For as long as they were in print, magazines exhorted Parisiennes to remain ‘women who were proud of maintaining a privilege for which all the world envied them, to help fashion overcome the war around them. Fashion will remain Parisienne in its most intimate fibre,’ according to an editorial that autumn. ‘You will dress yourself simply but elegantly. Those who are at the front want you to be pretty and soignée.’ It was a stirring column, telling women they had it in their power to accomplish this essential task: not to allow the luxury industry, one of the vital resources of Paris, to die.
By December the magazines were slightly more sober in tone, attuned to the times, advising women on what to put in the little packages to send their soldiers, how to cook the more economical rillettes, how to knit balaclavas and jumpers or, now that so many budgets were reduced, how to revive an old dress and make it look like this year’s. Some asked their readers if they would prefer to have half a magazine appear regularly or have the magazine stay the same size but published half as often. However, by early 1940 the shortages forced most magazines to close down anyway. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, despite the difficulties, stayed in production longer but, as Lucien Lelong explained in a November 1939 interview, maintaining the fashion industry was not just about vanity. ‘At a time when the country needs foreign currency we must make every effort to increase our export figures. Our overseas clientele has resumed its usual way of life … We have another duty. Twenty thousand working women and 500 male employees make their living from Parisian couture. It also has a direct influence on the life of other industries: textiles, silk, furs, lace etc.’ Everything must be done to preserve these jobs in Paris, he said. It was an argument he was to make even more stridently and urgently in the months to come. Paris to most people meant fashion, food, cabarets and the Comédie-Fran?aise. How these aspects of life were to fare over the next five years was not clear in 1939, but each of them was digging in.
But merely looking elegant and soignée was, of course, never going to be enough. As the American former actress Drue Tartière commented, many of the French soldiers looked pitifully ill equipped for the ordeal ahead, wearing carpet slippers instead of boots. Drue was one of almost 30,000 Americans living in or near Paris before the outbreak of war. She was working at Paris Mondial radio station arranging for Americans to give broadcasts to the United States, intended to convey the difficult atmosphere in Paris. Colette was one of her regular broadcasters, along with the French actresses Mistinguett and Cécile Sorel and the influential American journalist Dorothy Thompson. Although the American Ambassador, William Bullitt, advised all US citizens to leave France, some 5,000 chose to remain in the city either because they had made it their home and loved the country or because they had family ties or both. Since Drue’s French husband, Jacques Tartière, to whom she’d been married just a year, was away fighting, Drue hired as her housekeeper a young girl from Alsace called Nadine keen to live in the big city. Just before taking her on, Drue asked her how she felt about the Germans. ‘My father, Madame,’ she responded with a straight face, ‘always said that there was only one way to cure Germany and that was to kill the women and children.’ The response, while comforting, seemed a little extreme to Drue, who took her on all the same. Not many Parisiennes felt quite the way Nadine did towards Germany.
* Pétain was over sixty when he finally married, in 1920, Mme Eugénie Hardon, one of his mistresses, a divorcee who already had a child. Ironically, while Vichy prioritized raising the birthrate and protecting the family, he did not, as far as is known, father any children of his own.
? The rivalry ceased in 1941 after Lawrence tragically contracted polio and left Paris.
* For a while the artist Charlotte Salomon, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Dora Benjamin, sister of Walter, were all incarcerated here.
1940
PARIS ABANDONED