A Paler Shade of Red Read online

  There was no applause. We all sat motionless, struck by the chancellor's acerbic reception, a vague uneasiness slowly scaling up the collective spine of a dozen bright-eyed adolescents dreaming of clever scoops, scorching exposés and poignant editorials.

  *

  My father, a physician, had hoped I’d follow in his footsteps but shameful grades in math, physics and chemistry had mercifully and decisively dashed these paternal designs. My maternal uncle, a well-to-do criminal lawyer who defended men he knew deserved to be drawn-and-quartered, had urged me to pursue a legal career. His courtroom theatrics, the flourish of his sleeve work, the ostentation of his blackjack arguments against blameless plaintiffs -- his very assertion that the worst scoundrels are entitled to due process -- had seemed incongruous at the time and given me all the ammunition I needed to reject his counsel -- and profession. Years later he lovingly chided me and claimed that mine was the only “case” he’d ever lost.

  “What sort of victory would you have wrested had I ignored my instincts, disobeyed my conscience and yielded to coercion,” I asked. He smiled with avuncular pride and shook his head. “Like I said, you’d have made one helluva lawyer.”

  Standing numb and speechless in the atrium of the Paris School of Journalism that balmy September morning, I found myself summoned before a hurriedly convened court of self-inquiry. The evidence was slim, the exhibits trivial. Fiery high school prose had earned me a number of prizes -- a book of poems by Alfred de Vigny; a selection from the Letters of Madame de Sévigné -- and the cautious admiration of my teachers. I’d excelled in literature, history and geography, but I’d flunked everything else. Stirred by charity, the principal had written impassioned letters of recommendation, but the School of Journalism had acted with circumspection and agreed to enroll me provisionally.

  I paused for dramatic effect and shrugged my shoulders. “It’s either that or grave digger,” as my uncle had often warned. To my uncle, who had never defended a single honest, hard-working client in his entire career, and who feared death until it claimed him, being a grave digger was a ghoulish and contemptible occupation. Having one in the family would be calamitous. I would later concede that I’d grossly misjudged my uncle’s metaphorical admonitions. Being a brilliant attorney and an intellectual did not prevent him from holding manual labor in the highest regard. But the oft-repeated warning had had the desired effect. I flipped a mental coin in the air. “Heads, journalism; tails….” What an odd piece, I remarked. No tails.

  “So journalism it is. It’ll be a living,” I reasoned with greater incertitude than conviction.

  A living? Barely. Journeymen reporters earn subsistence wages. They survive on raw energy, frayed nerves, half-digested fare of dubious origin, they spend sleepless nights and torpid days separating rumor from reality, insinuation from fact and they live, as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Baker once put it,

  “...in a world where time is forever running out. On their inner clock it’s always two minutes to midnight and the work is only half done, maybe not even started yet, and they absolutely must have it ready for the printer before the bell tolls, whether they have anything to write or not. It’s not a work that suits everybody. High blood pressure goes with the territory, alcohol is an occupational hazard, and anyone too proud to confess cheerfully to a steady flow of errors and bad judgments will not be happy at it. When you’re playing to a large public and there is no time for second thought you may as well get used to looking foolish. Error and misjudgment are your destiny.”

  Baker also shrewdly observed that “reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.”

  I was hooked.

  THE OTHER PARIS

  Memory deceives; souvenirs betray: They repeat everything we tell them. Reminiscing is what sets the time machine in motion. And so the past burst through the floodgates of memory, begging to be stilled by the moving pen. Buried recollections, those that sloth or scruples might fossilize, are exhumed from a vast and untidy ossuary. The others, the ones that reside just beyond the threshold of awareness -- compromising overtones, erotic fantasies, old resentments, remorse and broken dreams -- are slowly being coaxed free. They are in tatters, so I pick them gingerly between thumb and forefinger the better to resurrect and survey ancient sounds and smells and images and feelings so subtle and so fleetingly perceived that they might be silhouetted but never fleshed out. Many are of doubtful authenticity, the bastardized offspring of fantasy, wishful thinking, transference. The rest are irretrievably lost or in hiding, cloistered in the company of useless mementos and unutterable confessions. The temptation to tell all is tempered by the wisdom to say nothing…. My memory of tomorrow escapes me. Everything is past. In its roots percolates the sap that feeds the future.

  Some memories canter on wooden clogs, others amble on rubber soles. Memory is often threadbare, short and mulish. It’s almost always deformed.

  *

  There once was another Paris, a microcosm from which radiated a larger universe beyond. The address: 2, rue du Pont Neuf. A large, cheerful apartment doubling as my father’s medical office, with fin-de-siècle windows facing the Louvre on one side in the distance, in full view of the Palais de Justice, La Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame’s sublime profile on the other. Across the street, the festooned façade of La Samaritaine, the department store where, my parents often told me, I’d been purchased “at a rummage sale.”

