Patrick Bade
Cultural Life in France Under the Occupation, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Cultural Life in France Under the Occupation, Part 1

- Thanks, thanks. Right, this rather alarming photograph of a fashion model swinging from a girder of the Eiffel Tower was taken in the summer of 1939 for the couturier, Lucien Lelong. Now, the summer of 1939 was gorgeous. Just as, of course, the summer of 1914 had been on the eve of the First World War. Paris, at this time, still the height of its glory is a cultural capital. And above all, of course, as the fashion capital of the world. And in the late 1930s, the two most powerful movers on the fashion scene were these two women who were bitter rivals and who deeply hated one another. It’s Coco Chanel on the left hand side, and Elsa Schiaparelli on the right hand side. They reacted very differently to the outbreak of war in 1939. Coco Chanel immediately closed shop. She shut down her business and she moved into the Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendome for the duration of the war. And she smooshed with the top Nazis. A very dubious record during the war. Elsa, she did not immediately shut up shop. This is her spring collection of 1940. As you can see, it has a very patriotic and a rather military look to the clothes that she designed. But once France fell to the Germans, Elsa Schiaparelli also decamped and she crossed the Atlantic and she spent the rest of the war in New York. Now, when the war broke out, the French felt reasonably sick. They felt very safe, actually, behind the famous Maginot Line. This was a string of tunnels, fortifications that ran all the way from the Swiss border to the Belgian border. The French had wanted the Belgians to be included in the scheme, but the Belgians were nervous of this. They didn’t really want to be completely at the mercy of the French. But it was deemed to be absolutely impregnable.

And this is a sunroom for the soldiers. The idea being that they could live underground in these tunnels more or less indefinitely. But of course, as we know in May of 1940, the Germans, they never attempted to storm the Maginot Line. They just nonchalantly went round it through Belgium. So, this period between the outbreak of war in August, 1939 and the invasion of Belgian and France in May, 1940, it’s known of course as the Phoney War. It was a period of sort of almost unnatural calm. And the rather reckless overconfidence of the period is expressed in the song, “We’re Going to Hang Out Washing on the Siegfried Line,” which was also a huge hit in France as well as in Britain. Around the same time, the great French tenor, Georges Thill, recorded a song, “Ils ne la gagneront pas.” They won’t win, they won’t get through, but, of course, they did. So, actually, this record, I do have a copy of it in London, but it’s one of Thill’s rarest records, ‘cause you can imagine it was issued at the end of 1939 and it had a very short shelf life. So, here is the Paris that I showed you last week of the interwar period. There was a general fear all over Europe that once war broke out, that cities would be reduced to ruins almost overnight. There were two reasons for this. One was the popularity of the film, “Things to Come,” which showed the destruction of London in a future war. And that certainly made a huge impact. And, of course, there was the destruction of Guernica in Italy. It was a kind of dummy run for how to destroy a city from the air. In fact, Paris, the central Paris, never started from air raids.

There were air raids, I’ll talk about that next week, in the industrial suburbs of Billancourt and in the west of Boulogne. Boulogne-Billancourt. But the central Paris itself was never touched. Nevertheless, there were menacing air raid warnings, like this one telling people to get as soon as safely and soon as possible to a place of safety. So, the eerie sound of sirens, which I’m very glad to say I’ve never actually heard in reality. But Maurice Chevalier, again, expressing the mood of jaunty overconfidence with a song of 1939, “Paris Will Always Be Paris,” “Paris Sera Toujours Paris.” And he’s talking about the blackout, how the city of light has dimmed its life, but nothing is going to change. So, life continued very much as normal. This is the great Polish harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska. You could say that she pretty well single-handedly, revived the fortunes of the harpsichord as a musical instrument. At the beginning of the 20th century, harpsichords were regarded as something for the museum rather than for the concert hall. So, Thomas Beecham, famously said that he thought a harpsichord sounded like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof. But Wanda Landowska was on a mission and she reestablished in… She succeed in reestablishing the instrument. She commissioned new works for the instrument by composers like Pleyel and Poulenc, and so on. And she built up a famous collection of historical keyboard instruments. So, in January, 1940, she was in the studios in Paris recording a set of sonatas by Scarlatti. I’m going to play you one of these. And if you listen very carefully, I don’t know how good your sound is on your computers, but you ought to be able to hear anti-aircraft fire in the quieter passages in the background.

