The brothel-keepers may have been confident that war would not diminish their clientele, but it was a testing time for Parisian couturiers and jewellers not yet sure who their customers would be in the months ahead, nor where the precious raw materials would come from. Should they close down, or move south to Vichy and protect valuable stock in the face of the German Occupation? Trading in gold was effectively forbidden by the Bank of France after 1940 unless the client supplied the metal themselves; and similarly, if women wanted new fur coats they were required to bring their own furs to be remodelled. But although many ordinary retailers had little stock and empty shelves, haute couture and luxury were far from dead. The designer Nina Ricci, who reopened on 1 July 1940, explained, ‘My clients, who had lost everything during the exodus, came to see me to replenish their wardrobes.’ At the end of October Lucien Lelong, President of the Chambre Syndicale, presented his new collection, insisting that ‘women desired only to dress wisely and with dignity’. This was true for the most part, and from now on clothes for cycling – slacks or divided skirts – were de rigueur, as were warm hoods and windbreakers. (By 1943 there were two million bicycles on the streets of Paris, which had a notable effect on fashion.) Lelong won a prize for Parisian elegance by designing a divided skirt ensemble in red, white and blue, the three colours apparently giving a defiant signal to the Germans. However, as the bicycle became the favourite mode of transport for women in the resistance, so their outfits had to attract as little attention as possible.
But from July 1940, when five officers arrived at the Chambre Syndicale headquarters and helped themselves to an archive about the creation and export of Parisian designs, Lelong was constantly fighting. Just as Hitler wanted to steal French art, he also wanted to move Parisian haute couture to Berlin to ensure that Paris was no longer the fashion centre of the world. Lelong, believing that he was defending not only a French workforce but French culture, insisted that Parisian haute couture must be in Paris or nowhere. He went to Berlin in November 1940 to argue his case, claiming that the designers and workers would not be able to produce anything if they were removed from their familiar surroundings, and he won that battle, saving a workforce of roughly 25,000 women, often seamstresses working in specialized fields of embroidery or beading.
By the end of 1940 a round of fancy-dress balls given by the Germans offered an opportunity to sample the best of French couture. One of the most lavish was a New Year’s Eve reception at the German Embassy for le tout Paris: literature, the arts, politics and the theatre were all represented. Corinne Luchaire, the child turned into a femme fatale by the press, was wearing only white and thought she looked ‘very virginal’. Suzanne Abetz, she noted, her father’s former secretary now married to one of the highest-ranking Germans in the city, ‘was dressed in a rather striking manner, loaded with heavy jewels which had just been bought and to her mind marked her rise in the world’.
* This woman began the war as Marie-Antoinette Morat but, when she became a résistante, gave her identity to a young Jewish girl on the run and, using false papers, took another name herself, becoming Lucienne Guézennec.
? According to some Comédie-Fran?aise documents she was born in October 1893, but there are other dates in the files.
* After his discharge from hospital, Reynaud was arrested on Pétain’s orders and imprisoned at Fort du Portalet, where the Germans held him until the end of the war. Reynaud was liberated by Allied troops on 7 May 1945.
* Names have been changed to protect the families but the original letters between this couple are in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. See Caroline Moorehead, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’, Intelligent Life, September/October 2013.
* Freddie Knoller, at the time of writing aged ninety-three and living in London, was eventually denounced (by a jealous girlfriend) and deported to Auschwitz in October 1943. He survived there until Liberation in 1945.
1941
PARIS DIVIDED
Early in 1941 Léontine Zanta, an influential Catholic intellectual and the first French woman to receive a doctorate in philosophy (in 1914), reminded her female students of their true patriotic duty at this time: to marry, have babies and find fulfilment in the domestic routine.
Let our young female intellectuals understand this and loyally examine their conscience. I believe that many of them, if they are sincere and loyal … will admit that … if they didn’t marry since they had not found a husband to their taste or because they were horrified by household work, which means that the poor things, in their blindness or their obliviousness, did not see that this was merely selfishness, culpable individualism, and that it was this sickness that was killing France. Today we need to accept the challenge and look life squarely in the face with the pure eyes and direct gaze of our Maid of Lorraine: it is up to you, as it was up to her more than five centuries ago, to save France.