  My birth, infinitely more prosaic, took place in a private clinic of the 16th arrondissement where chic ladies had their babies -- or aborted them -- depending on their whim. My godfather, Ernö, the anesthesiologist, and my father -- his cousin -- were both there to witness a delivery that elicited not a single joke. The procedure nearly killed my mother. A sickly, diminutive woman, she lived on to endure with quiet dignity the agonies of war, the sorrows of a discordant marriage and the affronts of chronic ill health. I would not have survived the trauma of parturition had it not been for the frantic thrashing I received at the hands of the attending obstetrician. It would be my first and last spanking.

  A difficult pregnancy and a near-fatal delivery convinced my parents not to try again, at least for the time being. Discretion became the better part of valor when France, which had been cowering under the threat of war, finally fell to the German hordes. Ensuing events would vindicate my parents’ decision.

  *

  On June 3, 1940, the Germans bombarded Paris, killing nearly 300 people and injuring more than 600. Two days earlier, the Wehrmacht had launched a lightning three-pronged attack; three Panzer divisions, 1,000 tanks each, headed for the cities of Amiens, Rouen and Dijon. On June 7, fearing another bombardment, French General Vuillemin ordered the evacuation of Paris. General Weygand, a hero of the First World War and supreme commander of the French armed forces, directed that children 16 and younger also be evacuated. The next day, ignoring the children, Weygand chose instead to remove the entire government, “except for members of the cabinet, whose presence may be necessary.” This decree would later be likened to the cowardice of Roman senators as they groveled before the Barbarians and laid down their arms.

  The mass migration began on the night of June 9 amid incredible confusion. The air ministry requisitioned 600 trucks to carry its staff, their families, furniture and personal belongings, whereas impassioned appeals for vehicles to transport the wounded away from the front fell on deaf ears and fleeing archivists let tons of documents fall into enemy hands. Thousands of retreating French infantrymen were booted out of Paris and rerouted toward the south, on foot. Signaling the imminent capture of the capital, over 25,000 soldiers were quickly taken prisoner by the Germans north of Paris.

  Since May 10 an endless stream of refugees had cascaded into Paris from Belgium and northern France, both overrun by the Germans. The inextricable tangle of civilians and soldiers became an easy target of German planes. The French military had tried
to stanch the unending flow and quell the panic but nothing worked against a bewildered populace distracted by the occupation and terrorized by government claims that a “fifth column,” invisible but omnipresent, had infiltrated and was now subverting France.

  In the early days of June, tens of thousands of Parisians fled the capital by car and on foot. Trains headed south were packed. Thousands more camped in railway stations. The stragglers nervously watched the sky darken in the distance.

  “We were struck,” wrote a journalist who took part in the exodus, “by an eerie gloom that spread out before us at the horizon and which, as if in the throes of some gigantic seizure, turned the sky from lead to coal black. All of us who witnessed it saw in this phenomenon an omen of cosmic dimension, the presage of untold misfortunes to come.” What this ten-million-strong ribbon of humanity beheld as it unfurled on the open road, were the oil tanks of the port city of Le Havre burning out of control.

  South of Paris, the rout created enormous bottlenecks. German planes strafed bridges and fields, leaving hundreds of bodies carbonized beyond recognition in smoldering, bullet-riddled cars or slumped in the shallow ditches lining the road. The survivors, men and women on bicycles, others pushing wheelbarrows filled with luggage or hauling horseless carts carrying infants, cripples and old folks, kept going, their backs arched against dead weight, their eyes scanning past the blackened clouds for signs of an impending assault from the air. Half-crazed with terror and grief, some of the women wrung their hands or beat their kerchief-covered heads repeatedly. Others shuttled among the dazed, the exhausted, the downhearted, offering hope, sharing food and water. Children cried unremittingly in long, mournful, almost perfunctory wails. Men, many of them patriarchs, cursed and shook their fists at their tormentors. “Ah, les sales boches. They’ll pay for this....” Deliverance and payback were still five years away.

  On June 14, 1940, the Germans crossed the ancient city gates. Huge flags -- a red swastika on a field of black and white -- were hoisted over palaces and ministerial buildings, replacing the French tricolor. Some German soldiers were seen buffing their boots with it, arousing laughter among the troops.

  Paris crumbled. A ghastly silence seemed to hover over the once bustling boulevards, plazas and age-old streets. Public buildings were empty. It was as if the city had lost its soul. On Place Pigalle, on the Champs Elysées, in the open vastness of the Place de la Concorde, everywhere it seemed, small groups of Parisians greeted and feted the invaders. Many volunteered their services. Others offered their bodies for bread or wine or money to expiate France’s fervid capitulation in a symbolic act of self-immolation.

  I saw Parisians standing motionless, weeping openly, a quiet rage burning in their eyes while Germans soldiers -- the reincarnated Sons of Darkness -- strutted freely in the magnificent and now cowed City of Light. I would never forget their tears. I remember taking my father’s hand and huddling next to him for warmth and comfort. Sensing disquiet, he’d picked me up and held me in his arms. He’d smiled reassuringly and pressed me closer to him and I saw sadness in his face, sadness and fear.

  I was three.