She like everybody was caught unaware by the rapid success of the German invasion and leaving behind her famous collection of keyboard instruments. She fled and she was rescued by Varian Fry and she managed to escape to America. And she survived the war despite her Polish Jewish background. But I’m afraid she lost her famous collection of instruments that was pillaged by the Germans. So, this is the 10th of May in 1940, the Blitzkrieg. This is the Germans doing what was thought to be impossible with their tanks, they swept through the Belgian and the French Ardennes and just circumnavigated the Maginot Line. Of course, there was panic in Paris. This is a photograph of people anxiously reading the newspapers on the 10th of May, 1940. Now, on that very day, another historic recording was made. This is Marguerite Long. She was the doyenne of French pianists. She worked with Faure, Debussy, Ravel performed in the premieres of many of their works. You can see her sitting here in her salon with a drawing by sergeant of her mentor, Faure, on the piano. She was in the studio with the Trio Pasquier to record the first piano quartet of Faure. It’s a wonderful performance that, you know, while they were sitting they must have known when they went into the studio that morning what was happening. And I wonder, I can’t help wondering if that gave an edge to their performance. It’s certainly a performance of incredible passion and intensity. Panic broke out in Paris as the German troops advanced, and virtually the whole population of the city fled. This was an extraordinary thing for a city of millions of people to be completely emptied. It’s wonderfully narrated, of course, in the novel, “Suite Francaise,” by Irene Nemirovsky. If you haven’t read this book, you must. It’s one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

It’s one of the most moving novels I think I’ve ever read. It was supposed to be a huge epic in five parts. But of course, Irene Nemirovsky only lived to write the first two parts. The first about the panic and the flight from Paris. And the second about the first year of the occupation. She went into hiding but she was denounced and she was arrested. And as she was taken away, her two children, her two daughters were bundled out of a window and they were given this box, you see here, to carry with them. In it was a manuscript. And they never read it. They never really knew what it was. They didn’t even know that it was actually the manuscript of a novel. And it was only in the early years of the 20th century when one of the daughters donated her mother’s papers to an archive in France. 'Cause Irene Nemirovsky should’ve been a very successful novelist in the interwar period. But after being murdered in the gas chambers, she was completely forgotten. But somebody in the archive examined it and realised it was a novel and it was deciphered and published and became one of the great publishing sensations of the early 20th century, winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. It’s the only time the Prix Goncourt has been won by somebody who had been dead for 70 years. So, this here are images of Dunkirk with the British Army fleeing and, of course, rescued this heroic rescue, which is really celebrated by the British as a… 'Cause it was a defeat. But we British have an extraordinary ability to turn defeat into victory, and that’s how we see Dunkirk. 'Cause the French didn’t see it that way. They tended to see it as a betrayal.

And still worse, of course, once the French had signed an armistice with Germany at the risk of offending any French listeners, I have to say that effectively France changed sides. Certainly for the first year of the… After the German victory. France had changed sides and now saw Britain as its former ally, as the enemy. And this was confirmed when, at the beginning of July, at 1923, Churchill ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. I’m sure William has talked to you about this. It’s an incident which the many French people still feel very, very bitter about. But I must say I can’t see really that Churchill had much of a choice. He couldn’t afford the risk of the French Navy falling into the hands of the Germans. So, here are the Germans arriving in Paris in June, 1940. Hitler ordered the removal of the waggon, the railway waggon in which the armistice of 1918 had been signed. It was removed from a museum, so that this time he wanted to really savour the humiliation of France by making them sign their surrender in the very same railway carriage. And 23rd of June, Hitler made his only visit to Paris. It was a day visit, actually slightly less than a day visit, but he landed just outside Paris. Of course, there’s no traffic. Paris was completely empty. So, he was able to do a lightning tourist visit to Paris. You can see him posing with Albert Speer on the left hand side. And with the sculptor. Oh, God. What’s his name? His favourite sculptor on the right hand side. He went to… He went to the Les Invalides to pay homage to Napoleon. Famously went to the Paris Opera. It was a building that he was completely obsessed by and had studied very, very carefully. So, he and Speer went round the building. They arrived. It was still very, very early in the morning.

