Patrick Bade
Cultural Life in France Under the Occupation, Part 2

Patrick Bade - Cultural Life in France Under the Occupation, Part 2

- These two pictures both show Paris during the Second World War. In fact, they both belong to me. They’re both in this flat. The one on the left is dated 1942, and it is signed, but I can’t read the signature, so I don’t know who the artist is. But it cost me the vast sum of 40 euros in my favourite gallery in the Passage. I’ll explain to you in a minute why I find this picture so poignant. The one on the right is dated 1944, and it’s by the artist Hermine David, who I talked about in the last lecture. Got one, she’s an artist of the Ecole de Paris. So one on the left, we’re halfway up the slope to Montmartre. It’s more or less the same view, but from a bit lower down as the one that Hitler had when he went to Paris in June, 1940. I can see my picture is doing funny things. Oh, it’s corrected itself again. That’s good. And so it’s 1942. It’s a gloomy day. And if you look carefully, you should just be able to make out in the centre of the image, the ghostly form of the Eiffel Tower that’s almost disappeared into the mist. The Eiffel Tower, which was such an important symbol, I think, for the French all the way through. Well, from its conception actually, in 1889, it was meant to be a symbol of hope and a symbol of progress. So this is a very dark hour, 1942. 1944, this painting, you can see it’s painted in the summer from the leaves on the trees. I think the likelihood it must have been painted between the beginning of June when the Allies made their landings in Normandy, and the end of August when Paris was liberated.

And it’s a joyous picture, the one on the right hand side, although it was a time of great hopes, but also great anxieties, because nobody really knew what was going to happen to Paris, whether Hitler wanted to destroy it, he wanted to reduce it to ashes, as he had done with Warsaw. And it was by quite a narrow fluke that that didn’t happen. I’m going to talk more about that next time. Whoops. What is that? That’s my new phone. And I have no idea, that’s the first call I’ve had on it. I have no idea who that is, but anyway. Paris, the first two years of the occupation for most people were actually not so terrible. Life continued as normal. See French people mingling with Germans in their grey green uniforms. In fact, the extraordinary thing is that the French, for a year, they cohabited very comfortably with the Germans. For more than a year. The very first act of violent resistance did not happen until well into July, 1941. And this guy who you see on the right hand side, his real name was Pierre Georges, but he’s always known as Colonel Fabien. He shot dead a German soldier at the metro station of Barbes-Rochechouart which you see on the left hand side. It’s extraordinary to think that there wasn’t a single act of violent resistance for well over a year. But things gradually degraded. There were shortages of food, shortages of fuel to heat houses. Central Paris was never bombed from the air, but the industrial suburbs of Boulogne-Billancourt and of Saint-Ouen, the other side of Montmartre they were bombed, because the Germans had taken over the factories and were using them for the German war effort. 1942 sees a very dark change in what was going on in Paris, particularly, of course, notoriously 16th to 17th of July.

Over 13,000 Parisian Jews were rounded up, including 4,000 children, and they were deported. And very, very few people survived. This poor woman here walking down the street with a yellow star, it’s highly unlikely that she survived till the end of the war. As you go around Paris, every school in central Paris has a plaque like this. This is quite new. I’m not sure which year these were put up. For a very long time, there was a lot of sweeping things under the carpet in France. People didn’t really want to confront what had happened. But the wording of these plaques is really quite impressive. It says, “To the memory of the pupils of this school who were deported between 1942 and 1944, because they were born Jewish, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism, with the active complicity of the government of Vichy.” I think that’s very interesting and quite impressive that the French have acknowledged their collaboration with this kind of barbarism. As I said, something relatively new. I think for a good generation after the Second World War, there was an incredible amnesia of what happened. The beginning of the change happened in 1969 with a famous documentary called, “Le Chagrin et la Pitie.” I think I’ve mentioned it before, which was extremely controversial. And it forced the French to really confront what had happened during the German occupation. This is a lineup of artists in New York. They’re all taking part in an exhibition called Artists in Exile.