  *

  Revisionists, at best, have short memories. Most are either cretins or hate-mongers. Sixty years after the fact, they continue to suggest that France’s “fifth column,” a term first used during the Spanish Civil War, was a myth. Less frivolous, but equally misguided, apologists claim that its cast of spies and counterspies -- propagandists, aspiring and also-ran politicians, anti-communist noblemen, wealthy industrialists, clerics, pacifists and agents provocateurs spirited across the border or parachuted under the cover of darkness in remote rural areas -- was grossly exaggerated.

  If the magnitude and influence of a fifth column was overstated (as was the prowess and effectiveness of the Résistance) -- a “hysterical caricature exploited by the communists,” as some insist, “to heighten the perception that reactionaries were orchestrating France’s demise” -- it was far from being a myth. Enfeebled by previous wars, France had fallen long before the German onslaught, not for lack of military assets but for want of pluck and endurance. A susceptibility to, or a curious fascination for, Germany’s hegemonic designs -- deftly marketed by its huge propaganda machine -- hastened the decrepitude and led to the intellectual and moral disintegration of the French ruling classes.

  Weakened by the 1914-1918 war, France had disintegrated long before 1940. It’s not that the military establishment was substandard; its general staff lacked initiative, grit. Corruption was rampant. Historians still ask whether France was asthenic or whether it had been hoodwinked by Germany’s propaganda machine, which had so deftly marketed Hitler’s hallucinatory world vision. This would help speed up the intellectual and moral decrepitude of the French ruling classes, not to mention a large number of actors, artists, writers and journalists.

  Elements of the French army would be contaminated by the Führer’s fanfare. German cinematographer Leni Riefensthal’s Triumph of the Will, a film exalting the Nazi Party rally that became a central motif of Hitler’s dictatorship, won a major award in Paris in 1937. Scores of high-ranking French officers, stirred by the fervor the film conveyed, aroused by the gigantic billowing banners and the upturned faces of Hitler’s cohorts goose-stepping passed his podium, openly endorsed the spread of Nazi ideology “in countries well behind in the application of such lofty human principles.”

  This infatuation was zealously shared by the Catholic Church, whose age-old anti-Semitism harmonized with Germany’s aims, and whose cooperation was to exceed the occupier’s demands. A defeat of Germany, the Vatican had argued, would bring down the autarchic systems that form the first line of defense against Bolshevism and help repulse the immediate communization of Europe. On the other hand, the Holy See had insisted, a victory by France would lead straight to France’s demise and the end of civilization. This was an objective to which, the Church asserted, the Jews were committed. This grotesque assessment was turned to profit not only by racketeers, defeatists and common traitors, but by rich entrepreneurs who had everything to gain from an alliance with Hitler and the Pope -- the arch-enemies of Bolshevism.

  It’s not enough to grasp history. One must become habituated to it.

  *

  We lie, we cheat, we steal by telling ourselves that men deserve to be betrayed, deceived and robbed.

  The argument that the world’s destiny is in the hands of bankers and industrialists is never as aptly demonstrated as in wartime. The lords of capital and the cannon merchants thrive on the menace of conflict and the conduct of war. They prosper when the first shots ring out. Uncovering threats and arousing fear grants them the right to pillage national coffers. Created as special constabularies -- “shock troops” -- against popular uprisings, Nazism and Fascism overstepped the role their mentors had intended. They boiled over and set the world afire. European and American capitalists who, by their generous subsidies, hastened the triumph of German and Italian National Socialism, lived to regret their benevolence. But their contrition rang hollow; they’d bet on the wrong horse. They would eventually recover and engineer other bloody conflicts in the name of free enterprise.

  *

  Among those taking part in the sellout of France were business magnates who believed that the hour of a “white” Internationale had come and that only a pact with Hitler and Mussolini could protect against the Red menace. One of them, multimillionaire perfume tycoon, François Coty, in an arrogant 1934 ghost-written column entitled “France first! Join Hitler against Bolshevism!” denounced [the]

  “... shortsighted, misguided, biased politicians and the malevolent anti-French sect that serves the socio-financial Internationale and perfidiously ascribe to both Hitler and Mussolini a redoubtable belligerence against France....”

  Ostensibly, the “malevolent anti-French sect” Coty referred to was the Jews. Most would pay dearly for this characterization in France and elsewhere in Europe.

  *

  So Fra
nce fell. The French resisted with reckless bravery, or collaborated with the enemy, or survived, shielding themselves with indifference against everything that wasn’t steak, fries, wine and tobacco. Everyone hatched his own strategy, devised his own survival tactic, all according to their wits or cravings.

  “I welcome our downfall,” said journalist Alain Laubreaux. “Victory would have brought our nation great misfortune.”

  Those who weren’t squirming at such spineless rhetoric were applauding it. Others saw in defeat a kind of divine retribution, cruel but salutary, against a people and a regime that, since 1936, had favored pleasure and ease over duty and accountability. Few Frenchmen advocated open resistance. Many, including some of France's most revered writers, artists and entertainers, chose to weather the occupation, some in opulence and splendor, and, if necessary, to hobnob with the enemy. All later found the words to justify an intimacy with the Germans that, given their celebrity, they had no need to cultivate. Between these two extremes, France bobbed and vacillated and struggled against chaos and incoherence.