It was something like six o'clock or seven o'clock. The only person there was an old concierge. He opened up, received them politely, took them around the building. Hitler noted that there was a door missing that he knew from having studied the plans of the theatre and the concierge agreed, “Yes, yes. The door had actually been bricked up 20 years earlier.” It shows you how closely Hitler had studied the building. So, when they left, Speer offered to a generous tip the concierge, he politely declined it. He wouldn’t take it. And tragically a couple of days later, he collapsed with a heart attack and died. I imagine the shock of finding Albert Speer and Hitler on your doorstep at six o'clock in the morning would be enough to kill off anybody. They went on to the Madeleine. Here, he’s on the steps on Madeleine. And, of course, he had to go the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t go up. Somebody had sabotaged the lifts, the lift mechanism on the Eiffel Tower. So, to get a view of this city that he conquered, he went up to Ramada and he stood on the terrace in front of Sacre Coeur this wonderful, heart-stopping amazing, amazing view. It always thrills me every time I see it. And on the right here, you can see the same view painted half a century earlier by Vincent van Gogh when he first arrived in Paris. So, in very soon after the collapse of France, a French general, not generally widely known at the time, Charles de Gaulle. He arrived in London and he made his very famous call for the French to resist the Germans in every way they possibly could.

Now, I have to say de Gaulle is not really one of my favourite 20th century political figures. He was a huge irritant to the allies all the way through the war, who constantly felt that he was sabotaging their efforts and that he was a prima-donna throwing temper tantrums all the time. Famously, de Gaulle, said towards the end of war… Churchill said, “That man, de Gaulle, he thinks he’s Joan of Ark. Unfortunately, I can’t get my bishops to burn him for me.” But de Gaulle, I suppose liked Churchill, his importance was… And Churchill was in some ways, of course, a really disastrous strategist. He wasn’t a genius as a strategist. His genius was for inspiring people with his rhetoric. And I think you have to give de Gaulle credit for the same. Here is this very famous speech calling for the French to resist. Broadcast from the BBC in London. In their desperation, the French turned to the octogenarian. Marshal Petain, a hero of first World War, the hero of Verdun. And he also frequently broadcast the French nation. You could say really, that the second World War was a war often fought through the wireless set. So, when Churchill made his speeches, people gathered around the wireless sets in Britain and in France, it was the same in public, of course, for Petain. And in secret for Charles de Gaulle. Here you see French children gathered round a radio with an image of Petain behind it. Here is Petain shaking hands with Hitler. And in this poster it says, French people, you have not been sold. You have not been betrayed. You have not been abandoned. Well, they had unfortunately, but here you can hear the quavery voice of the very elderly Petain. And he was really losing it. Certainly by the end of the war, I think he was quite deeply into dementia. Was hardly with it at all, by the time of his trial in the Epuration at the end of the war.

A cult was created around this frail old man, who was really not with it at all. And the French felt the need to replace their national anthem. Of course, the “Le Marseillaise” is the most thrilling, most inflammatory national anthem, I think ever composed. And I think you are all very familiar with the scene in Casablanca, where everybody in Rick’s Cafe stands up and sings the “Le Marseillaise.” It’s a very, very moving scene that always brings tears to my eyes. But it was, I think the Vichy authorities and the Nazis felt that the “Le Marseillaise” was a dangerous weapon that could be used against them. So, they promoted this song, “Marechal nous voila,” “Here we are for you, Marshal,” which was at the great irony, of course, is that the tune was actually stolen from a Polish Jewish composer, Kazimierz, Kazimierz… I’m having a bad day for names, but you can look that up. Who actually was murdered in the Holocaust? It was a terrible, terrible irony, really, that this bombastic tune had been stolen from a Polish victim of the Holocaust. It was recorded many times over, but most famously by the tenor, Andre Dassary. This is a fascinating document that I found in a book market in Tunis. It must be, oh, well over 30 years ago that expresses I think, very much the mood of France immediately after its defeat. It’s by a popular novelist called, Jean de La Hire. And you can see the title is, “Hitler: Que nous veut-il donc?” What does Hitler what does he want from us?

