A recent exhibition of pictures from occupied Paris has revealed a more relaxed image of the city
Posted on 05/26/2008 12:36:11 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
A new book which suggests that the German occupation of France encouraged the sexual liberation of women has shocked a country still struggling to come to terms with its troubled history of collaboration with the Nazis.
A recent exhibition of pictures from occupied Paris has revealed a more relaxed image of the city
Like a recent photographic exhibition showing Parisians enjoying themselves under the occupation, the book’s depiction of life in Paris as one big party is at odds with the collective memory of hunger, resistance and fear.
“It is a taboo subject, a story nobody wants to hear,” said Patrick Buisson, author of 1940-1945 Années Erotiques (“erotic years”). “It may hurt our national pride, but the reality is that people adapted to occupation.”
Many might prefer to forget but, with their husbands in prison camps, numerous women slept not only with German soldiers – the young “blond barbarians” were particularly attractive to French women, says Buisson – but also conducted affairs with anyone else who could help them through financially difficult times: “They gave way to the advances of the boss, to the tradesman they owed money to, their neighbour. In times of rationing, the body is the only renewable, inexhaustible currency.”
Cold winters, when coal was in short supply, and a curfew from 11pm to 5am also encouraged sexual activity, says Buisson, with the result that the birth rate shot up in 1942 even though 2m men were locked up in the camps.
The book has stirred painful memories. One French reviewer called it “impertinent” and another accused Buisson of telling only part of the story by focusing on the “beneath the belt” history of the occupation. Le Monde, the bible of the French intellectual elite, chided the author, who is the director of French television’s History Channel, for painting life under the occupation as a “gigantic orgy”.
People who lived through the occupation found it insulting to suggest that they spent it in bed. “It makes me really angry,” said Liliane Schroeder, 88, who risked her life as a member of the resistance and has published her own journal of the occupation. “It’s shocking and ridiculous to say life was just a big party,” she told The Sunday Times. “We had much better things to do.”
Schroeder nevertheless described her life as a messenger in the resistance as a “marvellous time” in which “people got on with life even if they weren’t laughing”. Young women were useful to the resistance, she said, because “when a young woman and a man sat in a café it did not look as if they were plotting. They looked like lovers”.
French sensitivities about the country’s wartime record were demonstrated last month when an exhibition of photographs depicting Parisians enjoying life under the Nazis included a notice explaining that the pictures avoided the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects”. The photographs showed well-dressed citizens shopping on the boulevards or strolling in the parks. People crowded into nightclubs. Women in bikinis swam in a pool.
Buisson dedicates a chapter in his book to cinemas, which he describes as hotbeds of erotic activity, particularly when it was cold outside. “At a few francs they were cheaper than a hotel room,” he writes, “and, offering the double cover of darkness and anonymity, propitious for all sorts of outpourings.”
The French even had sex in the catacombs, the underground ossuary and warren of subterranean tunnels in Paris: war, Buisson argues, acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating “the survival instinct”. He said in an interview: “People needed to prove that they were alive. They did so by making love.”
It has been claimed that prostitutes staged the first rebellion against the Nazis by refusing to service the invaders but Buisson called this a myth. The Germans, he claimed, were welcomed into the city’s best brothels, a third of which were reserved for officers. Another 100,000 women in Paris became “occasional prostitutes”, he said.
Elsewhere, members of the artistic elite drowned their sorrows in debauchery. Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, were devotees of allnight parties fuelled by alcohol and lust.
“It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party,” was how de Beauvoir put it. Sartre was no less enthusiastic: “Never were we as free as under the German occupation.”
De Beauvoir wrote about the “quite spontaneous friendliness” of the conquerors: she was as fascinated as any by the German “cult of the body” and their penchant for exercising in nothing but gym shorts.
“In the summer of 1940,” wrote Buisson, “France was transformed into one big naturist camp. The Germans seemed to have gathered on French territory only to celebrate an impressive festival of gymnastics.” The author said he did not want to make light of a tragic part of French history, but there was a need to correct the “mythical” image of the occupation. “In this horrible period, life continued,” he said.
“It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.”
Now Buisson is at work on a sequel, about how women were punished for sleeping with the enemy. The provisional title is Revenge of the Males.
All we knew about France long time ago.
Have at it.
I am shocked, shocked to find out there was sex going in in Paris!
Between men and women, too!
The only thing wrong with France is the French. I used to needle a French friend of mine with the idea that France was the only country we should have let the Germans keep. That way the French would have stayed polite to foreigners.
I care nothing for France....
Mon dieu! The most boorish tourists you can find now are Germans — seriously.
I have read that waiters complained that the Germans always tipped as opposed to customers after the war.
Most Germans I've met and worked with have been very nice and friendly. Austrians on the other hand...
Not a pair that any nation would choose to represent their virtue.
couldn’t agree more. France is the only country that deserved to stay occupied by the Germans.
““It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.””
You can say that again.
The real truth no one dares to speak is that the French communists supported Hitler and agitated for non-resistance to the Germans when France was being invaded. They only switched sides after Hitler invaded the USSR. After the war the communists launched a vicious campaign against their political enemies, denouncing them as Nazi collaborators. This was mainly to cover up their own complicity. The legend of valiant resistance by the French communists is largely an invention, but the French still hold it in reverence.
I will say one thing in earnest: the ability of civilians to persevere under occupation is often astounding to me, and even to live some semblance of a “normal” life while under the watch and guard of inhuman occupiers or (in the case of Iraq) your own citizens destroying your country in terrorist acts.
French collaboration made Polish rat-outs look like Boy Scout troops running a traffic patrol. Yes there was a resistance, but it was outdone by anti-Semites and collaborators. France has absolutely nothing to celebrate in WWII - not its bogus 1919 “peace” that made the war possible, not its dishonorable surrender at the hands of a madman’s army, not its shipping Jews up to the Reich.
They can at least feel good that they have beautifully preserved the lands and monuments of the Anglo-American offensives to liberate their country. Normandy is a real treat, and despite many stories I heard (from Americans and Dutchmen) before I went, I dealt with zero flak or unfriendliness to English-speakers.
The gals were only following the example of their leaders by bending over for the Germans.
“It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.”
Most of the Jews deported to concentration camps by German occupation authorities and the Petain/Laval government were French.
Sounds like my college days, when I was "occupied" with my quest for higher learning.
yitbos
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