And it’s quite a lineup, isn’t it? Motto, Zodkine, Tonguy, Max Ernst, Chagall, Leger, Breton, Mondrian, Masson. It’s incredible. Excuse me. Were there any avant garde artists left in Paris? Many of these artists, well, several of them were Jewish, not all of them by any means. But of course, we know how the Nazis hated, and Hitler hated and detested all forms of avant garde modern art. So many of these artists escaped via Marseilles and then over the Pyrenees, with the help of Varian Fry. When Paris fell in June, 1940, the very distinguished New York critic, Harold Rosenberg, said, “The laboratory of the 20th century has been closed down.” He might have added that a new laboratory had actually been opened up in New York. I think you could say that in many ways, New York took over the role that Paris had previously enjoyed as the cultural capital of the western world, at least for the 1940s and the 1950s. And last time, I mentioned, of course, the terrible loss of so many Jewish artists of the Ecole de Paris from Montparnasse. You can see dozens of them who died. So who was left? What was left? Well, actually, quite a lot was left. It’s amazing how Paris maintained a very thriving cultural life, all the way through the occupation. This was partly thanks, in inverted commas, to the Germans, because the Nazis were very keen to keep Paris as a cultural capital. And they also wanted it for the recreation of their own troops. And we can see here lots of galleries, lots of museums, which were opened, lots of exhibitions. Also, the Nazis were very keen to make some kind of cultural dialogue between France and Germany. And so in 1941, 1942, they arranged a series of trips with all the top artists, French artists, all kinds of visual arts, literature, theatre, films and so on. They invited people to go on these, in inverted commas, goodwill visits to Berlin.

Now, anybody who went on these trips was in trouble at the end of the war. ‘Cause it was seen as de facto evidence of collaboration, if you’re willing to go on these trips. I have to say, not everybody who went on them was willing. There was a lot of arm twisting that went on. The Germans had huge leverage, because almost everybody knew somebody who was imprisoned in some way or other. There were a couple of million prisoners of war. And so for instance, the popular singer, Lucienne Delyle, who was very anti-Nazi, nevertheless went on one of these trips, because her brother had been imprisoned and he was threatened. And who is to blame her? I must say, if the Nazis came and took my sister and they said, “Well, you have to make a proper speech in favour of us, or we’ll do in your sister.” I would make the speech, and I think most of us would feel the same. In this group, there are number of very distinguished French artists. I can recognise in the middle, the man with a beard is Kees Van Dongen, originally Dutch, but now a French artist. And next to him, looking rather sour, is Andre Derain. And this is the following year. This is 1942. And these are all the most popular stars of the French cinema. But there’s Junie Astor, there’s Susie Delair, there’s Danielle Darrieux. She was also arm twisted into going, because her husband had been arrested.

And on the right side, the woman on the writers Vivian Romans. This is the French performing artist I think who suffered most at the end of the war. She was utterly vilified. She became, well, almost like an object of hatred. We’ve seen in Britain recently how somebody like Meghan Markle, for instance, can be objectified, can be turned into an object of unbelievable vilification and hatred. And this happened to Germaine Lubin. She was the greatest French dramatic soprano of the 20th century. It was incredible voice. It’s a voice. If you listen to her few records, you can hear it’s a voice comparable to that of Kirsten Flagstad. Noble, huge, sumptuous, amazing sound. She sang Isolde in the last performances given at Covent Garden in 1939, the Covent Garden season. Also the last performances given at the Bayreuth Festival. In fact, she didn’t sing to the end of the series, because she refused to continue and went back to France when war was declared. But when she had this triumph as Isolde in Bayreuth it was headline news in France, and everybody was thrilled about it. They thought, “This is so amazing that a French soprano can have this kind of success at Bayreuth.” But the photograph you see here really was her nemesis. You can see Hitler looking admiringly at this very beautiful, goddess-like woman. The French being the French, of course, there were all these rumours that they were lovers. Absolute nonsense. They certainly weren’t. By and large, she actually really did keep her nose clean all the way through the occupation. Unlike Edith Piaf, unlike Maurice Chevalier, throughout the war, she adamantly refused ever to sing in Germany, although there was a lot of pressure for her to do so. But her biggest mistake was in 1941 when the Berlin Staatsoper came on a goodwill visit to Paris under the conductor Herbert Von Karajan.

She agreed to sing the role of Isolde with the Staatsoper. Later, she explained the only reason she did this was because her son was a prisoner of war. And the the Germans said, “Well, if you do this, if you sing Isolde with the Berlin State Opera, we’ll release your son.” Which they did. But as I said, at the end of the war, she was really treated absolutely appallingly viciously, actually. She went through what was called national degradation. All her property was confiscated. The shame was so terrible that the son for whom she’d made this sacrifice actually committed suicide. The biggest pro-German musical event in Paris was a performance at the Palais Garnier, at the Paris Opera, of the Opera Palestrina by Hans Pfitzner. There are many people who have German friends who think that this opera is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century opera. It was actually presented at Covent Garden, I think about 10 years ago, and had rather mixed reviews, but it was given a very lavish performance in Paris in 1942. Of course, it’s never been performed in France ever since. I think the circumstances of its Paris premier ensured that that would not happen. The German composer who was warmly received in Paris, and many of his works were performed, Werner Egk.

