Paul Kix - The Saboteur

These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out, their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.

So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans, and despised Vichy, a spa town in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all my friends and I could talk about.”

Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument to the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution.” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.

For Robert, the family’s legacy had followed him everywhere throughout his childhood, inescapable: He was baptized beneath a stained-glass mural of the brother priests’ martyrdom; taught in school about the aphorisms in François VI’s Maxims ; raised by a father who’d received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military commendation. Greatness was expected of him, and the expectation shadowed his days. Now, with the Germans living in the chateau, it was as if the portraits that hung on the walls darkened when Robert passed them, judging him and asking what he would do to rid the country of its occupiers and write his own chapter in the family history. To reclaim the France that his family had helped mold—that’s what mattered. “I firmly believed that … honor commanded us to continue the fight,” he said.

But Robert felt something beyond familial pressure. In his travels around Paris or on frequent stops home—he split his weeks between the city and Villeneuve—he grew genuinely angry at his defeated countrymen. He felt cheated. His life, his limitless young life, was suddenly defined by terms he did not set and did not approve of.

What galled him was that few people seemed to think as he did. He found that a lot of people in Paris and in Soissons were relieved the war was over, even if it meant the country was no longer theirs. The prewar pacifism had gelled into a postwar defeatism. Fractured France was experiencing an “intellectual and moral anesthesia,” in the words of one prefect. It was bizarre. Robert had the sense that the ubiquitous German soldiers who hopped onto the Métro or sipped coffee in a café were already part of a passé scenery for the natives.

Other people got the same sense. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the hatred of the Germans and the grudges held against them “assumed a rather abstract air” for the vast majority of French, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, because “the occupation was a daily affair.” The Germans were everywhere, after all, asking for directions or eating dinner. And even if Parisians hated them as much as Robert de La Rochefoucauld did, calling them dirty names beneath their breath, Sartre argued that “a kind of shameful, indefinable solidarity [soon] established itself between the Parisians and these troopers who were, in the end, so similar to the French soldiers …

“The concept of enemy,” Sartre continued, “is only entirely firm and clear when the enemy is separated from us by a wall of fire.”

Even at Villeneuve, Robert witnessed the ease with which the perception of the Germans could be colored in warmer hues. Robert’s younger sister, Yolaine, returned from boarding school for a holiday, and sat in the salon one afternoon listening to a German officer play the piano in the next room. He was an excellent pianist. Yolaine dared not smile as she sat there, for fear of what her mother or older brother might say if they walked past, but her serene young face showed how much she enjoyed the German’s performance. “He was playing very, very well,” she admitted years later.

It was no easy task to hate your neighbor all the time. That was the simple truth of 1940. And the Germans made their embrace all the more inviting because they’d been ordered to treat the French with dignity. Hitler didn’t want another Poland, a country he had torched whose people he had either killed or more or less enslaved. Such tactics took a lot of bureaucratic upkeep, and Germany still had Britain to defeat. So every Nazi in France was commanded to show a stiff disciplined courteousness to the natives. Robert saw this at Villeneuve, where the German officers treated the Terrible Countess with a respect she did not reciprocate. (In fact, that they never deported his mother can be read to a certain extent as an exercise in decorous patience.) One saw this treatment extended to other families as they resettled after the exodus: PUT YOUR TRUST IN THE GERMAN SOLDIER, signs read. The Nazis gave French communities beef to eat, even if it was sometimes meat that the Germans had looted during the summer. Parisians like Robert saw Nazis offering their seats to elderly madames on the Métro, and on the street watched as these officers tipped their caps to the French police. In August, one German army report on public opinion in thirteen French departments noted the “exemplary, amiable and helpful behavior of the German soldiers …”

Some French, like Robert, remained wary: That same report said German kindness had “aroused little sympathy” among certain natives; and young women in Chartres, who had heard terrible stories from the First World War, had taken to smearing their vaginas with Dijon mustard, “to sting the Germans when they rape,” one Frenchwoman noted in her diary. But on the whole, the German Occupation went over relatively seamlessly for Christian France. By October 1940, it seemed not at all strange for Marshal Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old president of France’s provisional government and hero of the Great War, to meet with Hitler in Montoire, about eighty miles southwest of Paris. There, the two agreed to formalize their alliance, shaking hands before a waiting press corps while Pétain later announced in a radio broadcast: “It is in the spirit of honor, and to maintain the unity of France … that I enter today upon the path of collaboration.”

Though Pétain refused to join the side of the Germans in their slog of a fight against the British, he did agree to the Nazis’ administrative and civil aims. The country, in short, would begin to turn Fascist. “The Armistice … is not peace, and France is held by many obligations with respect to the winner,” Pétain said. To strengthen itself, France must “extinguish” all divergent opinions.