And it puts forward a very straightforward argument. It says, “Well, Hitler has won the war.” “It’s clear that he’s the victor and France needs to be on the winning side. So, we must ally ourselves with Hitler.” Now, the great irony here is because he started writing it on the 15th of November, 1941, and he finished it on the 8th of December, 1941. Now, if he’d finished it on the 6th of December, he would’ve been right. Hitler had won the war. As far as Britain was concerned. I mean, Britain was stubbornly holding up. But there was no way that Britain could win a war against Germany, which was either allied to or had conquered the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Russian border. And was actually, of course, by December, 1941, well into, it’s on its way to Moscow and St. Petersburg. But all that change, of course, on the 7th of December with Pearl Harbour, once America was in the war, there was no way in the end anybody with any foresight could see that there was no way that Germany and Italy could defeat the combined might of the Soviet Union and the United States. So, it was completely wrong. You can see that some rather strange damage to the cover of this. And well, as I said, I bought it in a book market, and I was staying with a friend in Tunis and he had a very feisty kitten. I’d really never met a cat quite like that. He just picked it up as a few days old kitten in the street. And it was a real powerful personality. It completely ruled the two dogs in the house. And I had this book on my bed and the door opened and the cat came in and from the other side of the room, it shrieked and it tore across the room and it fell on the book.

And it attempted to rip the book to pieces. It’s the only time in my life where I thought there might be something in the theory of reincarnation. I wonder who that cat had been in a previous existence. So, yes, the general mood of France, I think you ha- You know, it’s extraordinary fact that in the first year of the German occupation, there was not a single attack on German military part personnel in France. It was only after Germany attacked Russia, that Stalin then activated the communist resistance. So, it’s in summer of 1941, communist resistance starts in France. And it’s really only after the Americans land with the torch landings in North Africa in November, 1942, that a more widespread resistance springs up in France. So, this song dating from late in 1941, was a big hit for Mistinguett, who we heard last time. She opened in a show at the Casino de Paris. And the title is, “La tour Eiffel est toujours la.” “The Eiffel Tower is still there.” And she’s saying, “Yes, things have changed. The streets are quieter because there are no taxis. And the only there are different sounds because women are walking around in wooden shoes rather than leather shoes. But the Eiffel Tower is still there. Paris is still the same. There are still lovers on the benches by the river sand.” So, this is the France of the first years of the occupation divided into two. The northern parts and right down the Atlantic coastline occupied by German troops and the rest of France in the south and the East nominally independent under Marshall Petain and the Vichy regime.

Very difficult for people to cross from one part of France to another and almost impossible for Jews. As you can see from this. It’s absolutely forbidden for Jews to cross the line of demarcation between occupied France and free France inverted commerce. So, once the resistance does get going, as I said, one of the great weapons of the Second World War was the radio. And there are these very famous communications from the French division of the BBC in London. And it began with two musical motifs, ♪ Ba, ba, ba, boom ♪ ♪ Ba, ba, ba, boom ♪ Of course, that is in morse code, the letter V, it’s also of course, the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. So, it goes, ♪ Ba, ba, ba, boom ♪ Here we are in London and to prove that we’re in London, we get a bit of Handel’s water music, ♪ Da, da, da, da, da ♪ So, it’s again, kind of ironic that we have two pieces of German music, not music written by British composers to introduce the French resistance broadcast from the BBC. The coded messages that were sent to the resistance have become famous. They have a kind of weird, surreal beauty to them. I’ll play you something. The villa is silent. The the gardener’s dog is crying. Gabrielle remains anonymous. The ghost is not chatty. The priest is nervous. The lamb is cooked. The star of the radio broadcast in London was the French Jewish comedian, Pierre Dac. And he was a real thorn in the flesh for the French, for the Vichy government and the German occupiers mocking the Germans and the German occupation. It was a real jewel over the radio waves between the germ-controlled Radio Paris and the BBC. And here is Pierre Dac singing a little ditty to the tune of Cucaracha. Radio Paris lies, it’s German.

