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When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944
By Ronald C. Rosbottom, Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of French and European Studies

Reviewed by Rand Richards Cooper '80

For 50 months, from June 1940 to August 1944, Nazi Germany occupied a vanquished and humiliated Paris. Ronald Rosbottom's astute new book takes us inside this strange interlude in the life of the city, when the Nazi swastika fluttered atop the Eiffel Tower. Rosbottom, whose love affair with Paris began a half-century ago, during a collegiate year abroad, comes to the task not as a historian but as a "storyteller and guide," whose goal is to catch "the heartbeat, the intangible rhythms, of life during a period of sustained anxiety."

To that end he consults unpublished diaries and memoirs and interviews two dozen now-elderly eyewitnesses to the occupation. His literary sources range from Gertrude Stein, to the aristocratic German novelist Ernst Jünger, to obscure works that elucidate aspects of daily life under the Nazis-for example, Paul Achard's 1941 book La Queue, which described the pervasive reality of waiting in line and the culture of gossipy solidarity it sponsored.

Primarily keyed to the French experience, When Paris Went Dark also assays the viewpoint of the German occupiers. Rosbottom explores their ambivalence, the mix of condescension and cultural covetousness with which they viewed the city. He quotes liberally from guidebooks that catered to the many "camera-toting, bargain-seeking, question-asking, naively curious German-speaking visitors" who flooded Paris, buying up luxury goods and mementos, treating the city "as though it were a huge amusement park"—not least of all Hitler himself, who in his lone visit posed for a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, an image that Rosbottom adroitly describes as "waver[ing] between the sinister and the kitschy." It was the conqueror as tourist.

When Paris Went Dark is a surprising book. Rosbottom is not interested simply in chronicling the political and historical timeline of the occupation, but rather in "describing the claustrophobic trauma of living in a familiar environment that has suddenly become threatening."  His approach is persistently psychological, deploying such concepts as trauma, alienation, disconnection, disorientation and anxiety. Noting the steep reduction of urban bustle during the German occupation, he comments that Parisians lost "the patina of urban noise...a sensory cocoon that provides a feeling of protection." Citing philosopher Gaston Bachelard on the topic of "felicitous" and "hostile" spaces, he describes how shops, sidewalks, restaurants, even bordellos were taken over by the Germans, pushing Parisians to the margins—literally and metaphorically—in their own city and saddling them with feelings of "spatial, tactile, and pyschological unease." 

The effort to trace the effects of military occupation across the entire spectrum of the human being includes a psychosexual perspective; describing what he calls "the libidinal Occupation," Rosbottom asserts that many Parisians felt "a sexual frisson" at the sight of "handsome, virile" German soldiers sunning semi-nude on rooftops and riverbanks. Assessing the role played by teenagers in the Resistance, he comments that a typical adolescent's "almost erotic need to form new affective relationships" aided recruitment.  Such observations can border on the eccentric-as when he notes that, amid the overcrowding of public transport, "Parisians of all social and economic classes were aware of the body odor of their compatriots." This is social history attentive to the fundamentals of mind and body.

A psychological approach to understanding the pressures of occupation complicates the issue of moral reckoning. For Parisians, Rosbottom writes, "[d]aily life was...a matter of accommodation to unexpected and noxious events." So when does accommodation cross over into collaboration? When you were gratuitously pleasant to a German officer? When you slept with one? "[T]hese are questions that deserve thoughtful answers," Rosbottom insists, and his appalled account of the violent reprisals that followed liberation shows just how often, and how cruelly, this thoughtfulness went missing—especially in the brutal scapegoating of women known or rumored to have had sexual relations with German soldiers.

When Paris Went Dark is packed full with historical curiosities. We learn that French teenagers would carry two fishing poles-deux gaules-to secretly signal allegiance to deGaulle; that gasoline shortages forced city buses to adopt wood and charcoal power, generated in big, strapped-on burners that made the buses resemble "humpbacked exotic animals;" that 85 percent of U.S. GIs were virgins when they enlisted; and that, although Paris resident Pablo Picasso was later happy to imply that he had courageously resisted the occupying Germans, in fact the only trouble he created was when he ate steak on a meatless day (and was fined). We also learn about realities Parisians tried hard to forget after liberation-such as the million-plus letters written to the German authorities by citizens denouncing their neighbors, especially Jewish neighbors. Such letters culminated in the mass arrest and deportation of Jews in July 1942, which Rosbottom describes in the most heartbreaking chapter of the book.

Occasionally Rosbottom's discussions veer toward the esoteric; for instance, he describes the resetting of Paris to Berlin time as a choice between "alternative temporal avenues" made with the goal of "bringing the French into the temporal current of Nazism." But his book does a big service. Digging deep into personal testimony, When Paris Went Dark strips away the inevitability that history confers upon events and returns us to a moment when all outcomes were still open. At times the story reads almost like interior monologue, with Paris as the protagonist, thinking out loud-as when Rosbottom evokes the widespread surprise among Parisians at how free of violence the German occupation was at its outset. "Perhaps it would not be so bad to have the Germans here after all," he writes. "At least now there was order, precision and predictability."

Such perspectives recover the paradoxes of the past, and make the beleaguered city speak.

Rand Richards Cooper '80 is a former Visiting Writer at Amherst.