Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Arletty and Chanel was that both had taken German lovers and lived in the Ritz. Arletty had her ‘
beau Fridolin
’ from the Luftwaffe, as Galtier-Boissière called him. Chanel – then aged sixty – was with a handsome German called Hans Gunther von Dincklage, known as Spatz, who may or may not have been an Abwehr spy.
    As an insurance policy at the Liberation, Coco Chanel is said to have given away hundreds of
flacons
of Chanel No. 5 to GIs from her establishment in the rue Cambon. But when she was arrested at the Ritz early in September no American troops came to her support. She was, however, released soon after. She claimed that she had been involved in a secret mission to Spain, to bring the Allies and the Axis to the peace table, and hinted that Winston Churchill – a friend from her days as the mistress of Bendor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster – had intervened on her behalf. But whatever the reasons for her release, she left Paris in a bitter mood. She and Spatz, who had got out of France before the Liberation, were reunited in Switzerland; and Chanel made only odd visits to France over the next eight years.
    Colette had supplemented her income during the Occupation by writing for the collaborationist paper
Le Petit Parisien,
and even produced an article for the pro-German
La Gerbe
. On the other hand, she was hiding her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket. After his escape from prison camp in 1942, he did not leave their apartment in the Palais Royal until the Liberation.
    Colette’s neighbour in the Palais Royal, Jean Cocteau, exaggerated the insults and blows he received from fascists during the Occupation as an avant-garde writer and a homosexual. As a persecuted minority, he stood a better chance of effacing his appearances in Otto Abetz’s salon at the German Embassy.
    Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s protégé, who during the Occupation had been the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra and had toured in Germany, was initially banned for life from the French stage but was then let off with only a year’s suspension. He protested that he should have been honoured, not condemned, for having saved the Opéra from the Germans, but Lifar was seldom in touch with the real world.
    Collaborators in the plastic arts numbered those who had attended the opening of the exhibition of Nazi-approved sculpture by ArnoBreker at the Orangerie in May 1942 and those who had accepted an official tour of Germany sponsored by Berlin.
    The Breker exhibition, in aid of Wehrmacht charities, was opened by the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and the occasion attracted most of the demi-collaboration. Guitry even argued in his memoirs that because Breker had asked Maillol to open his exhibition, and introduced him to a line of saluting Wehrmacht generals as ‘
Mon maître vénéré
’, the whole event represented France’s supremacy in the arts over Germany, and thus washed away the defeat of 1940. Guitry did not mention that a year later ‘degenerate works’ by Max Ernst, Léger, Miró, Picabia and Picasso were publicly destroyed outside the Jeu de Paume.
    Among the painters who had been on the sponsored tour of Germany were Paul Belmondo, André Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Kees van Dongen and Vlaminck. Vlaminck, a friend of Simenon and bitter enemy of Picasso, went into hiding at the Liberation. But the sanctions against the painters were mild. The Beaux-Arts recommended that they should each be made to create a major work for the state as punishment, and their works were excluded from the Salon de la Libération.
    ‘It is clear,’ wrote Galtier-Boissière in his diary two weeks after the Liberation, ‘that the majority of our stars are more or less tainted… but in the campaigns which are gathering steam, there is a strong whiff of jealousy.’ Even after Arletty’s death in the summer of 1992, letters were published in newspapers objecting to the fulsome obituaries. They did not complain about her ‘
collaboration horizontale
’ with a German officer, but about the fact that she had been dining at the Ritz while the rest of France was going hungry.
    Most of the directors and stars of the cinema had worked with the German-controlled company Continental. Henri-Georges Clouzot was the director of
Le Corbeau,
considered one of the most remarkable films of the war years. The Germans were very dubious about
Le Corbeau,
in which a series of poison-pen letters throws the inhabitants of a village into a turmoil of mutual