I read his autobiography. it’s a bit self-serving. I don’t think he was in any way a believing Nazi, but he was an opportunist. It was his luck, or maybe his bad luck, that both Hitler and Goebbels liked his music. As far as they were concerned, Werner Egk was the acceptable face of musical modernism. But the biggest pro-German event in Paris, as far as the visual arts was concerned, was in 1942. It was an exhibition at the Orangerie of Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker. This was a very, very big deal. And you can see all the elite of the Parisian cultural world were invited to the opening, to schmooze alongside the Nazi occupiers. I find this a rather funny photograph of this elderly lady looking up, apparently adoringly, at this huge Aryan nude. Of course, Arno Breker sculptures, dreadfully overscaled. There’s so much art and architecture of Nazi Germany was this oppressive sense of being overscaled. And Sacha Guitry and Cocteau were both present at the opening. Sacha Guitry, in his usual irreverent way, whispered to Cocteau, “Thank God they don’t have erections, we’d never get out of here.” Cocteau, I think probably fell for the rather blatant homoeroticism of Arno Breker sculpture. it’s a fascinating subject. Sometimes somebody, I’m not sure if it should be me, could do a very interesting talk for lockdown about the Nazi attitude to homosexuality. As you know, I’m sure, homosexuals were persecuted. They went to concentration camps. They were murdered, like Jews and like gipsies. But there was, nevertheless, I would say a very pervasive element of homoeroticism in a lot of Nazi culture, certainly in the paintings, in the sculpture, and even in the movies.

I think it was probably that aspect that attracted Cocteau, who rather foolishly published an article in praise of Arno Breker called, “Salut a Breker.” This, on the left, you can see a letter that was sent by the poet Paul Eluard, serious poet Paul Eluard to Cocteau. I’d say more in the spirit of regret than anger. He says, “My dear Cocteau, Freud, Kafka, Chaplin are forbidden by the same people who honour Breker.” And he finishes by saying, “Please restore our confidence in you by distancing yourself from this art, which is promoted by the Nazis.” Now, Breker also has an important connection with Aristide Maillol, who at the time was regarded as the greatest French sculptor. In fact, he was a pupil of Maillol, and revered him. And relations between them were really quite warm, which was very good for the fate of this young woman, Dina Vierny. She was the very young model of Croatian Jewish origin. She was recommended to Maillol by Matisse. It was Matisse who first spotted her. He realised that her type of beauty, her physique, which is quite chunky, was just Maillol’s ideal. She was very, very young. I think she was in her late teens. And they developed a very intense. She became his muse. And she really inspired all his late work. And the insert photograph, I think shows the very affectionate relationship between them. Of course, in France, French being as they are, everybody assumed that they were were lovers. But I don’t think that was actually the case. Dina Vierny always denied it. She said, “No, we had a very, very loving relationship, but we were not actually lovers.”

But she was arrested, and no doubt destined for a gas chamber. But Maillol desperately called, telephoned Arno Breker and said, “Please, please, please do something to save Dina Vierny. And Breker did, and she survived the war. She certainly repaid her debt to Maillol by creating the collection that she donated to the Musee Maillol in Paris, wonderful museum on the left bank. His death, right at the end of the war, is the subject of controversy and mystery. He had a son who was a very enthusiastic fascist and a member of the Milice, the French fascist police, who were sometimes even more ruthless and more terrible than the German occupiers. And in those heady, dangerous, bloody first days of the liberation, his son was arrested by the resistance and threatened with being shot, and Maillol drove through the night, or was driven through the night trying to get there in time to save his son. And we don’t know really for sure what happened. Either the car crashed and he was killed. But there is one version of the story that says that his car was actually intercepted by the resistance and that he was murdered. Now, theatre. The period of the occupation, it’s only four years, was a mini golden age for the French theatre. The theatre we’re looking at, it was the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre. It’s opposite the Chatelet by the River Seine, and up up till 1940, it was known as the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt. But the Germans did not want a Jewish name on a theatre, so it was renamed the Theatre de la Ville. So of course, the theatre, like the art world, it suffered its losses, with authors, actors of Jewish origin who were forced to flee.

