In June 1940, when Hitler made his one and only visit to Paris, flying in suddenly and secretly the day after the armistice agreement had been signed, he briefly visited the mighty art gallery. He is pictured standing among some of the enormous sculptures considered too big or too dangerous to move, all that remained. But the visit was intended to make a statement, because one of Hitler’s key war aims was to expropriate French culture, proving the superiority of German culture in every possible way from music to fashion. He wanted to create his own art gallery in Linz, his home town, and this required the expropriation of Jewish-owned art on a massive scale. Later, the Louvre served as a temporary warehouse for artwork stolen from Jewish collectors. A 1943 image shows 170 canvases stacked against a wall, while another shows a hall cluttered with crates containing sculptures and other large pieces. Expropriation, or spoliation, was both an economic necessity – the objects could be sold – but also an essential part of the procedure of dehumanization preceding extermination. It was part of the mechanism of genocide, to disorientate, slowly destroying any sense of belonging by depriving Jews of what they owned. Removing the art was a stage in the process of sucking the lifeblood from Jews, most of whom saw themselves as French first, French above all else, so entrenched in French soil that many of them had fought in the French army or given their sons to the country or even bequeathed their homes to the state.
But nowhere were the effects of the Occupation felt more acutely by Parisians than in their stomachs. After August 1940, when stringent food rationing was introduced, people had to register first with the authorities, then again with an individual baker and butcher, and then had to collect coloured stamps, which the French called tickets, from the local Mairie. During the phoney war several restaurants still seemed to offer, as one American journalist reported, ‘a choice between seven kinds of oyster and six or seven kinds of fish, including bouillabaisse followed by rabbit, chicken or curry and fruit salad, pineapple with kirsch or soufflé à la liqueur’. And even in 1940 a select number of Parisian restaurants such as Maxim’s, La Tour d’Argent and Le Boeuf sur le Toit seemed able to offer menus that offered similarly fine dining on a grand scale for those in power. But for the bulk of the population, already suffering the effects of a poor harvest made worse by the invasion, once the Germans started to requisition food along with everything else, daily life for those not willing or able to enter the black market involved a painful mixture of hunger and queues. From the outset, the products that were rationed included bread, sugar, milk, butter, cheese, eggs, fats, oil, coffee and fish, and the list lengthened as the war dragged on. And of course the rich, with access to country cousins or the black market, not only did not suffer in the same way but made light of the difficulties. One customer commissioned from Boucheron, the Place Vend?me jewellers, a charm bracelet comprising small cars, each one engraved with the name of a rationed foodstuff. Janet Teissier du Cros, the Scotswoman married to a French soldier, described long queues for food, full of grumbling women often standing unprotected in the rain as they inched forward. ‘We all spoke our opinion without restraint,’ she wrote, ‘and I never even attempted to conceal my origins for it only made them more friendly. When at last my turn came and I was inside the building, going from counter to counter, from queue to queue, for the various cards, I was always in a fever lest some mistake be made and I come away with less than my due.’ Those whom Janet resented above all were the women behind the counters, women no doubt as underfed and overworked as the rest. ‘They were most of them tasting power for the first time in their lives.’
On 11 October 1940 Pétain made a radio speech in which he alluded to the possibility of France and Germany working together once peace in Europe had been established. In this speech, he used the term ‘collaboration’, linking the word to the idea of peace with Germany. And that month the Vichy government, on its own initiative, showed what being a collaborationist government meant when it published the first in a series of anti-Semitic measures, the Statut des Juifs, which authorized the exclusion of Jews from the professions, the civil service, the military and the media. It was the beginning of a series of ever harsher exclusions which made living in Paris for Jewish women close to impossible. On 24 October Pétain conducted an historic meeting with Hitler at Montoire, 125 miles south-west of Paris, at which he and Laval discussed with the Führer how Franco-German collaboration would work in practice. For Pétain and Laval, collaboration with Germany, which they believed would soon be the dominant force not just in France but in European affairs, was the means by which France might secure a better place in a post-war Europe. In the short term they also hoped that collaboration would lead to some immediate improvements: the return of most prisoners of war, the continuing safety of the French population, a decrease in the war indemnity France was obliged to pay and, of course, an assurance that Vichy’s sovereignty over the occupied and unoccupied zones would be respected.