So, there were many conservative people in France that they’d been very unhappy with left wing governments before the war. And they saw the defeat at the hands of Germany as an opportunity. You can see in propaganda posters like this, this is the old France before the war, which was corrupt and left wing and dissolute. And this was the new France of under German inspiration where you have discipline, order, savings, courage and work, family, patriotism. Huge exhibitions organised in Paris in 1941, denouncing the influence of Freemasons and also denouncing the influence of Jews on French culture, particularly on French cinema. This is a display from that show showing how denouncing, how Jews had taken over and corrupted French cinema as the Germans saw it. Terrible, terrible outbreak of virulent antisemitic propaganda. Here you see Jews being compared to tuberculosis, syphilis, cancer, and it’s everywhere. Antisemitic measures being introduced under the direction of the Germans. So many petty, petty restrictions. Of course, Jews had to wear yellow stars. They couldn’t use public transport, they couldn’t use public telephones. There’s absolutely heartbreaking photograph of children going into a play park with a notice saying that this is a park reserve for children, but forbidden to Jews. And pictures like these, these colour photographs 'cause the Germans, I mean, they had most advanced technology in so many ways. And that was, of course, one of the great beliefs of Hitler and his supporters, that they were actually going to win the war through their advanced technology, whether it was the jet engine or things like, of course, they had things like colour photography and they had magnetic tape long before anybody on the allied side had them.

Their biggest mistake, of course, was to reject atomic physics as Jewish science, otherwise they really might have won the war. So, these colour photographs of occupied Paris are really, I think, startling. Were so used to seeing black and white photographs of this period. Signs of German occupation everywhere with all these notices in German in front of the Paris Opera. Propaganda, so I’ve already talked about radio propaganda, but throughout Germany, Austria and occupied Europe, there were these magazines produced. They were a very important source for me when I was writing my book about music in the Second World War. They purported it to be sort of cultural magazines, but of course, they were full of Nazi propaganda. So, the fashion industry, the Germans were very jealous of French hegemony and they really wanted to take that over. They wanted to steal leadership in fashion from the French. And so the French were starved of materials, there was no leather for shoes. But fashion became a way of French women to actually express resistance and protest. And the two elements in the very, very flamboyant, exaggerated, inventive hats that French wore, French women wore during war. I think you can see as a protest against the German occupation and the shoes. And there are many songs written in the period. Including this one by Maurice Chevalier and we’ve already heard one from Mistinguett that refer to the sound of women walking along the Paris pavements in their wooden shoes with a kind of clack, clack.

This brings me, 'cause Paris, the Germans were very keen to keep Paris going as a pleasure capital and as a cultural beacon. And partly because they wanted it also to use for the leisure of their own troops. And so Paris was where troops, you know, after a stint on the Russian front, it’s very nice to be sent to Paris, to recuperate, have a good time, still have some good food on the black market. And then there is the very fraught question of what the French call, . Although sexual relations between Germans and French were discouraged by both sides. An awful lot of it went on. Tens of thousands of illegitimate children were born to French women and to German soldiers. Paris went all out to entertain the soldiers. There were many nightclubs where the clientele was almost exclusively German military. And one nightclub singer put on trial for collaboration because she sang in these clubs at the end of the war, the judge said, “How could you do this? How could you sing before all these men in grey green uniforms?” And she said, “I’m shortsighted.” And that could be said for, of course, for an awful lot of French people during the occupation. Cultural life resuming. This is the reopening. Of course, initially all the theatres in Paris shut, but by the end of 1940, they were reopening again. This is the reopening of the Paris Opera. And it opened with a performance of Berlioz’s, “Damnation of Faust.” And this was very carefully chosen because it’s a great masterpiece, which, of course, unites a French genius and a German genius, Gerta and Berlioz, both towering figures.

