It Seems The French Enjoyed The Nazis

A new book which suggests that the German occupation of France encouraged the sexual liberation of women has shocked a country still struggling to come to terms with its troubled history of collaboration with the Nazis.

Like a recent photographic exhibition showing Parisians enjoying themselves under the occupation, the book’s depiction of life in Paris as one big party is at odds with the collective memory of hunger, resistance and fear.
 

This Author Says It Was A Giant Sex Romp

“It is a taboo subject, a story nobody wants to hear,” said Patrick Buisson, author of 1940-1945 Années Erotiques (“erotic years”). “It may hurt our national pride, but the reality is that people adapted to occupation.”

Many might prefer to forget but, with their husbands in prison camps, numerous women slept not only with German soldiers – the young “blond barbarians” were particularly attractive to French women, says Buisson – but also conducted affairs with anyone else who could help them through financially difficult times: “They gave way to the advances of the boss, to the tradesman they owed money to, their neighbour. In times of rationing, the body is the only renewable, inexhaustible currency.”

 

Jews Say The Book Author Is A Heretic

The book has stirred painful memories. One French reviewer called it “impertinent” and another accused Buisson of telling only part of the story by focusing on the “beneath the belt” history of the occupation. Le Monde, the bible of the French intellectual elite, chided the author, who is the director of French television’s History Channel, for painting life under the occupation as a “gigantic orgy”.
 

The Resistance Was Mostly Jewish Black Marketers

People who lived through the occupation found it insulting to suggest that they spent it in bed. “It makes me really angry,” said Liliane Schroeder, 88, who risked her life as a member of the resistance and has published her own journal of the occupation. “It’s shocking and ridiculous to say life was just a big party,” she told The Sunday Times. “We had much better things to do.”

Schroeder nevertheless described her life as a messenger in the resistance as a “marvellous time” in which “people got on with life even if they weren’t laughing”. Young women were useful to the resistance, she said, because “when a young woman and a man sat in a café it did not look as if they were plotting. They looked like lovers”.

University Students

French sensitivities about the country’s wartime record were demonstrated last month when an exhibition of photographs depicting Parisians enjoying life under the Nazis included a notice explaining that the pictures avoided the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects”. The photographs showed well-dressed citizens shopping on the boulevards or strolling in the parks. People crowded into nightclubs. Women in bikinis swam in a pool.

 

A SS Commander Tells The German boys To Be Respectful

Buisson dedicates a chapter in his book to cinemas, which he describes as hotbeds of erotic activity, particularly when it was cold outside. “At a few francs they were cheaper than a hotel room,” he writes, “and, offering the double cover of darkness and anonymity, propitious for all sorts of outpourings.

What Death Camps

This Jewish couple never came close to a supposed Death Camp.

The French Artsy Crowd

Elsewhere, members of the artistic elite drowned their sorrows in debauchery. Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, were devotees of allnight parties fuelled by alcohol and lust.

“It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party,” was how de Beauvoir put it. Sartre was no less enthusiastic: “Never were we as free as under the German occupation.”

De Beauvoir wrote about the “quite spontaneous friendliness” of the conquerors: she was as fascinated as any by the German “cult of the body” and their penchant for exercising in nothing but gym shorts.