paris's reality, and less than a lifetime ago.
Last weekend, the MIT Club de France joined with the Yale Club of France for a walking tour on the theme of the Occupation and Liberation of Paris. Having been working on the organization of this event since last spring, I was happy to see the event run so smoothly. It was fascinating to walk down streets I'd traveled so many times and discover there was still so much to learn.
The Place Vendôme, shown here, is home to several important sites for the resistance and liberation, including the Dior Building (to our right, not pictured), which housed the first resistance cell in summer 1940, and the Ritz Hotel, center, which was liberated on August 25 by Hemingway (actually a journalist, not a soldier). Hemingway marched down the Champs Elysées, turned off into the Place Vendôme, entered the Ritz Hotel, declared them liberated, promptly ordered 50 martinis for he and his entourage, and then stayed for three weeks without paying a cent.
The Galérie National du Jeu de Paume, where private works of art were stored en route to Germany/Austria. Here, Rose Valland, a secretary, art historian, member of the French resistance, and captain in the French military secretly recorded all of the stolen works of art and their destinations. About 45,000 works were later recovered because of her.
The French Naval Ministry building in the Place de la Concorde (soon looking for new tenants) still bears some marks from its Nazi occupation as you can see in the next pictures...
Close up on the Naval Ministry Building: if you look closely at the bottom panels of the shuttered windows, you can see holes bored into the shutters. These were made for Nazis to be able to spy and shoot out from the safety of the building. It's one of those details you might have never otherwise noticed, but it's hard to ignore once pointed out. Shocking today to imagine a battleground on Place de la Concorde, huh?
Brad, our tour guide, is telling us the story of one of the Rothschild family mansions near the US and British embassies. As the story went, the Germans took over the home and the butler stayed on after the family was deported. Upon the return of one of the Rothschilds after the war, the butler was asked, "So, how was my home while I was gone? It must have been quite quiet. Were there many visitors?" to which his butler responded, "In fact, yes. Pretty much the same crowd as before you left." Some friends they had.
The tour passed by the memorial to Jean Moulin, a major hero of the French Resistance who united the resistance under de Gaulle and was ultimately betrayed by an unknown source and killed at the hands of the Germans in 1943. Most resistance cells only consisted of teams of about three or four people such that, when a member of the resistance was caught, he or she couldn't rat out many others. The average survival time after entering into the resistance was only six months. The resistance grew a whole lot in the month of August 1944 as the Allies finally started taking back France, enough so that the French had a term for those who'd supported the Germans until it was a losing cause: the RMAs, "résistants du mois d'août" or "resistors of the month of August." Throughout the occupation, many French took part in more subtle and symbolic forms of resistance, one example being that all French people riding Line 1 of the metro would stand each time their train stopped at the Georges V station in silent salute to the British king. Try demanding that sort of anglosaxon loyalty from today's French.
Our tour ended by this monument to de Gaulle on the Champs-Elysées. It reads "Paris. Paris Outraged. Paris Broken. Paris Martyred. But Paris Liberated."
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