And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (40 page)

Had he stayed in Paris, Jouvet might well have succeeded Copeau at the Comédie Française. Copeau had been appointed in May 1940 after the theater’s general administrator, Édouard Bourdet, was injured in an accident. By the end of the year, after Copeau had reopened the theater, Bourdet was ready to return. But the Germans wanted neither man. Instead, Copeau was replaced by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, a poet and novelist, who held the post until March 1944. Although dependent on Vichy’s subsidy, Vaudoyer proved a skilled manager—no easy task, given the theater’s tradition of internal power struggles and a regulation that allowed permanent members of the troupe (the
sociétaires)
to decide which actors on contracts (the
pensionnaires)
could join their exclusive group. Several
sociétaires
were openly
pétainistes
and accepted invitations to recite poetry or verse on political occasions, while a few used their status as
sociétaires
to disguise their involvement in the resistance.

One Romanian-born Jewish
sociétaire
, Jean Yonnel, widely heralded as the company’s greatest tragedian, was initially forced to resign, but the Propaganda Staffel then concluded that he was indispensable. In October 1941, he appeared in Racine’s
Bérénice
and, six months later, in Goethe’s
Iphigénie en Tauride
, a production he also directed. He went on to play leading roles in two of the company’s stellar creations of the period,
La Reine morte
and
Le Soulier de satin
. “The Germans named him an honorary Aryan,” recalled Michel Francini, who was working in music halls at the time. “Yonnel’s name was on posters. After Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, he went on stage wearing one. He was given an ovation.”
⁴

Although censors were ready to cut words or phrases from plays, even classics, the Germans viewed the Comédie Française with reverence; the free seats reserved for Wehrmacht officers at every performance were invariably taken, while the German Institute was
eager to see German plays performed in the House of Molière. In theory, foreign companies were not allowed onto the theater’s stage, but this rule was twice ignored. In February 1941, prompting the official press to hail the first example of theatrical collaboration, Heinrich George brought Berlin’s Schiller Theater to Paris for two German-language performances of Schiller’s
Kabale und Liebe
(Intrigue and Love). George, a star of the German stage who had recently been seen in France in the anti-Semitic movie
Le Juif Süss
, proved a good diplomat, too: he gave Molière’s bust a Nazi salute and responded to the play’s warm reception by noting that in this case “the genius of art” was the only conqueror. But not everyone was pleased. Béatrice Bretty, a Jewish
sociétaire
who had resigned, later recalled her shock at learning that “the German actors had been received with flowers, champagne, toasts and speeches.”
⁵

The National Theater of Munich came next. In April 1942, it brought Goethe’s
Iphigenie auf Tauris
, which was twinned on successive nights with the Comédie Française’s production of the same play,
Iphigénie en Tauride
, directed by Yonnel. While the German-language newspaper
Pariser Zeitung
said the two versions symbolized “an exemplary coexistence between two peoples,” Laubreaux declared that the mediocrity of the French production more than justified Vaudoyer’s dismissal. Behind Laubreaux’s attack was not only his ambition to run the Comédie Française himself but also his perception that the theater was doing too well in maintaining its independence. Indeed, the following year Vaudoyer tried hard to resist German pressure to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Gerhart Hauptmann, a German playwright who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1912. But after the Palais de Chaillot presented Hauptmann’s
Rosa Bernd
and the Odéon put on his
Le Voiturier Henschel
(The Wagoner Henschel), the Comédie Française was left with little choice. In May 1943, it staged Hauptmann’s
Iphigenie in Delphi
in a new French translation, albeit portraying it as part of an
Iphigénie
series following the earlier versions by Goethe and Eurypides. It would be the last German play given by the company during the occupation.