And recordings, the recording industry. There was a great shortage of materials, very little shall shellac for making records, but surprising how many important recordings were made during the second World War, actually in every country involved. And so, I think a lot of propaganda investment went into these recordings. First ever complete recording of “The Damnation of Faust” was made in Paris under the occupation conducted by Jean Fournet with the soprano, Mona Laurena. She’s a very good singer, actually, but all her records date from the occupation, little is known about her before the war and nothing is known about her after the war. She owed her brief moment of glory and all these recordings she made at the time to the fact that she was having a sexual relationship with the head of Radio Paris, a man called, Otto Sonnen. So, it’s another example I suppose of, . But the greatest recording, classical recording made in Paris during the occupation was the first complete recording of “Pelleas et Melisande.” I could talk for hours about this. I could do a whole talk on just this one recording. It’s a very interesting story. “Pelleas et Melisande,” is a long opera. And it’s not an opera actually that lends itself easily to be broken down into sections of four minutes, which you needed for each side of 78. It takes 21 shellac records and it’s really heavy.

And I know that 'cause I remember buying it at the Gramophone Exchange in Water Street and having it to carry it back to my student digs. And my arms fell off by the time I got home. Really, really heavy. It was a huge undertaking to do this under the occupation with no possible prospect of it making any money. Nobody could afford, very few people could afford to buy 21 78s. Why do this? And there, I think everybody wrote about this at the time and everybody claimed it for their own. I mean, some people claimed it as this great sign of the assertion of French values against German values that they would make a recording like this. And there were other people who saw it in terms more friendly to the German occupation. But anyway, everybody realised the great significance of this recording. One of the the things, it is a fantastic performance. And under Roger Desormiere, great conductor, who was a member of the resistance and who actually paid the rent on Darius Milhaud’s apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy behind me. All for the four years of the German occupation, he paid the rent on that apartment. Milhaud, of course, as a Jew was in exile in America. So, that was an incredible gesture of faith in a way that the war was eventually going to be won. And the other mystery for me is the soprano, Irene Joachim, who sings the role of Melisande and Joachim. She was the granddaughter of the great Hungarian Jewish violinist, greatest violinist of the late 19th century, Joseph Joachim. So, I’ve asked many people about this, including my friend the singer, Renee Doria, who was a colleague of hers, knew her very well.

I said to her, “How was it that somebody with the name Joachim, granddaughter, one of the most famous Jews of the 19th century, how could she sing all the way through the war? Her name up on the posters outside the Opera Comique.” When I said this to Renee Doria, she said, “Oh, I never thought about it.” But what she did tell me, which I thought was interesting, was that Irene Joachim was a communist. She also was very involved in the resistance. She, in her memoirs, everybody who was involved in it wrote memoirs about this performance. And you can get it on CD i if you’d like to be seen. If you like Pelleas. I’d warmly recommend it. It’s still considered to be the greatest recording of the opera ever made. And everybody remembered and people who went to it, the premier of this production, which was recorded, was at the Opera Comique. They all remembered one particular moment where the bass, Arkel, he sings the word, If I was God, I would have pity on the hearts of men. And apparently the the whole audience booth was really choked with emotion at this one moment. So, I’m going to play it you from this recording. Anybody who lived through the German occupation of France was faced with extraordinary moral choices every moment of their lives. You could not live, you could not eat, you could not breathe, you could not walk down the street without being faced with moral choices. I think that’s what one of the thing, I’m going to address that more in my next talk.

When I look at the work of playwrights and writers and filmmakers, how do you deal with these situations? And I would like to quote a very, very dear friend, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. She says that you should not judge people in hell. And you could say that the whole of France, in a way was in hell under the occupation. As long as people didn’t denounce one another, as long as they didn’t actually commit crimes. I think you have in a way to go with what they did in order to survive. And it’s the morality is so complicated of the German occupation of France. And so sometimes you needed to collaborate in order to avoid a much worse outcome, not just for yourself, but for your children’s or your employees or whatever. But there were all sorts of little ways of resisting as well. And I’m going to finish with one of those.

