From the Page to the Screen: Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre

On July 16, 1942, Wehrmacht captain Ernst Jünger wrote the following in the journal he kept on life in Nazi-occupied Paris:

Les couleurs des glaïeuls se rapprochent de celles qui relèvent de la distillation; derrière l'éclat de ces coloris extraits à l'état pur, la vivante substance de la fleur s'efface presque. D'où vient aussi, comme devant toute figuration pure et par trop pure, le sentiment de vide et d'ennui qu'on éprouve presque inévitablement au spectacle de ces fleurs. Mais elles éveillent aussi—leurs espèces blanches en particulier—des questions théologiques.¹

[The colors of the gladiolas appear distilled; behind the glare of these shades extracted in a pure state, the living substance of the flower is almost erased. And from there, too, like before any too pure visible manifestation, derives the feeling of emptiness and ennui that one feels almost inevitably because of the spectacle of these flowers. But they also awaken—the white ones in particular—theological questions.]

Beautiful flowers were not the only subject of Jünger's musings on that hot summer Thursday. The German officer goes on to describe the rare books he bought the same day as he wandered around the city, including J. G. Houssaye's Monographie du thé, Saint-Didier's La ville et la république de Venise, and Lautréamont's Préface à un livre futur.

At first glance, there is nothing offensive or surprising in Captain Jünger's meditations. Indeed, Jünger—a novelist, essayist, and avid student of zoology and botany—is known for such lengthy and luxurious musings on both nature and literature.² What does give Jünger's mental meanderings a morally dubious quality, however, is the context in which they were written, a context that is made abundantly clear to viewers of Michel Mitrani's 1974 film, Les Guichets du Louvre. Mitrani's film depicts—in disturbing and often unsparing detail—the infamous rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver, a two-day round-up conducted by French police that targeted non-French Jews in Paris, and that resulted in the detention and deportation of 12,884 men, women, and children, all but about 450 of whom were sent to their death.³ The film portrays events that took place between the early morning and the late afternoon on the first day of the round-up—the very same leisurely July 16^th Jünger spent browsing for books, writing in his journal, and meditating on the theological implications of flowers.

Although released in the much-discussed mode rétro era, just months after Lacombe Lucien (January 1974) and in the wake of Le Chagrin et la pitié (filmed in 1969, released in the early 1970s), Mitrani's film, unlike its contemporaries, has received scant scholarly attention. Both the film version of Les Guichets du Louvre and the book by Roger Boussinot on which it is based have been largely neglected by historians and cultural critics alike.⁴ Les Guichets du Louvre merits detailed critical analysis, however, for the film provides viewers with a historically accurate and edifying depiction of the most notorious event of the Nazi Occupation. At the same time, it serves as an example of how feature filmmaking can alter the historical record, allowing fiction to supersede fact. Indeed, while retaining a great deal of nuance and accuracy for the depiction of the rafle itself, the film manipulates the portrayal of the most important figures in the film. Through artful editing and fictionalization, Les Guichets du Louvre gives the viewer a strategically limited understanding of the historical context around the round-up (including the portrayal of Ernst Jünger). More importantly, the film also fictionalizes the actions of Roger Boussinot, fundamentally changing the tenor of the story as a whole. In doing so, Mitrani's film effaces elements of Boussinot's autobiographical narrative that could have been a source of ambiguity and controversy, thereby rendering the film more palatable to a mainstream audience and diminishing viewers' exposure to the complexities...