Flying the flag

And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. By Alan Riding. Knopf; 416 pages; $28.95. To be published in Britain by Duckworth in March 2011; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“DURING the occupation”, declared Jean-Paul Sartre, “we had two choices: collaborate or resist.” But France's iconic intellectual, speaking some three decades after Hitler's tanks rolled into Paris, was rewriting history. As Alan Riding points out, in this meticulously researched history of French culture during the second world war, there was another option—attentisme, or wait and see—and the divisions between them were easily blurred. Sartre himself was certainly never a collaborator, but his image as a résistant was burnished rather late in the day. Mr Riding notes that “although his involvement in the intellectual resistance had been minimal, after the liberation he had suddenly appeared as the chronicler of France's calvary.”

Much of this book, notably the flight to America of artists such as Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp, or the collaboration of the narcissistic Jean Cocteau, will be familiar to those who have read Frederic Spotts's 2008 book, “The Shameful Peace”. Mr Riding used to write about European culture for the New York Times and was based in Paris. Where he adds value is in his analysis of the subtle challenges of the Nazi occupation for the various sectors of the arts. If escape and exile were not the chosen option, actors needed to tread the boards, singers needed the music halls, musicians needed the concert hall. How could they avoid giving succour to the enemy, given the many Germans in the audience?

Most chose a degree of compromise, some larger than others. Edith Piaf, who said in 1940 that “my real job is to sing, to sing no matter what happens”, was willing to perform twice in Stalag III-D, a camp for French prisoners-of-war outside Berlin—but on her first visit cleverly encouraged the camp commander to allow photographs to be taken of her with him and the POWs. The photos were then cropped so that each POW's image could be attached to counterfeit documents identifying him as a French worker in Germany. On Piaf's next visit to the camp, the documents were secretly delivered. If a POW escaped, he had a protective German ID card. As Piaf put it, “I was not in the Resistance, but I helped my soldiers.”

By contrast, Jean Guéhenno, an essayist, refused absolutely to write for any outlet approved by the Germans. Instead, his opinions were pseudonymously confined to an underground newspaper, Les Lettres Françaises, and an equally clandestine publishing house, Éditions de Minuit. “Writers should not be seeking the glory of the byline,” he noted in his “Journal des Années Noires”, which was published just after the war. “Now is the time to write for nothing, for pleasure.” Well said—but then Guéhenno did have the financial security of a teaching job at the Lycée Henri IV.

Mr Riding's book is an impressively comprehensive survey of the occupation years: the relentless persecution of France's Jews, especially the foreign-born, by the Vichy authorities as well as the Germans; Goebbels's expropriation of Jewish-owned art; the fascism of some French intellectuals, and the attraction of Stalin's communism for others. One irony is that French cinema, so enriched by Jewish directors, actors and producers before the war, nonetheless flourished after their expulsion thanks to an influx of new talent. Mr Riding particularly praises Marcel Carné's “Les Enfants du Paradis”.

But if the French arts, from the chansons of Maurice Chevalier to the ballet of the collaborationist, Serge Lifar, survived the Nazis, how lasting was their victory? Mr Riding saves his best for last, with a discomfiting portrayal of the post-Liberation épuration—the “purge” of collaborators—and a clear-headed judgment of Paris's subsequent cultural status.

Simply put, between 1918 and 1939 the French capital was also the cultural capital of the world. Yet, by the late 1940s “culturally the city was no longer a magnet for artists and writers from around the world.” Perhaps that was for the better. Mr Riding notes that French intellectuals have “propagated doctrines—monarchism, Fascism, anti-Semitism, Communism, even Maoism—that offered explanations and solutions for everything.” With these doctrines having failed to bring Utopia, “politically speaking, artists and writers may now be less prominent, but they are also less dangerous.”