But nevertheless, as I said, there is this quite extraordinary mini golden age. I think there are various interesting reasons for this. One is that, as I mentioned last time, every person who lived through the German occupation, people were faced with existential decisions, extraordinary moral dilemmas, extraordinary philosophical questions on an absolutely daily basis. The French writers wanted to write about this, they wanted to express it 'cause they couldn’t do it directly, because of German censorship. I think that’s another thing that makes the plays written in these four years so powerful and so universal, that these great themes had to be tackled obliquely. They couldn’t be tackled directly. And there were practical factors as well. There was a huge audience for the theatre all the way through the occupation. One reason for that was that there were no American movies being imported, so you couldn’t go and see John Wayne or whatever. And another factor actually was the shortage of fuel, and that going to the theatre was actually a way of staying relatively warm for a couple of hours. Now, this is Mr. Theatre. This is Sacha Guitry. He was, I would say, a sort of heterosexual French equivalent of Noel Coward. Multi-talented, witty, brilliant, amazing man. I think probably his weakness, and it’s a weakness I think of many people in the theatre, was that he wanted to be loved. He wanted to be liked. And so, he decided it was his duty to carry on as normal. He had a very busy career in plays and making movies, all the way through the Second World War. And he was cultivated by the Nazi occupation. People knew that if they had a problem, they had a loved one who was in danger, who’d been arrested, was at Drancy, might be sent to a concentration camp, he was one of the people you could go to. He had the contacts, he could get people out of concentration camps. He got the singer Marya Freund, for instance.

She owed her life to him. There were many, many others. But of course, every time he did this, he was more compromised. He’d been so visible all the way through the occupation. So, he was one of the first people who was arrested and imprisoned at the time of the liberation. You see a photograph of him here, that he had this magnificent house in Paris with a great art collection. And these young men of the resistance, they arrived at his house early in the morning. He was still wearing his designer pyjamas, I think they were by Jean Lanvin. He’s actually wearing them in this picture. This is a photograph of him. They wouldn’t let him get dressed. He just put a jacket on over his designer pyjamas, and they took him away to be interrogated. In fact, this was an experience. In the end after many trials and interrogations, they really didn’t have anything substantial against him. And he was released and he was able to continue his career. But he was a very embittered man, really. He had planned to leave his gorgeous town palace and his art collection to the French nation. But he then decided against that. He left it to his fifth and last wife instead. And as soon as he was dead, she had it demolished, and sold it for redevelopment. But the last wife, who he married after the war, when he proposed to her, he famously said, "The other four were just my wives. You, madam, shall be my widow.” So, there were a clutch of great masterpieces that are still standard repertoire in the French Theatre, by great French writers of the older generation.

Henry de Montherlant and his play La Reine Mort was premiered at the Comedie Francaise in 1942. This is Paul Claudel. Ironically, I suppose outside of France, he’s better known these days for the appalling way that he treated his sister, the sculptor, Camille Claudel. Had her imprisoned for much of her life, and prevented her from continuing with her work as an artist. But his greatest play, the Soulier de Satin, that was premiered in 1943. And with the great Jean-Louis Barrault performing. And this is Jean Giraudoux, and his most famous play. That’s Sodome et Gomorre. That’s 1943. So they were the old guard of French Theatre, who all had a kind of Indian summer during the occupation. We find a whole new generation of playwrights who came to the fore in these years. This is Jean Anouilh. He had actually had a couple of plays premiered before the war. But in, let me see, yes, 1940. This was actually the premier of his play, Le Cartier, was in November, 1940. So this would’ve been one of the absolute first plays in the reopened theatres, when Paris began to come back to life at the end of 1940. And it was a success at the time. It was a vehicle for the golden couple of French theatre in the 1930s. That’s Yvonne Printemps and Pier Fresnay. Yvonne Printemps who by this time actually she was in her late 40s, if not her 50s, but she convincingly took part of a teenage girl in this play. And Francis Poulenc wrote a song for her to sing in the play. I’m going to play you that, 'cause it’s just so exquisite and I absolutely love it. And of course it’s become a very familiar song, but I don’t think anybody since has ever sang it quite as delicately and charmingly as the great Yvonne Printemps herself.

• On a much more serious level, and probably a play of more lasting value by Jean Anouilh was Antigone. I remember studying it for my A-level French, and being very impressed by it actually. It’s a retelling of the Greek myth of Antigone. This is from the original cast, and you can see it was dressed in modern costume. The use of Greek mythology, of course, was a way of getting round German censorship. 'Cause this play is really about resistance. And the character of Creon who you see on the right hand side is I suppose a collaborator, and Antigone is resisting and pays the price for it at the end, with her life. The other great playwright to emerge in Paris of the younger generation was Jean Paul Sartre. And his play, Les Mouches, also uses Greek mythology to make a comment about resistance. Again, it’s a retelling of a very familiar story, the story of Electra and Orestes. And later, after war, he explained, “The real subject that I should like to have written about, was that of the terrorist, who by ambushing Germans, becomes the instrument of the execution of 50 hostages.” You see these incredibly complex moral problems. By resisting, do you actually do more harm than not? And this play. I also did this for A-Level. My poor French teacher, Ms. Scott, oh dear, how she suffered trying to explain to us what is going on in this play, where three people, a lesbian, a nymphomaniac, and a wife murderer, are locked in a room for all eternity with their eyelids removed, so they can’t close their eyes. They have to face one another all the time. And it’s a pretty terrifying, very dark play with the theme, “Hell is other people.”

