Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

attic room, Brasillach gave himself up. The decision was made when he heard that, on his account, his mother had been arrested and imprisoned. After taking a last look at the banks of the Seine opposite Notre-Dame – ‘Paris is beautiful, when one is about to leave it,’ he recalled from his cell – he presented himself in the afternoon at the Prefecture of Police and was conducted without handcuffs across to the Conciergerie on the Quai de l’Horloge. He spent the next five months in prison, first at Noisy and then at Fresnes.
    Prominent figures in the performing arts were more visible targets than writers, but few of them had been carried away by the sort of dangerous idealism which had infected Brasillach. These members of the demi-collaboration were not guilty of treason, but of wanting to continue their lives as if nothing had changed. Jean-Louis Barrault argued that continuing to work and ignoring the Germans was a positive attitude, and all that could be done if one were not an active member of the Resistance.
    This was perfectly valid as far as it went, but many people found it difficult to remain morally upright throughout the Occupation. It was also tempting for people in the performing arts to look on the Germans in Paris as no more than a new, cultivated élite. Otto Abetz was an ardent Francophile and those who attended his parties at the German Embassy in the rue de Lille found it hard to remember that this was the civilized face of a brutal and oppressive enemy.
    The superficial glamour of the Occupation was perhaps best illustrated at the parties given by General Hanesse of the Luftwaffe, who had taken over the Rothschild town house in the Avenue de Marigny as his official residence. There he gave magnificent receptions, for Goering among others, which attracted a number of stars from the French stage. Arletty had a stronger reason for going. Her lover, with whom she lived in the Ritz, was one of General Hanesse’s officers. His guests were not only filmstars. On his return from prison camp, Baron Élie de Rothschildremarked to the old family butler, Félix, that the house must have been very quiet under General Hanesse’s occupation.
    ‘On the contrary, Monsieur Élie. There were receptions every evening.’
    ‘But… who came?’
    ‘The same people, Monsieur Élie. The same as before the war.’
    Sacha Guitry, whose talents both as a dramatist and an actor suggest comparisons with Noël Coward, was arrested early one morning before he had a chance to dress. He was hustled out of his house in yellow-flowered pyjamas, jade-green crocodile pumps and a Panama hat, and taken to the
mairie
of the 7th
arrondissement
. When asked by the examining magistrate after his arrest why he had agreed to meet Goering, Guitry replied ‘
par curiosité
’. He said that he would have been just as interested in having dinner with Stalin, which was probably true.
    Guitry recorded in his memoirs that as Leclerc’s troops approached the city Arletty had telephoned himin great agitation: she was an obvious target for
épuration
. When she was arrested early in September, a terrible rumour ran round Paris that her breasts had been cut off. This was a grotesque invention, but she may well have had her head shaved. Her hairdresser clearly remembers her turbaned head and having to make a wig for her. Arletty is said to have yelled at her accusers: ‘What is this government which is so interested in our sex lives!’ Her own account plays down the event of her arrest: ‘Two very discreet gentlemen came to fetch me.’ There was a car and no handcuffs, she said. Fromprison, she was allowed out under escort to make the final reshoots for
Les Enfants du Paradis
. It came out on 15 March 1945. One of her lines ran: ‘I amthe victimof a miscarriage of justice.’
    Gabrielle Coco Chanel was born poor like Arletty, but rose to become the founder of one of Paris’s most successful fashion houses. She too had made her way up from nothing and was contemptuous of what people thought. ‘France has got what she deserves!’ Chanel declared at a lunch party on the Côte d’Azur in 1943. Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge’s wife, Baba, was so shocked that, on meeting Coco the next day, she turned her back. (Shortly afterwards, when police came to arrest Baba Lucinge as a Jew – she was born d’Erlanger – Lucinge suspected that Chanel had tipped off the German authorities.)
    The most striking similarity between