And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (61 page)

The
épuration
in other cultural areas was, by comparison, relatively gentle, although in music, an art form particularly dear to the Germans, two high-profile cases stood out. The concert pianist Alfred Cortot, who had found time to perform in Germany while working as a musical adviser to Vichy, was arrested by the FFI in his Neuilly home on September 1, 1944. He was quickly released following intercession by Claude Delvincourt, the director of the Conservatoire de Paris and himself a
résistant
. But the following year, the Fine Arts Committee of Inquiry revoked Cortot’s position as a professor at the conservatory, while a professional purge committee suspended his right to perform in public for one year. When he resumed his career at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in January
1947, he was booed off the stage. Within two years, though, much of the public had forgiven him.

In contrast, the
épuration
destroyed the singing career of Germaine Lubin, the great Wagnerian soprano. A German favorite, she was arrested by the FFI on the day after the liberation and taken for questioning to the town hall of the 8th arrondissement. Her lawyer obtained her release, but one week later she was again arrested, and this time she was held for two months, first in Drancy, then in Fresnes. In the meantime, she was banned from performing at the Paris Opera. The legal case against her was dropped in January 1945, reopened in March by a Civic Court, then again dropped. She withdrew to her château in the Loire Valley, but in December 1946 she was rearrested and brought to trial, this time before a Court of Justice, which found her guilty of
indignité nationale
and ordered confiscation of her property and condemned her to
dégradation nationale
. Then, in May 1949, Lubin was once more summoned by still another Civic Court in Paris, to answer the charge that she had used her friendship with Hitler to obtain her son’s release from a prison camp. The following year, now sixty years old, she offered a recital at the Salle Gaveau. Her loyal fans gave her an ovation, but her voice was failing her and she never again sang in public. Instead, until her death in 1979, she worked as a voice teacher, with the soprano Régine Crespin among her pupils.

The purge of other musicians and dancers focused on those close to the Germans. Serge Lifar, the Paris Opera’s ballet director, who both boasted and exhibited his close ties with the Germans, left Paris before he could be arrested. He was banned from the opera, but he had found work in Monte Carlo and returned to his old post as ballet master at the opera in 1947. Perhaps most remarkably, at least to judge by his memoir,
Ma vie
, Lifar never ceased to believe that he had always acted correctly and in the interests of the Paris Opera.

The
étoile
ballerina Solange Schwarz, who had had a German lover, was also banned from the Paris Opera, but she, too, soon resumed her career, first at the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, then at the Opéra-Comique. Even Jacques Rouché, the venerable head of both the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique, was interrogated by the FFI, but the composers Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric and Roger Désormière came to his defense and no charges were brought against him. In contrast, Max d’Ollone, the
pétainiste
who had headed the music section of the Groupe Collaboration and served as
director of the Opéra-Comique during much of the occupation, emerged unscathed.

The world of popular music was no less exposed than opera and ballet, since
chansonniers
and cabaret dancers had routinely performed before Germans. Like many others, Léo Marjane had sung regularly on Radio-Paris, where her signature “Je suis seule ce soir” had echoed the melancholy of women whose husbands were prisoners in Germany. When she was taken before a Civic Court to answer for performing before Germans, she responded dismissively, “I am myopic.” But her career never recovered.

Maurice Chevalier, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet and Édith Piaf had been denounced by Radio-Londres for visiting Germany, even though it was only to perform before French prisoners of war or STO workers. Chevalier, who had spent the final months of the occupation hiding from both the resistance and the Gestapo, was briefly arrested. Thanks to Aragon, he was released and escaped further punishment, although in exchange he was expected to perform at various Communist Party fund-raisers. He then tried to persuade his American fans that he had never collaborated with the Germans by filming a special message to them in his trademark “Frenchie” English. Rossi was arrested in October 1944 and spent three weeks in Fresnes before he was briefly banned from performing, while Trenet, also suspended from singing in public, went to the United States for two years before returning to enjoy a glittering career. Piaf was hardly bothered: summoned for questioning, she found witnesses to testify that she had helped some prisoners of war escape and was forgiven for entertaining Germans in Paris.

