* A member of the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he was found guilty of treason and hanged in August that year.
* Laval’s ill-judged remarks in June that he welcomed a German victory, even though he added the rider which everyone forgot, ‘as a means of countering Bolshevism’, effectively signed his death-warrant.
* Following the law of 2 June 1941 it was necessary to carry a certificate issued by the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, proclaiming that the holder did not belong to the Jewish race.
* Vichy France depended on the loyalty of its police and judiciary, which most of the time was not in question. However, the conundrum for the Vichy regime was that as long as it collaborated with the Germans it could preserve the fig leaf of French sovereignty, but if it resisted it risked provoking German intervention in all areas. For the first two years Vichy nominally administered France while accepting an occupied zone in the north. But it was not that simple as there was a double ruling in the north – one French, one German – but the Germans had the upper hand. Officially the Germans ran only the north, at least until 1942, and France and the occupiers were separate – a fiction which Vichy was determined to uphold.
* Similarly Denise Epstein, daughter of Irène Némirovsky, affirmed in a May 1996 interview that she had seen candlesticks belonging to her mother in the possession of the concierge of their apartment building after the war (Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, p. 196).
* Janet Flanner estimated that the perfect taste and style of pre-war Paris espoused by le gratin were maintained by only approximately a hundred people out of a total population of two million (Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–55, p. 62).
* When Esther received the Légion d’honneur in 1921 and Alfred the same award in 1922, both certificates were signed by Marty.
* The exceptional ability of Lysanders to land on small, unprepared airstrips behind enemy lines made them invaluable for clandestine missions to place or recover agents in occupied France.
1943
PARIS TREMBLES
At dawn on 30 July 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud, aged thirty-nine, was guillotined in the courtyard of Paris’s La Roquette prison, having been found guilty of performing twenty-seven abortions in the Cherbourg region. At her trial in a specially convened court, the prosecution stressed her immorality, but to the populace she became a martyr for a cause – people called her a ‘maker of angels’. Giraud, who came from a poor family, was married to a sailor with whom she had two children, and had worked as a domestic housekeeper and laundress. Since the beginning of the war she had rented rooms to prostitutes and began to perform abortions, initially on a voluntary basis and without compensation. Vichy, which still had limited civil authority in the occupied capital, had decreed in a special law of 15 February 1942 that abortion was so sinful – it was a crime against state security – that it must be treated as a capital offence. Only a pardon from Marshal Pétain himself could save Giraud’s life. But he refused to commute the sentence, and Marie-Louise Giraud thus became the only woman ever to be guillotined in France for the crime of performing an abortion.