Again, it could be seen as a metaphor for the situation of the French people locked into France under German occupation. This play, how on earth it got past the censors, I don’t know. I think probably they just didn’t understand it. But it had its premier on the 10th of July, 1944. Just four days after the Normandy landings. Now, movies. There are two big factors here with the movies. One I’ve already talked last time about how the French movie industry was, in inverted commas, ethnically cleansed, the Jewish element was got rid of. Many, of course, went to Hollywood. That was a huge negative blow for the French cinema industry. But the fact that after 1941, there were no American movies coming in was in a way a plus point, and that people were desperate for escape. They were desperate for entertainment. So in fact, the French movie industry thrived throughout the Second World War, despite attempts of the Germans to control it as far as possible. There was a company set up called Continental, which was in fact really a front for the Germans way of controlling French films. Most of the resources, most of the money was pumped into this company. Again, at the end of the war, it was considered as de facto evidence of collaboration for anybody who had anything to do with this company that was under the control of the Germans. When it came to the epuration, all these tribunals, and it was examined what people had done in the war. If you’d done anything. If you were a cameraman, if you were a director, if you were an actor, see Jean-Louis Barrault here.

If you had anything to do with Continental, it was a very black mark. This particular movie was one of the most lavish. It really is a sumptuous movie. It’s a very glamorised biopic, biography of the great romantic composer Hector Berliotz. In fact, when Goebbels saw the film, he had a real temper tantrum. He was outraged, because he simply didn’t want French movie makers to be able to make movies on this kind of scale, and with this kind of lavishness, and he didn’t want any French cultural figure to be turned into a hero in the way that Berliotz was in this movie. So he was very, very displeased by that. This is probably now the most prestigious film that was made for Continental. By Clouzot. It’s called Le Corbeau, The Raven. And it’s a movie that got Clouzot into very, very big trouble at the end of the war, partly because it was made by Continental Films. And partly because, once again, it’s a very transparent metaphor for what is going on in France under the German occupation. It’s a film which is most certainly not very flattering to the French during that period. It’s film about denunciation, you can say denunciation became almost a sort of national pastime. There were an astonishing number. There were millions and millions of denunciations were made during the occupation. The film is set in a small French town, which is overcome by a campaign of denunciations with poison letters. Very, very powerful movie that has really stood the test of time. One of my favourite movies is Les Visiteurs Du Soir. Marcel Carne, working with Jacques Prevert, great poet.

He worked with a regular team between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, for a 10 year period. Made I think some of the greatest of all French movies. I already talked last time about Arletty. In Les Visiteurs Du Soir, instead of being set in ancient Greece, it’s set in mediaeval France. But again, it’s pretty obvious that it is a metaphor for what’s going on in France under the occupation. So, the devil accompanied by the beautiful Arletty turns up in a castle and bewitches everybody in the castle. Everybody is completely under his spell. The movie is particularly celebrated for its wonderful final scene, where the devil actually fails to triumph over love. There was this young couple who, as you can see, are in love with one another, and he turns them to stone. You could say that the German occupation did that for the whole France. France was frozen. It was turned to stone under the Nazis. But in the final moments of the film, you can see the bottom right on the left hand side, the devil goes up to the statues and he puts his head to the breasts of the lovers. And he’s enraged to hear that their hearts are still beating. So, I suppose the meaning here is that under the horror of German occupation, there’s still the beating heart of the French spirit. But of course, the greatest of all. Some people think it’s the greatest movie ever made. Many, many people will tell you it’s their favourite movie. This is Les Enfants Du Paradis, which was made towards the end of the war. It was started in the summer of 1943 and not finished until June, 1944.

It was actually not released until after the liberation. So, it was made under extremely difficult circumstances of extreme material shortages. This is just one of the most lavish, one of the most sumptuous, one of the most gorgeous films ever made. It’s a total feast from beginning to end. If you don’t know it, go on Netflix and watch it tonight before you go to sleep. I first saw it as a teenager. I went up to London with my mother and my sister. My mother wanted to see it at the Academy Cinema. My sister and I, we weren’t really thrilled at the idea of watching an old black and white French movie, but we were entranced. And after that, really on a regular basis, when we came out to London, it used to show all the time at the Academy Cinema and we would ask to see it. It’s the greatest role of all, of course of the very great Arletty, in the role of Garance. And a wonderful role for Jean-Louis Barrault as well. Les Enfants Du Paradis. Paradis is the gods, it’s the children of the gods. It’s the poor people who sit up at the top of the theatre. And there are these incredible recreations of Paris of the early 19th century, with huge, huge crowd scenes. Here is Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault. Now, there was a problem before they could release this movie, because there’s a sinister character who’s a rag and bone man. And when they first shot the movie, this character was played by an actor called Robert Le Vigan, who you see on the left hand side, who is greatly admired. He was a very, very brilliant character actor who took small, often rather sinister roles in French cinema.

