Americans in Nazi-Occupied Paris

Abstract

Americans in Nazi-Occupied Paris George Poe (bio) Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation. Penguin, 2010. 544 pages. Illustrated. $32.95; Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. Knopf, 2010. xiv + 400 pages. Illustrated. $28.95; Alan Furst, Mission to Paris. Random House, 2012. 256 pages. $27. And the Show Went On highlights the cultural program that continued with surprising vitality after a transitional slowdown during the initial months following France’s signing of the armistice in June 1940. This study by Alan Riding, a longtime writer for the New York Times, covers much of the same topical ground as Frederic Spotts’s The Shameful Peace, published a year earlier by Yale University Press and reviewed in the spring 2010 issue of this quarterly. A difference between the two accounts is that, true to his subtitle (How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation), Spotts focuses almost exclusively on French artists and writers; and, true to his title, Spotts concludes that, with but a few impressive exceptions, the group’s collective backbone was overly pliant. My review of Spotts’s study ended by mentioning a less severe analysis that came out at roughly the same time: Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under the Occupation (Five Ties Publishing, 2009). This volume, a collection of over 650 documents edited by Robert Paxton, Olivier Corpet, and Claire Paulhan (granddaughter of Paul Paulhan, the latter deserving to be remembered as a literary résistant), offers a more nuanced view of the “extreme challenges faced by writers and intellectuals during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation.” Riding’s And the Show Went On does merit mention inasmuch as my critical purpose is to consider studies of late in which the stories of Americans in Paris during World War ii are stressed (in following up my recent review in these pages of David McCullough’s study of Americans in nineteenth-century Paris during periods of war and peace). In fact Riding dedicates two full chapters to two very different Americans: the first being the Harvard-educated journalist Varian Fry, who arrived in Marseilles in August of 1940 with substantial resources from the Emergency Rescue Mission to help Parisian artists and intellectuals—as well as other European artists working in France—obtain overseas visas and seek asylum, principally in the United States. Fry was “like an angel from heaven” and quite the American hero. Florence Gould, on the other hand, was the quintessential rich American living in Paris (born in San Francisco to French parents, her prodigious wealth came from a second marriage to Frank Jay Gould, son of Jay Gould). She was a darker sort of angel, helping and enabling—via [End Page 167] questionable contacts with Nazi, Gestapo, and Milicien friends—many of the intellectuals who frequented her wartime salon and who delighted in the unusually good food and champagne found there, given the times. A report by the prosecutor’s office of the Département de la Seine in 1948 concluded that “this Franco-American appears to have enjoyed singular protections during the occupation, and if it is not certain that she committed the crime of intelligence with the enemy, it is certain that we have no reason to congratulate her for her attitude”—enough to merit Florence Gould’s high ranking on Spotts’s collabo list, in spite of a certain indulgence that she was subsequently accorded, owing, it could be argued, to her generous Franco-American patronage of the arts. Charles Glass’s study, unlike Riding’s and Spotts’s, focuses almost exclusively on Americans in Paris, though the volume’s subtitle does frame Glass’s examination within the very same period of Nazi occupation, 1940–1944. This book offers fascinating and well-documented biographical presentations of Americans—both men and women—who chose to remain in Paris during the occupation (on the female side, some 350 American women would be rounded up in 1942, following the American declaration of war against Nazi Germany). Sylvia Beach’s tale is woven throughout the chronological parts of the study, and her refusal to abandon the Paris that failed to retain...