Nonfiction corner: The Nazis came for France once. Not everyone there was upset about it

By Nina Siegal

NEW YORK: The Liberation of Paris in 1944 is an undeniably alluring subject, especially in the wake of the recent French elections. In July, a coalition of left-wing parties mounted a stunning, last-minute rebuke to what was shaping up to be the country’s first far-right government since World War II.

We’ve long nurtured the romantic image of Parisians taking up arms against fascist occupiers, complete with black-and-white photo montages. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa provided the documentary snapshots; Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall suggested the glamorous characters.

Still, beyond recounting the chaotic exuberance of that week in August 1944 — the labor strikes, the acts of sabotage, the police rebellion — the question for historians trying to approach the subject now is how they will surprise us.

The British military historian and former war correspondent Patrick Bishop doesn’t offer a bold new analysis in his social history of the period, “Paris 1944.” Instead, he aims to highlight the symbolic power of that mythic city, by drawing the reader into the streets of Paris just in time for the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

Although it looked a lot like a people’s revolt against Nazi tyranny when the once-exiled Gen. Charles de Gaulle strode down the Champs-Élysées to Notre-Dame Cathedral on Aug. 26, 1944, scholars have long observed that it would have amounted to little without help from the Allies.

France was as divided then as it is today, and some Parisians were happy to go along with the new Nazi-backed regime. After the war, de Gaulle tried to paint a picture of a unified France under the yoke of Nazi occupation, the people fighting a tyranny imposed from without. That image persisted, but thanks to the historian Robert O. Paxton’s pioneering scholarship and Marcel Ophuls’s documentary film “The Sorrow and the Pity,” we now know how greatly exaggerated this story was.

And yet, it’s still worth asking what this notion of Parisian revolt meant for the larger arc of history, especially in our current context of global authoritarian threats. Did the symbolic power of a cohesive French rejection of Nazism help move the country toward reunification after the war? Can it offer us a model for sloughing off tyranny in this century? Does it indicate something about the nature of resistance?

Bishop doesn’t go there, at least not explicitly, but his book does enliven the political complexities beneath the symbolism. He revisits the events of 1944 through portraits of the players in the drama. Some are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, J.D. Salinger and Capa. Others are known Resistance figures such as Rose Valland, the Jeu de Pomme art curator who tracked Nazi looting, and Henri Rol-Tanguy, the French communist leader.

Fascists and collaborators get equal billing to the resisters and their allies. We hear about Adolf Hitler’s favorite living sculptor, Arno Breker, who moved to Paris from Germany in the 1920s and took commissions from the Nazis in the ’30s; and Robert Brasillach, the editor of the leading French fascist newspaper, Je Suis Partout.

Bishop is most agile when in the company of writers. Hemingway, working as a war correspondent for Collier’s, and Salinger, a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division, arrived in their D-Day landing zones in Normandy around the same time. The encounters of the two authors, one already a legend and the other a budding short-story scribbler, make for great reading.

For a historian known for titles such as “Fighter Boys: The Battle of Britain, 1940” (2003) and “Bomber Boys: Fighting Back 1940-1945” (2007), it may come as no surprise that this is a particularly male cast. The vast majority of those we meet are men, and they are often the boozing, bragging and morally conflicted types that are the staple of wartime literature.

Women are typically mentioned as pretty girls kissing soldiers, or the sidekicks of notable men. And only minor attention is paid to the plight of Parisian Jews, who numbered around 175,000 before the German invasion in 1940; by the time the Germans surrendered the city, some 50,000 had been deported and killed. The famous French modern art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who managed to flee with his family in 1940, does make the pages, because he was Picasso’s dealer and because his son, Alexandre Rosenberg, joined the Free French Army, which would later help liberate Paris.

The central character of the book is, of course, the city itself. Perhaps there is something to be said for its symbolic power. Hitler spared the French capital in 1940, with a romantic notion of reshaping Berlin after its grand buildings and boulevards. Luckily, by the time Hitler changed his mind and ordered the destruction of Paris, it was too late.

Many different forces have long sought to define what the city is and was, carpeting the mess of voices with a show of unity above. But that has never been the truth. Today, no coalition — left, right or center — has control of the French Parliament and the country’s future is anything but secure. President Emmanuel Macron has said he will not announce a new government until after the Olympics, which opened beside the Seine in a display of multicultural French identity that immediately stirred controversy.

New myths are hard to forge and even harder to break. Where there is myth-busting in the pages of “Paris 1944,” it is subtle. Bishop’s story remains a celebration of a historical moment when individual gusto and gumption, from within and without, overcame authoritarian might. That is why we still have Paris.