He was an absolute, virulent and outspoken Nazi. And how this all worked in the actual filming process, I don’t know, because there were also Jews involved secretly with the making of the film, that had to do it under pseudonyms. But the great designer Alexandre Trauner was always part of the company, the troop who made the films of Carne, as was the composer, Joseph Kosma. So they managed actually to survive in hiding through the war and to keep working, but of course, always under false names. The liberation, they haven’t released the movie, Robert Le Vigan flees. He goes to South America, he goes to Argentina, but he’s one of the most notorious of all French collaborators. And in absence, he was sentenced to death. There was simply no way that they could release the film with him in it. He was in two short but crucial scenes with Arletty. So, they had to re-shoot these scenes with Pierre Renoir who you see on the right hand side, the oldest son of the painter, Renoir. But there was another problem, and that was that Arletty in prison. She’d been imprisoned for what the French called collaboration horizontale. She had a German officer as a lover during the war. So, what to do? Fabulous French solution to the situation. She is smuggled out of the prison in the middle of the night several times to re-shoot the scenes with Pierre Brasseur. She told me this.

I think I’ve told you before. It’s my biggest boast, actually. Whenever I meet French people of a certain age, I always try and drop into the conversation, I once spent a day with Arletty, and they’re always amazed, they’re always very impressed by that extraordinary woman. 'Cause she was put on trial, as I said, for collaboration. There are many famous quotes from Arletty. She was a very clever woman with a wonderful turn of phrase, but one of the most famous is her reply to the judge. And he said, “Madam, how could you sleep with a German during the occupation?” And she said, I’m not going to translate that for you. You can translate it for yourselves. Songs. I know I did a whole talk about popular songs in France during the Second World War. It’s a great age of the chanson. Maybe the last great age. No, I suppose there are still great chanson going into the 1950s and '60s, and I’ll talk about that next time, with people like Brassens and Piaf, and so on. But the songs, they’re not just wonderful songs. They really reflect the social and political situation of France in these years. Now, it’s often been pointed out that the great songs of the Second World War are all songs about separation. That the Second World War separated people, moved people around in a way that no war had ever done before. Not even the First World War shifted people around the globe, separated people like the second World War did. I remember once being at a dinner party with a group of 12 people of my age, and we all went around the table, telling where our parents met and how they met. They all met during the Second World War. An extraordinary thing was that not one single person at that dinner table would’ve been born without Adolf Hitler.

My parents, curiously, met in Palestine as members of the British Armed Forces. All these songs in England, of course, our great song of the Second World War is, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.” And in Germany, the great song of the Second World War is, “I know that one day a miracle will happen, and we’ll meet again.” Almost identical words. The great song in France in the early part of the war was J'attendrai. It’s another example. I talked about this recently. A song or a work of art can change its meaning according to changing political circumstances. J'attendrai was actually an Italian song. The original version is Tornerai, and had nothing to do with the war. Its great popularity and the way it was taken up by many, many singers was I think because of the war. And in France, separation had a special meaning. There were 2 million young French men who were imprisoned as prisoners of war for very long, long periods of time. Some of them, all the way through the war. There were all the people who were forced to flee from France to other countries. And there was also the separation between the occupied zone and the Vichy zone, where it was very difficult to cross. So, people were longing for their loved ones. There are many versions of this song, but I’m going to play you my favourite one, which is by Jean Sablon.

• To me, the man who wrote nearly all the best songs for every moment of the war, was Charles Trenet. He was a kind of a genius. He had this incredible instinct for writing, as I said, the song of the moment. After the initial collapse of France, he wrote Douce France, which could be said is a song of French wanting to turn back in on themselves, and wanting to put the war behind them. 1942, he writes a song called Si Tu Vas A Paris. He wrote this song. Actually, he was in Marseilles. It’s a song that expresses longing for Paris. Somebody who’s been forced to leave Paris and is saying, “If you go to Paris, say hello to my friends, say hello to my cartier. If you see my house, say hello to my house, say hello to my bistro, to my metro station, and so on.” It’s a very, very poignant song. And it was sung all over the world, actually, very quickly during the war, by people who were longing for Paris. And it picked up such a resonance that it was actually banned in the occupied part of France. I’m not going to play it to you now, because I’m running out of time, and I have other things I need to do, to talk about before we finish. Classical musical life. Again, there were huge losses. Many of the favourite artists of the French musical artists like Art Rubenstein, Wanda Landowska, Bruno Walter, of course, they were all forced to leave. But it’s a measure of how rich French musical talent and life was at the time, that you could still in a week in 1942, have all these wonderful concerts you can see on the right hand side, with great, great artists like Ginette Neveu, and Alfred Cortot and Jacques Flavier. This is Honecker who is very conspicuous, French, he was a neutral. He was, I suppose, the composer most in view during the war, and certainly in no way Nazi or a collaborator.

