Rosbottom, Ronald C. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. ISBN 978-0-316-21744-6. Pp. xxxii + 447. $28. Here readers become cautious flaneurs passing from one end of Paris to the other during the 1,500 days, from June 1940 to August 1944, when the lights went out, a swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower, and France was officially on German time. Rosbottom illuminates these dark years by describing chronologically the atmosphere of everyday, ordinary, Parisian life under the Occupation which, as a cultural historian, he gleans from photographs, newspapers, songs, pamphlets, diaries, novels, plays, letters, wartime archives, memoirs, and films. He begins with the opening dance of acquaintance, a minuet, “with precise moves and little touching,” that avoids direct confrontation between the occupied and the 20,000 occupiers who suddenly appear everywhere. With good weather, availability of food, a working métro, and with each guardedly following the other’s lead, this dance lasted until winter and then fully collapsed in June 1941.With the fleecing of the Jews, the initial roundups, the massive July 1942 Vel d’Hiv rafle, the creation of the Service du travail obligatoire and la milice, it was hardly possible to deny Nazi intentions.Attitudes shifted from accommodation to mutual suspicion and then open hostility. Rosbottom somehow taps into the arrhythmia of Paris’s occupied heartbeat, signaling its darkness, silence, confusion, anxiety, bicycles, need for flashlights, long lines, lack of cars, sound of birds, food rationing, paranoia, noisy wooden-soled shoes, large numbers of cats in its streets, and densely-packed public transports. Using German sources, he records the sexual and psychological loneliness experienced by the occupiers but also underscores the attraction of the “sexualized German body” and mentions that between 80,000 and 200,000 Franco-German babies were born in France during the Occupation. Perhaps the most original part of Rosbottom’s study is his analysis of the narrowing of time and space as the Germans “occupy” Paris. Here we discover both agoraphobia (military and police everywhere) and claustrophobia, temporal restrictions (curfews), and above all spatial constraints: air raids, surveillance, crowded buses, no cars, the “repedestrianization ” of the nation’s capital; people closeted in their apartments with rooms closed off for heating purposes, some living only in their kitchens, keeping diaries which were their only escape.No one was more“occupied”than Paris’s Jews: constrained by anti-Semitic legislation and propaganda, lost jobs and businesses, frozen bank accounts, seized furniture, banned from parks, cafés, cinemas, libraries, restaurants, and publicly branded with the star. Many people profited from the presence of the occupiers (restaurants, shops, the entertainment industry, bordellos). 20% of French people actively collaborated with the Nazis while roughly 2% formally joined the Resistance. As the noose tightened, from early 1943 onward, violent resistance grew, including Jewish resistance among young, leftist Jews such as Tommy Elek whose courageous exploits are narrated. This stimulating and well-written text ends with the “uncontrollable hysteria” of the post-liberation: settling of scores among Gaullists, 250 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 Reviews 251 Communists, resisters, and collaborators; “misogynist scapegoating” of “horizontal collaborators”; and the birth of the Myth of Resistancialism which would hold fast until the early 1970s. Whitman College (WA) Patrick Henry Creative Works edited by Jean-François Duclos Alem, Kangni. La légende de l’assassin. Paris: Lattès, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7096-3642-1. Pp. 213. 18 a. À soixante-dix ans, et trente-quatre années après les faits, Me Appolinaire, brillant avocat, reste hanté par le procès de K.A., le criminel le plus honni, le plus médiatisé de l’État de TiBrava. La peine capitale assénée à son client continue d’obséder le vieil homme. Les éventuels mangeurs d’âmes, les Obrafos, agressivement pointés du doigt par le pasteur Hightower, ont-ils donné à ce procès une dimension métaphysique audessus des moyens clairvoyants du droit rationnel? Ces doutes, Alem a su les créer chez le lecteur de La légende de l’assassin, un titre qui pourrait trouver un substitut approprié dans La légende des assassins...
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Oct 8, 2021
Nicolas A Karakatsanis + 1
Open Access