Writing in the German Institute’s
Cahiers Franco-Allemands
in 1943, Laubreaux lamented that, in contrast to classical music, opera and cinema, Franco-German exchanges in theater were minimal. And in truth, no French theater delegation ever traveled to Germany as guests of the Reich. For this, Vaudoyer could claim some credit.
After the war, he noted that, by allowing just two German companies onto the stage of the venerable Salle Richelieu, he had obtained the release of fifteen employees who were prisoners of war and protected others from compulsory work in Germany.

For the most part, by ensuring that French classics featured prominently, Vaudoyer stayed true to the Comédie Française’s mission as France’s national theater. In December 1940, still during Copeau’s regime, Barrault, newly hired by the theater, appeared in the title role of Corneille’s
Le Cid
. Plays by Molière—
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe
and
Le Malade imaginaire
—were always popular, as were Corneille’s
Horace
and Racine’s
Phèdre
and
Bérénice
. Seeing France defended by its great playwrights, Galtier-Boissière savored the latest quip: “How will the war be won? With American gold, British tenacity … and the Comédie Française.”
⁶
Prewar productions of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
and
Twelfth Night
were also revived, but it was not until late 1942 that the company staged its first new play, Montherlant’s
La Reine morte
.

A closet homosexual with a penchant for chasing young boys, Montherlant was a solitary figure in his late thirties, best known as a novelist and essayist. In
L’Équinoxe de septembre
, he had taken a brave stand against the September 1938 Munich Agreement, in which France and Britain had surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler. But after the French defeat, he, too, surrendered. In
Le Solstice de juin
, a book of essays published in early 1941, he blamed the Third Republic for France’s humiliation and welcomed the conquering Germans as if they were virile medieval knights. Per chance, one of these handsome Germans was Karl-Heinz Bremer, Montherlant’s former translator and now Epting’s deputy in the German Institute. In one shocking essay, “Les Chenilles,” Montherlant describes urinating on caterpillars, many of whom die and a few escape: it was his metaphor for Germany’s victory over the hapless French. At the end of
Le Solstice de juin
, Montherlant spelled out his philosophy: “To do everything possible to wipe out the enemy. But once he has demonstrated that he has the stronger hand, to join forces with him with the same conviction.”
⁷
Put differently, he believed in collaboration. After spending a few months in the unoccupied zone, he returned to Paris in May 1941 and wrote regularly for Drieu La Rochelle’s
Nouvelle Revue Française
, as well as for
La Gerbe, Comoedia
and the daily
Le Matin
.

Since Montherlant’s earlier plays had all flopped, Vaudoyer took something of a risk when he commissioned him to write a historical
drama for the Comédie Française. Montherlant took his inspiration from a sixteenth-century Spanish playwright, Luís Vélez de Guevara, and set his story in Portugal, where King Ferrante wants to marry off his son Pedro to the Infante of Navarre. When the king discovers that Pedro has secretly married Inès de Castro, who is carrying his child, the affront to his authority leads him to order Inès’s death, a sentence that then brings on his own death. With Yonnel as Ferrante, Barrault as Pedro and Madeleine Renaud as Inès, this star-laden cast helped to ensure a splashy opening on December 8, 1942.

Seeing no apparent parallel between the plot and contemporary events, the collaborationist press felt free to praise the play for its poetic depiction of the passion and tragedy unfolding in Ferrante’s court. Yet, illustrating how carefully texts were studied for hidden meanings, the clandestine newspaper
Les Lettres Françaises
complained that the play celebrated the victory of “reasons of state” over human feelings. “And there lies the secret of the official support given to
La Reine morte,”
it said. For Montherlant, though, it was above all a family drama. So, too, was his next play,
Fils de personne
, produced at the Théâtre Saint-Georges in June 1943, in which a father seeks out his twelve-year-old son, whom he abandoned before birth. Still, for all the intellectual resistance’s disapproval, Montherlant’s reputation only grew. In a list prepared in 2000, among the 133 plays most performed at the Comédie Française since 1680, Montherlant’s
La Reine morte
and
Port-Royal
, staged in 1954, were the only ones written in the twentieth century.