But I think he suffered somewhat from that overexposure during the wartime period, when he was a big fish in a small pond. Messiaen is a composer, young composer, whose talent was emerging at this time. He was a prisoner of war. And he wrote one of the greatest masterpieces of chamber music of the 20th century, The Quartet For The End Of Time, in a prisoner of war camp in Silesia. And there happened to be a rather battered old piano. There was a violinist who had a violin, there was a cellist with a cello, and there was a clarinettist, Henri Akoka or clarinet. Ooh, sorry about that. He wrote this piece for them, and it got its first performance in the camp. It’s a wonderful piece. I think really, it’s such a profound and beautiful piece. But I’ll leave you to discover that on your own. Radio, I talked about that last time, the importance of radio, Radio Paris. This was the German-controlled radio station of Paris. Once again, anybody who was involved with Radio Paris, anybody who accepted to go over the radio waves with Radio Paris was regarded as de facto a collaborator at the end of the war. You can see Maurice Chevalier on the right. A few years ago, I was walking down the quay in Paris and I picked up this book. Anybody who reads French, it’s a fascinating book. It’s not been translated, by a man called Albert Grunberg. And you can see it’s the diary of a Jewish hairdresser, which doesn’t necessarily sound very promising, but in 1942 when the roundup started, he went into hiding in an attic. And he didn’t emerge until August, 1944. So, he was hidden in the attic for four years, completely cut off from the world, apart from his radio set.

And obviously, a very cultivated, very intelligent man. He’s following what’s going on around the world. He’s listening to BBC, he’s listening to Swiss radio, which is where he got his most reliable information about the progress of the war. And he was also listening a lot to Radio Paris. He would rage in fury at the disgusting propaganda of Radio Paris. But Radio Paris, he listened to it, because it had such a rich cultural programme of literature, classical music. Again, I was hoping to play you, but I won’t now, a live broadcast of a concert on Radio Paris of January, 1944, from the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, conducted by the great Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg. This is the 6th of June, 1944. Normandy landings. And then, as the troops approach Paris, the people in Paris are incited to make an insurrection, which they do. And as you go, just a few days. It was, I suppose, by the standards of what happened in other cities in Europe, not so terrible. But nevertheless, there were many deaths of people who attacked the Germans and all over Paris, you see these plaques on buildings, where members of the resistance died during those heroic days of the liberation. And I want to finish with a story. This is Colette in her old age, in her flat in the Palais Royal. It’s right up underneath the roof of the Palais Royal. And like pretty well everybody in Paris, at least a million of the inhabitants, in 1940, she fled out of Paris with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, who you see on the left hand side. And then when things quietened down, like everybody else, they came back to Paris. But on the way in, they were stopped by German soldiers and questioned.

And the soldier said to them, pointing at Colette and her maid Pauline, he said, “I can see by the look of them, they’re Jews,” and Maurice Goudeket, wanting to protect his wife, said, “No, no, no, my wife is not Jewish, but I am.” Of course, it was a rather foolish admission. And he was arrested and threatened. He was sent to Drancy. Of course, if you were still in Drancy, if you could pull the right strings, you could be got out. But once that train had left Drancy, eastwards, there was no hope at all. So Colette, absolutely desperate. She goes around talking to everybody who she thinks can help her. Sacha Guitry, Arletty, all these people, everybody. And she succeeds, and he is released. He’s been held in the most disgusting, insanitary, horrible conditions. He’s covered in lice. He’s absolutely filthy. He arrives back at the Palais Royal, and Pauline greets him and she says, “Oh, Madam is out, she’s at the hairdresser.” So he was thinking, “Oh my god, I’ve been through hell and she’s at the hairdresser,” but actually, he stood on newspapers and she stripped him and hosed him down. And he was quite glad that Colette never saw him in the state which he was released.

