When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom Read Free Book Online Page A

future-with-hope, had no effect on me and [was] even painful to me, or almost.” 4

    De Beauvoir and Sartre. (Creative Commons)
    Another prescient chronicler, Edith Thomas, an active French Communist and archivist, kept a daily journal of the Occupation that came to light only in the early 1990s. * Thomas described what Paris was like on May 8, 1940, only two days before the Blitzkrieg would end and the taking of Paris would begin:
    The desert of the streets, and the dead squares at night. Paris [after the grand exodus] is like… a city become too large for those who live there. They walk along under the funereal streetlights covered in blue paper, which give no more light than the candlelight of my childhood. Steps sound as if they are coming from empty rooms where it seems that no one will ever live again. Everything is too big; frightening, bluish, dark, and the shadows of men are lost as if they were in the deepest of forests. 5
    We know how things would end, but back then Parisians had no concrete information, so rumor, guessing games, BBC propaganda, and news bulletins took the place of planning. This waiting was one of the most enervating aspects of the Paris during the war, especially after the Germans arrived. It would not end until Allied tanks were seen on the outskirts of Paris in late August of 1944.

“They” Arrive, and Are Surprised
    In mid-June of 1940, the German army arrived before Paris, exuberant but stunned. They could see in the distance the Eiffel Tower, standing as confidently over the world’s most recognized cityscape as when it had first appeared there just fifty-one years earlier. The Wehrmacht had been almost as surprised as the French at the ease of their foray into the Low Countries and France. Their victory had not been a foregone conclusion. Hindsight has given us a quite benign view of what the Allies and Germans expected in 1940: “The campaign was won so swiftly and decisively that, retrospectively, both sides came to view its outcome as inevitable.” 2 More imaginative and forceful leadership on behalf of the Allies could well have stymied even the panzer-led Blitzkrieg the Germans had so brilliantly planned. The Battle of France could have bogged down in the same area as it had in the First World War, and Germany could have been quickly bled and spent to death before realizing its aims. But luck and Allied pusillanimity made Hitler into a military genius, and now another German army was ready to occupy, this time for years, the capital of France.
    Just a generation before, the Kaiser’s troops had lost major battles in their attempt to take the city. Still, the Germans were a bit abashed attheir new responsibility as occupiers: “The German generals, of whom many had fought in the First World War, had psychological difficulty in realizing the depth, and especially the rapidity of their victory [over the French Army].” One young lieutenant wrote home: “My thoughts are turning in on themselves. My mind truly wants to understand. We are the victors. But our heart is not yet ready to seize the immensity of this fact, all the grandeur of these events, the full significance of our victory. We talk about it amongst ourselves, we try to understand it, but without success.” 3 The fact of their victory was in effect more intimidating than had been the armed forces of their enemy.
    There had been almost no French military defense of Paris, so there had been no excuse for the Wehrmacht to hesitate in driving right into the prize. But an awkward lull had briefly prevailed. Waiting outside the city on June 13, a day before his army would formally enter it, one young lieutenant was impatient. Asked to make plans for his battalion’s quarters when they entered the capital, he borrowed a BMW motorcycle, and using the Byzantine dome of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur as his guide, drove straight into Montmartre, on the city’s northern edge. The streets, he felt, were strangely empty, but