The moral maze of occupied France
Jack Carrigan writes about the perils faced by American expats in Nazi-occupied France

8 January 2010

Americans in Paris
By Charles Glass
Harper Press, £20

This absorbing book is sub-titled: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation 1940-1944. Its author, a well-known American journalist and broadcaster, divides his time between London and Paris so is appropriately situated to tell the story of those of his compatriots who chose to remain in Paris after the Occupation.

The Germans marched into the city on June 14 1940. Glass tells us that "at this scene, Parisians had stared, sullen and silent, many of them weeping". Most American expats had fled; those who stayed were in a difficult rather than an immediately dangerous position - at least until December 11 1941 when Hitler declared war on the US and they became enemies overnight.

Glass concentrates on four prominent personalities whose attitudes towards the Germans were in sharp contrast to each other: the millionaire businessman Charles Bedaux; Sylvia Beach, owner of the celebrated bookshop Shakespeare & Company; Clara Longworth, Comtesse de Chambrun, who had married into an influential aristocratic family and Dr Sumner Jackson, who led the team of doctors at the American Hospital.

They had three options under their new, unwelcome masters: to resist, to collaborate or to endure. Sumner Jackson chose resistance, Sylvia Beach endured, Bedaux collaborated - although, as Glass shows, this involved many grey areas - while the Comtesse in her imperious fashion did a bit of all three.

The author provides much detail on the backgrounds of these four people in order to explain why they behaved as they did in the "moral maze" that the Occupation caused. He tries to understand rather than condemn, leaving the reader to make up his/her own mind, always asking the implicit question: would I have behaved differently, faced with the same moral dilemmas? Would I have chosen suffering or to save my own skin?

Bedaux, self-made millionaire and a brilliant entrepreneur, continued doing business with everyone, French, American and German. His social milieu included Nazi officials, rising collaborators and newly rich black marketeers.

Working for Germany as well as France "he convinced himself he was doing nothing wrong". French-born but a US citizen, he committed suicide in 1944 when awaiting trial in America as a spy. Yet this man had also endangered his wealth and his life to protect Jewish friends, employees and clients.

Sylvia Beach "hadn't the energy to flee", as she admitted. The friend of Joyce and Hemingway, she had run her famous bookshop, a haven for the avant-garde, for 20 years; now she slept in the back of the shop surrounded by books but with no running water, little heating and dwindling food supplies.

In this, of course, she resembled most of the population of Paris. When America entered the war she was interned and Shakespeare & Co was forced to close; it never reopened at rue de l'Odéon.

Sumner Jackson, the surgeon, had married a Frenchwoman. Deserting the American Hospital was unthinkable; so was compromise. He emerges as a quiet, brave, unflinching man, trying to alleviate the sufferings of French prisoners of war and facilitating their escape.

Risking his own life, he falsified hospital records to say that these prisoner patients were terminally ill or had died. Eventually sent to Germany as a slave labourer he was to die during an Allied bombing raid.

Clara de Chambrun was perhaps the most complex of the four. Her son had married the daughter of Pierre Laval, the deeply unpopular premier of Vichy France; if this did not make her an actual collaborator the close association was to contaminate her reputation.

But she, too, fought her own battles to keep open the American Library in Paris when it was the only public institution in German-occupied Europe where books in English circulated freely. She was also a famous Shakespeare scholar and an early investigator of his Catholic influences. She disapproved of Resistance fighters, believing they made the situation worse due to the brutal German reprisals against them. While she saw Pétain and Laval as protectors of France, to other Americans they were traitors; Glass reminds us that they sent a million men to forced labour in Germany and helped deport Jews.

Much of the frenetic atmosphere of those times has been beautifully captured in Suite Française, the superb (and tragically unfinished) novel of Irène Némirovsky, one of those deported Jews; she was to die in Auschwitz.

American diplomat George Kennan wrote in his Diary: "When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it [Paris] and what is left is only stone."

Glass has helped those stones to speak.