This is the composer, Francis Poulenc. And in 1943, he was commissioned to compose a ballet for the opera called, “Les Animaux modeles,” which is based on the account, the stories, the fables of La Fontaine. And he decided to put in a very cheeky little piece of resistance into his score. He uses Attune, which would’ve been very familiar to all the French people in the audience. A popular song that dated back to 1870, saying, . You will never have our Alsace-Lorraine. Are the words that every French person in the audience would’ve heard in their head when they heard the tune. So, here is the original song, And this is what he did with that tune transforming it with luscious harmonies and beautiful orchestration. It’s completely Poulenc. He’s really made it his own. But, of course, all the French people in the audience would’ve been secretly chortling and probably the German military in the audience would’ve wondered what the joke was. My time is running out, so let’s see…

Q&A and Comments:

Scary, yes, I know. I have a terrible head for heights. I find that photograph absolutely terrifying.

Veronica is in northern Spain, not Italy. I’m not sure I get that. Geneca is in Spain. Did I say it was in Italy? Yeah, of course, it’s in Spain. It’s in the Basque Country. Yes, the sirens are very, very scary.

Q: Would I consider French postage stamp?

A: Yes, I would. The one of the great designer of French postage stamp, a man called, Albert Decaris, is an artist I’m very interested in and I’ve collected a lot of his drawings.

“Suite francaise,” yes, now interest you say it’s beautifully. I’m sure it is beautifully translated. When it came out, I tried to read it in French and I found it difficult. So, I read it in English and then I reread it in French. And that was very interesting 'cause there are certain things I realised when I having read it in English and having understood it, I realised that there were certain things, particularly a conversation, an angry conversation between an aristocrat and a left wing peasant where it couldn’t be translated because it all hinged on that the use of vous and tu. And, of course, that doesn’t work in English.

Q: Am I going to speak about Piaf?

A: I could do a whole lecture on her. It’s a very, very interesting story. I can’t remember actually, I think I have included her next time. I think, yes, I will talk about her next time.

Churchill was not anti French. Churchill was very, very, very pro French. And he was a great supporter of de Gaulle. It was actually Roosevelt who really… He just became exasperated with de Gaulle, with his prima donna behaviour.

Arnold Greco, was the artist whose name I couldn’t think of. And Kazimierz Oberfeld was the other. Thank you very much. It’s on my list.

Yes. There were French troops rescued at Dunkirk. That is perfectly true.

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody became pretty exasperated with de Gaulle, but he had his uses as did Churchill.

Oh, how amazing. I’m really amazed that Rita, that that book is available. I would’ve thought it had been disappeared without a trace.

Q: Wasn’t it easy for the Germans to deduce that dot, dot, dash was V for victory?

A: It seemed, well, luck whoever thought of it was brilliant. What can I say? Well, of course the Germans knew it.

Yes. It was a big campaign to promote it. Right? How successfully the Jews in Europe as a whole broke into the cinema or later. Yeah. That’s another… Trudy would be great on that. Maybe I could do it for France.

Q: Was Petain really aligned with Hitler?

A: This is a very complicated question, Arlene. I don’t think he really was aligned with Hitler, but nevertheless he did go along with terrible things, and, you know, signed antisemitic laws and so on. What was used instead of leather for making, yes, wood was used instead of leather. The very interesting course if Lydia Bowman, her mother’s book about being in the Warsaw ghetto is very interesting.

Yes. Radio is so important.

And Anne Sebba’s book, “Les Parisiennes.” Yeah, very good book. I enjoyed that book a lot.

Q: What was Poulenc’s joke?

A: Poulenc’s joke was that he included attune in his ballet under the nose of the Germans that had very anti-German words for those that knew them.

It’s “Suite francaise,” Judith, you must read it. It’s such a great book. And it’s been translated into every language. Chevalier’s record was very problematic. And, I mean, that could be another, I think I did do a talk on that some time ago who got away with staff and who, who didn’t. And basically Chevalier got away because he had the protection of the Communist Party after the Second World War. Yeah.

Q: Was he a collaborator?

A: Yes. Was everybody a collaborator in France? To some degree, yes, they were. And as I said, as I explained, I don’t know that they could always be blamed for it.

Dude, I’m not sure I could do, I know I ran enough about World War II photographers, certainly a very interesting subject. And, of course, Lee Miller would rate a talk on her own.

No, Coco Chanel got away with it. But people say that she got away with it because she had the protection of Winston Churchill and the Duke of Westminster.

So, that’s it for today, and I will continue on Wednesday more in the same vein, talking particularly about theatre and films and the visual arts.