The German women sent to Paris would mostly have been born in the late 1910s, and food was important for them too. They regarded the city as a ‘Paradise of Plenty’. Although German women had, unlike French, the right to vote, the Nazi ideology in all other ways treated them as second-class citizens whose role was to breed; they faced quotas in universities, and many other aspects of public life were closed to them. Yet, as they entered their teens in the early 1930s, having witnessed hyperinflation, mass unemployment and economic collapse, many of these middle-class girls were loyal supporters of the Führer. They may have been born malnourished, and they suffered spells of chronic hunger in 1923–4 and again in 1929–31, so food was inevitably a concern. But the women were not obsessed in quite the same way as the German men often were, meticulously documenting in letters home from France what they had had to eat that day and what they hoped to scrounge the next. Paris was regarded by all German soldiers as a prized posting, especially compared with the hardship and privations of being sent to the east. In Paris one could still get butter, coffee and luxuries such as paté, confit (of various animals) and salted beef (if you knew where and could pay), as well as jewellery from Cartier, Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels, couture clothes from Jacques Fath or Maggy Rouff, and even silk stockings, though they might cost as much as 300 francs on the black market. But most French women could not afford such luxuries and, once they had damaged the final pair left in their cupboard, were deeply concerned about how they were to maintain their propriety since it was considered distinctly unladylike to be seen without stockings. The perfumer Elizabeth Arden came up with an answer: a miracle bottle of iodine dye costing about thirty francs and sold in three shades: flesh, gilded flesh and tanned flesh. It was advertised as ‘the silk on your legs without silk stockings’ and was very popular. Some women also became adept, in addition, at painting a straight black line up the calf to imitate the seam of a real stocking.
But you couldn’t eat iodine, and food was the overriding preoccupation for everyone. Food was an essential part of French national identity, especially for women responsible for domestic catering. Many Parisians were by now suffering deep hunger, and a generation of babies was in danger of growing up with rickets. Young French girls were sent off on their bicycles to visit distant cousins in the country in the hope that they might at least return with a cauliflower or a few eggs. If they had been sent by train, however, the jostling crowds on the way home frequently meant that an egg or two would be smashed – a disaster. Others, returning with suitcases full of meat, hoped they would not be noticed in the station mêlée. There were soup kitchens where poor people lived on ten francs a day, and special canteens run by the police, or similar bodies, for their own workers, like the one where the British nanny, Rosemary Say, worked until she was taken to the Vittel camp for enemy aliens in May 1941. But those with the money to use restaurants knew how to slip notes surreptitiously under a plate to ensure they would be given food not available to others. Food was an obsession not just because of gnawing hunger nor just because it was the only safe, non-political topic of conversation, but also because of these wild discrepancies. Racketeers were making serious money exploiting whatever they could get their hands on, and small café owners sometimes did a sideline in supplying false identity cards. Those who looked well fed were known as BOFs, Beurre Oeufs Fromages, and some of the profits they or their husbands made went back into the city’s economy as they were often spent at the couture houses. These ‘queens of the black market’, as they were known, were laughed at by some of the vendeuses, who described them as fat, well-fed women, who ‘arrive with pockets full of bundles of banknotes which they do not hesitate to place on the desk of the vendeuses. Their manners and language do not exactly match with the tone of couture.’
For ordinary Parisians the black market that was operating in earnest was mostly at Les Halles, although rumours that there was butter at an antiquarian bookseller’s, wine at the dentist’s or meat at a stationery shop regularly sent women scurrying off in unusual directions. At night women were sometimes seen at Les Halles searching the floor to see if any edible scrap had been dropped. On 31 May 1942 the anger over food supplies burst into the open as a group of largely communist women organized a demonstration to show the Germans ‘that we were not afraid’, as Lise London later explained. Born Elisabeth Ricol in France in 1916 to illiterate working-class Spanish parents who had been forced to emigrate, Lise had been a communist activist all her life and was now a leader of the Movement of Patriotic Women in Paris. Those who knew her described her as a force of nature, a brave and tireless agitator who put the cause above everything. She had learned her politics as a teenager in Moscow and while there fell in love with Artur London, a tall, handsome nineteen-year-old Czech-Jewish intellectual for whom she immediately left her first husband (the communist Auguste Delaune, who would be executed by the Nazis in 1943). But it was when fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War that she learned she could face anything life threw at her. Still only twenty, she survived appalling deprivation and danger in Madrid, but while she was there miscarried a five-month-old baby.