In cinema, it was still more difficult to separate judges and judged since, except for Jews and those few actors and directors who had left for the United States, the entire industry had worked throughout the occupation: no fewer than 220 French movies by 82 different directors had been made and released under German rule. After the liberation, the industry’s Communist-dominated
comité d’épuration
decided to focus on those who had worked for Alfred Greven’s Continental Films. Bizarrely, among those who had done so were the screenwriter Jean-Paul Le Chanois and the assistant director Jean-Devaivre, who had belonged to the small cinema resistance group that put out the clandestine sheet
L’Écran Français
. Further, while seven of the eight directors named for investigation had worked for Continental, some, like Michel Tourneur, who had made six movies
for Greven, were not on the list. Jean Marais, now wearing an FFI uniform, was disturbed by the persecution. “Many of my colleagues who had worked for Continental or Radio-Paris revealed themselves at the liberation to be
résistants,”
he wrote in his memoir,
Histoire de ma vie
. “They accused and judged their peers.”
²⁵

One who was admonished for signing a contract with Continental was Marcel Carné, even though he had made no movies for the German firm. On the other hand, after endless hearings, Henri-Georges Clouzot was banned from filmmaking for two years, albeit more because the resistance hated
Le Corbeau
than because he had made it for Continental. The movie was even proscribed at the liberation, although the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert testified that it was not “a film of anti-French propaganda.” Perhaps because he was so well known, Pierre Fresnay, who had made nine films during the occupation, including four for Continental, was jailed for six weeks, then placed under house arrest.

In a few cases, punishments went beyond professional sanctions. Some directors and editors involved in making propaganda newsreels for
France Actualités
were given prison sentences. One movie director, Jean Mamy, who had also used the name Paul Riche, was even executed. He had made
Forces occultes
, an anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic production, which was arguably the only propagandistic feature film of the occupation. In August 1944, having first gone into hiding, he surrendered to the police after his mother was arrested by the FFI. Inexplicably, he was not brought to trial until late 1948 and, in March 1949, he was the last person shot under the
épuration
.

Some FFI lists included the actors who had traveled to Berlin in 1942 with Danielle Darrieux. Albert Prejean, who had made six movies for Continental, was jailed for six weeks but never charged. Viviane Romance was arrested in Biarritz, held for several weeks, then acquitted by a military tribunal. Darrieux recalled that when she arrived to be questioned, the first man she saw was none other than her former husband, Henri Decoin, who had made three films for Continental. “He said, ‘But what the hell are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Get the hell out of here right now.’ They really didn’t know who was who in the purge.”
²⁶
Decoin himself was suspended from working for one year because one of his films,
Les Inconnus dans la maison
, was said to have demoralized the French.

Other cases were more serious. Céline’s friend Robert Le Vigan had a lot to answer for: a veteran star of stage and screen, he was a
convinced Fascist who had voiced his anti-Semitism on Radio-Paris, he had joined Doriot’s extreme rightist party and he was suspected of being an informant for the Gestapo. Jean-Louis Barrault, Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Renoir spoke up for him, but he was nonetheless sentenced to ten years of hard labor by a Court of Justice; he was freed on bail in 1948. The veteran actress Cécile Sorel, seventy years old when Paris was liberated, was sentenced to
dégradation nationale
for requesting the gift of an apartment confiscated from a Jewish family. And Alice Cocéa was jailed for three months and banned from working for a year for taking over the lease of the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, which belonged to the exiled Jewish playwright Henry Bernstein.
^*
Ginette Leclerc, who made eleven films during the occupation, including
Le Corbeau
, suffered more than most: she was jailed for nine months because, with Greven’s help, she had opened a cabaret popular with German officers.