By choosing a historical theme in
La Reine morte
, Montherlant followed the wartime practice of setting dramas (and movies) in the past. While this often allowed them to be staged without interference by censors, it also encouraged audiences to view them as allegories. This was almost too easy in the case of Joan of Arc. Having stood up to the English invaders, the fifteenth-century French saint proved to be an all-purpose heroine. For anti-Nazis, she was the personification of French honor and courage, an inspiring example of resistance to humiliation and occupation. For the Germans and Vichy, she served to remind the French that England was their traditional enemy, a country that as recently as 1940 had again betrayed France. “Martyr of National Unity, Joan of Arc is the symbol of France,” proclaimed a Vichy poster. Beyond the pageants and oratorios put on around France by Vichy’s Jeune France organization, then, Paris, too, underwent a Joan mania.

Oddly, the occupation produced almost no new plays about Jeanne La Pucelle, as she was known in France, but producers had many to choose from. The first to be presented in Paris, in December 1940, was Shaw’s
Saint Joan
. Two others,
Jeanne d’Arc
and
Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc
, written years earlier by the literary nationalist Charles Péguy, were adapted by his son Marcel in 1941. Honegger’s oratorio
Jeanne au bûcher
, written in the 1930s, was toured widely by Jeune France after its premiere in 1942. This work was apolitical; other plays leaned toward Vichy’s point of view, among them Jean Jacoby’s
Scènes de la vie de Jeanne d’Arc
and Marcelle Vioux’s
Jeanne d’Arc
. One play that pleased everyone was Claude Vermorel’s
Jeanne avec nous
, which he wrote in 1938 and which ran for eight months in Paris in 1942. It was applauded by the collaborationist press, with Rebatet hailing Vermorel’s Joan as a “patroness of French Fascism.” Yet in time, both for its staging and its text, it was considered the first resistance play of the occupation: not only did English soldiers click their heels, but the Inquisition that condemned Joan behaved remarkably like Vichy.
⁸
In her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir said that, in applauding Joan’s “proud response” to the English, “we demonstrated without ambiguity against the Germans and against Vichy.”
⁹

Guitry also saw historical drama as an excellent vehicle for glorifying France, an objective he pursued even while socializing with German officers and diplomats. Already in the fall of 1940, after reopening his Théâtre de la Madeleine with
Pasteur
and his tribute to distinguished French artists, he followed with
Florence
and
Le Roi Louis XI
, both plays that made audiences feel good about France. Then, before the year was over, he appeared in
Le Bien-aimé
, a new comedy in which the absolutism of Louis XV could be interpreted as an allegory for that of the Nazis. The story is told that a German general visited Guitry in his dressing room after the show. “So, Monsieur, after two hours you’re not defeated,” the officer said. Guitry replied, “That, General, is exactly the impression I hoped to give.”
¹⁰

Next came
Le Soir d’Austerlitz
, which he renamed
Vive l’empereur
after objections from the Propaganda Staffel. In this comedy set on the eve of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in 1805, Guitry, who had been married five times, celebrated adultery. In
N’écoutez pas mesdames
, though, there is a veiled reference to Jews whose property had been Aryanized when one character notes, “In truth, no, I am not an antiquarian. I am helping out someone who, at this
time, is experiencing misfortune.”
¹¹
Two of Guitry’s plays were vetoed by the Propaganda Staffel.
Mon auguste grandpère
(My August Grandfather), his pointed response to the charge that he was Jewish, mocked anti-Semitic legislation put in place by Vichy. And
Le Dernier troubadour
(The Last Troubadour), which was to star Charles Trenet and the young soprano Géori Boué, was a musical comedy in which the first and third acts take place during the German occupation and the second act jumps back four centuries to the time of Joan of Arc and the English occupation. Here, at least, the German censor offered an explanation: “Impossible! It will give too much pleasure to the Gaullists.”
¹²