Well, in the last two years of the war, from the end of 1942 to August, 1944, he was hidden in the attic like the Jewish hairdresser, and going kind of stir crazy. When they start to hear what was going on, with the gunfire and street battles, and Paris was being liberated, and against the pleading of Colette, he said, “I can’t stay in there, I’ve got to go out.” And he went out into the streets and he was actually trapped overnight by street fighting. When he arrived the next day, Colette was actually beside herself with anxiety. And he said, “No, no, don’t worry. Paris is liberated. I promise you, Paris is now liberated.” And she said, “I don’t believe you.” And he said, “What can I do to make you believe me?” And she said, “I will believe that Paris is liberated when you bring me a soldier wearing a kilt.” So she sent him out onto the streets again, and of course the allied troops were pouring into the city, and he actually managed to find a Scottish soldier wearing a kilt, and he persuaded him to come back to Colette’s flat, and to convince her that Paris really was liberated. So, I’m going to finish there.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, the bombing of the suburbs of Paris was the Allies, 'cause they were trying to destroy factories that were producing armaments for the German war machine.

Yes, thank you for spotting that it’s 2002, and of course you’re absolutely right. It was very, very late, but better late than ever. I actually really appreciate the wording of those. As far as I know, all the schools around me, all the schools in the ninth and 10th arrondissement have those plaques.

Oh, I love that, Janet. “Nowadays, the actress would be vilified more for the fur coat than for the collaboration.” Yes, you’re right.

Yes, I could talk about Egk. That was Werner Egk and Art Honecker had a kind of mutual admiration. That is decidedly dubious, really, that Honecker such a big supporter of Werner Egk.

Q: Was Elizabeth Schwarzkopf?

A: I would say yes. You need to read the book by Alan Jefferson, who found evidence that she was under the direct protection of a top Nazi. Nobody’s actually really come up with a smoking gun. But the assumption is that she was the lover of a top Nazi, and that it was either Frank, the generaleiter of Poland or Goebbels.

Q: “Did Hitler see French culture as different from the rest of Europe?”

A: Yes, I think he did. There was a kind of envy of French culture that the Germans had. I think they had a slight inferiority complex, but it is a mixed thing. I think they also despised the French. They thought they were in some ways decadent.

Yes, Pyrenees.

Q: “Was Charboi?”

A: No. Charboi was never compromised by the Nazis, because he wasn’t there. He was in Hollywood.

“The British was saved from the moral dilemma faced by the occupied French except in the Channel Islands.” That’s absolutely true.

You need to watch Le Chagrin et le Pitie, and see who’s the great prime minister who’s deposed after Suez? Sorry, I’m having a name thing. He’s interviewed at the end and he’s asked, “Do you really think the British would’ve behaved better than the French under occupation?” And he won’t say. He definitely doesn’t say yes. I think it’s an open question. My guess it would’ve been exactly the same.

Yes, Margaret, it’s very interesting that the German censors were so thick that they actually couldn’t see what these plays were about. They probably weren’t very interested. Jean Marais that’s an interesting story. He’s very frank. I must say, Jean Marais in his autobiography comes across as incredibly honest and sympathetic. And he actually openly says, “Actually I only joined the resistance right at the end when I knew that it would be good.” He knew it would be good for his post-war career even if he’d been only a member of the resistance for five minutes.

I do have a lecture on Camille Claudel. I could do that.

Q: Are these films available?

A: I don’t know. I’m sure. They probably are. Certainly scenes from them, I’m sure that you can see chunks of Les Enfants Du Paradis on YouTube.

Picasso. Yes. Of course Picasso stayed behind. That’s another very complicated story. And somebody said to him after, “Well, why did you stay behind?” And he claimed it was just out of laziness, that he couldn’t actually get itself together. Picasso, it’s interesting, 'cause he could have had a very good time in America. He had such a huge reputation. He wouldn’t have suffered financially at all in the way that other people did.

“Yes, it’s true that the British did not behave any better in the Channel Islands than the French did in mainland France.” I think Marcel Carne, it’s funny, even though I think Les Enfants Du Paradis has still got a great reputation, but Carne I think is a little bit considered passe. And his reputation has been somewhat eclipsed.

Lili Marleen. Yes. Sung by everybody, of course, in the Second World War, except the French actually. Well, it was sung in France, but it was only country where they didn’t really adopt it as their own. Suzy Solidor sang it in France. But it was always seen as German. It was never seen really as French. Whereas the British made it British, and the Americans made it American.

And so, yes. I’m afraid, Monty, I’m not going to say it over the airwaves, but you can look it up. It’s very, very famous. I’m quite sure if you look up Arletty on the internet, you’ll find that story.

No, for once, I think my sister and I would agree that on that particular occasion, not always, we were happy to follow our mother’s advice.

Hi Peter. Thank you. The trouble is my memory is really going. It’s awful, not to be able to. To lose names in the middle of a lecture is a bit scary.

Les Enfants Du Paradis, The Children of the Gods, The Children of the Gods, you must see it. It’s such a wonderful movie. I guarantee you’ll love it. So, that’s it. And we will look at Paris post-liberation at the time of liberation, post-liberation, on Sunday.