Just as women who engaged in
collaboration horizontale
were seen to have offended French honor, actresses who had paraded around Paris with German officers on their arms were singled out. Mireille Balin’s Wehrmacht lover was even assassinated when she was arrested by the FFI in September 1940. The actress Corinne Luchaire was carrying the child of her Austrian Wehrmacht lover when she followed her collaborationist father, Jean, to Sigmaringen in 1944; she was later sentenced to ten years of
dégradation nationale
.

The most famous actress to be trapped by the
épuration
was the inimitable Arletty. In her favor, she had made no films for Continental and, with Guitry, she had helped obtain Tristan Bernard’s release from Drancy. But from 1941 she was devoted to a young Luftwaffe officer, Hans Jürgen Soehring. She was seen everywhere with him, dining at Maxim’s and attending receptions at the German embassy, including one for Göring in December 1941. After the liberation, she went into hiding, but she was arrested two months later and sent to Drancy. “In jail, a young nun tried to bring me closer to God,” she later recalled. “I told her that we had already met and it hadn’t worked out.”
²⁷
Always quick with a bon mot, one morning during her trial she was asked by the prosecutor how she was feeling. “Not
very
résistante,”
she replied. The principal complaint against her, then, was that she had had a German lover, to which she retorted, “In my bed there are no uniforms.” She then offered the line for which she is best remembered: “My heart is French but my ass is international.” After six weeks in Drancy, she was placed under house arrest at the château of friends in La Houssaye-en-Brie, twenty miles outside Paris. In 1947, she resumed her career with
La Fleur de l’âge
, a new film by her old friend Carné, for whom she had made two of the best films of the occupation,
Les Visiteurs du soir
and
Les Enfants du paradis
. In 1956, with ten movies to her name since the liberation, she was chosen to be a member of the jury of the ninth Cannes Film Festival. Even at the age of fifty-eight, she still knew how to charm the French.

For visual artists, it was relatively easy during the occupation to continue working and even to sell oils or sculptures privately or through a gallery without ever coming into contact with Germans. When German officers came to his door, Picasso was unable to turn them away, but at least some of these uninvited visitors were educated men, like Jünger and Heller. The issue of collaboration arose when artists went out of their way to associate themselves with the occupiers. After the liberation, the Communist-dominated Front National des Arts immediately denounced the dozen artists who had accepted invitations to visit Germany in October 1941, among them the Fauvists Derain, Van Dongen, Vlaminck and Friesz. Several of these same artists had also sat on the Comité d’Honneur for Arno Breker’s splashy exhibition at the Orangerie in 1942. Aristide Maillol would probably also have been interrogated about his friendship with Breker, but the octogenarian sculptor died in a car crash while driving to visit Dufy on September 26, 1944. The Front National itself had no power of arrest, but its naming and shaming of artists under investigation was widely reported, above all after Picasso joined the Communist Party and was appointed president of the Front’s executive committee.
^*

In June 1946, twenty-three artists, including those fêted in Germany in 1941, were sanctioned with one- or two-year suspensions of
their right to exhibit or sell their works. And while this had little impact on their professional activity, at the very least it bruised their reputations. On the other hand, galleries that had operated during the occupation, even some that had sold art looted from Jewish families, were not sanctioned. Thus, once again, businessmen were held to lower moral standards than artists. In fashion, designers were also treated as businessmen—essential to France’s recovery—rather than artists: of the fifty-five cases brought before the
commission d’épuration de la couture
, not one involved a major fashion house. In contrast, it was Chanel’s private life that earned her a short spell in jail; friends obtained her release and she wisely moved to Switzerland until 1954.

The debate about theater during the occupation was simplified by the fact that, as with cinema, everything presented before the public had been censored and/or approved by the Propaganda Staffel. On the other hand, the urge to purge was complicated by the fact that playwrights who accepted these rules included not only
pétainistes
like Montherlant,
attentistes
like Anouilh and Claudel and opportunists like Cocteau and Guitry, but also Sartre and Camus, men who after the liberation were identified with the resistance. Further, it was no secret that German officers had attended and applauded performances of both of Sartre’s plays.