Paris had surrendered in June 1940 without a struggle. Just after the Ger-
man military’s triumphal parade down the Champs-Élysées on June 18,
Adolf Hitler invited the sculptor Arno Breker and the architects Hermann
Giesler and Albert Speer to stand at the Trocadéro and feast their eyes on
their most beautiful possession. Paris was the Nazi’s crown jewel. So intent
were the Germans on seducing Parisians and colonizing the City of Light
that, at least on the surface, it operated more or less normally during the
occupation. Even when the tide turned against the Nazis’ New Order, Paris
was still spared final destruction. In 1944, rather than hand the city over to
Allied forces, Hitler had ordered the city destroyed. Wehrmacht engineers
placed explosives around iconographic buildings and sites such as the Lux-
embourg Palace, the Dome of the Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, and Notre
Dame Cathedral. Bombing the city with V1 and V2 rockets was another
possibility. But General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of Gross Paris,
refused to carry out the Führer’s orders. This decision, more than any other,
saved the historic central districts. The joyous scenes of the Liberation in
1944, the street dances, the infectious rediscovery of the public domain
became historic because the central city was still standing. Although bleak
and exhausted, the view of Paris was a familiar, reassuring site. When the
novelist Claude Aveline returned to Paris after the miracle of the Liberation,
he realized immediately that it had escaped the war’s destruction: “Paris
knew none of this. There were some traces of combat, but that’s all. And the
most celebrated, legendary places, the Concorde, the Invalides, the Latin
Quarter, the Luxembourg, the Étoile: they were free and safe.”
4
The city’s
cherished monuments were still standing. Its landscape was recognizable
as the nineteenth-century City of Light, the erstwhile temple of modernity.
Historians, urbanists, and chroniclers of all points of view agreed that the
Paris of the late 1940s and early 1950s was still visually the one magisterially
fashioned under the Second Empire. It seemed to reemerge like a romantic
vision from the past, symbolizing the nation’s endurance just at this mo-
ment when it seemed so shattered. All of the elegance and sophistication,
the grace and luminous beauty somehow would magically rematerialize.
Life in Paris would be gay and confident again.
This visual bubble shielded the reality. The dark years of the war and
occupation had been a disaster. They extinguished any notion of a genuine
public sphere and isolated Paris from the rest of France almost completely.
First of all, Paris was no longer the capital of France, but was reduced