False Policeman, Real Crooks, and Fictional Detectives in Paris during the Occupation

January/February 2007 Historically Speaking 31 False Policeman, Real Crooks, and Fictional Detectives in Paris during the Occupation Richard Vinen In 1943 the collaborationist intellectual Robert Brasillach pointed out that die atmosphere of wartime Paris, with its "terrorism [he meant resistance ], black markets, and darkened streets," provided an idea setting for a detective story. He urged Georges Simenon, a writer whom he much admired, to compose such a story. Nothing ever came of this. Brasillach himself was shot for treason shordy after the liberation. Simenon prudendy withdrew from the political tumults of wartime France and spent ten years living in America. References to the occupation in his fiction are always intriguingly indirect: we learn that Maigret did not set foot in die capital of the wartime French state until the 1960s, even though he was born only twenty miles away from it, and that he left Paris for a year after the liberation due to "difficulties ." Simenon's The Stain on the Snow is often assumed to be a novel about wartime France, but it is in fact set in an unidentified city (I have always felt diat it is really Liege) occupied by an unidentified army (I have always felt that it was really meant to be that of the Soviet Union). Brasillach did, however, have a point. The atmosphere of wartime Paris did often feel like that of a roman noir. The city was quite literally dark—in order to conserve electricity and avoid giving Allied bombers an easy target. German curfew removed honest citizens from the streets at night. After midnight, die only people allowed to go out were German officers, French policemen , and diose civilians (often criminals in die eyes of die French law) who had managed to obtain special passes from the German authorities. The presence of German troops brought all sorts of illicit commerce in food, drink, and sex. Often these dealings brought German soldiers into conflict with members of the Paris underworld. Organized, armed resistance to the Germans did not really begin until the Communist Party was mobilized after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, but long before then Paris police reported diat hundred of shots had been fired at German soldiers, mosdy in barroom brawls over girls. There was a sinister excitement to life in Paris during the occupation (particularly during its later stages) because everyone assumed that die city was living through its last days and that the retreating Germans would blow it up (as diey would have done if die German commander had obeyed Hider's orders). Crime and policing raise interesting questions for historians of occupied France. Throughout the occupation, the French police force continued to exist and continued to carry out its normal work— directing traffic, keeping die peace on die streets, and repressing crime (the vast growth of the black market created new work in this last area). The Paris police also did tilings diat were more Paris, France, 1942. Families from the north having their first meal in days in a refugee camp. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USW33-042487]. direcdy connected to the German occupation. Most notoriously, onJuly 16, 1942 they carried out a mass roundup of Jews who were interned and eventually deported to Auschwitz, where the vast majority of them died. The fact that policemen committed what most French people probably now regard as the most heinous single crime in French history has evoked mixed responses. Were the police victims forced to carry out terrible orders, or were they eager racist collaborators? Two of France's most prominentJewish historians gave different answers. Maurice Rasjfus never forgave the police for arresting his parents in 1942 and has spent much of his career drawing attention to other instances of police brutality (notably the massacres of protestors during the Algerian war). By contrast, Annie Kriegel, in a striking passage in her memoirs, describes the moment when she realized that die deportation of ParisJews had begun. She came home on die afternoon after she had finished taking her school-leaving exams and, as she crossed a square in eastern Paris, saw a column of bedraggled miserable looking people carrying...