Nearly 30,000Americans lived in or near Parisbefore World War II, including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and JosephineBaker. When war broke out in September 1939, at least 5,000 ignored U.S.Ambassador William Bullitt’s advice to leave, bound there by ties of family,employment or, in a great many instances, love for the city.
They remained evenafter Hitler’s forces marched into the city in June 1940; America wasstill neutral, after all. By the time the United States and Germany declared war on each otherin December 1941, approximately 2,000 Americansartists, intellectuals, blackmusicians, businessmenwere left.
Glass, author ofseveral other books and a former journalist, has written a lively account ofthe moral and political quandariesto cooperate, collaborate or resist?and increasingprivations of living under German occupation. He skillfully uses memoirs,diaries, letters, documents and official records to draw a picture ofexpatriates caught in a mesh of deceit, bravery, self-sacrifice and fear, andplaces them in the context of diplomacy and the wider war.
A surprising numberof Americans remained un-interned for most of the occupation. The authorconcentrates on a handful of people and their associations, including SylviaBeach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, which she wasdetermined to keep open while aiding Jewish friends and resistance fighters.
It would be hard tooverstate the courage of Dr. Jackson, chief surgeon at the American Hospital,or that of his wife and teenage son. Besides keeping a vital medical facilityoperating, and out of German control for four long years, he and his familyfrequently risked execution in enabling the escape of scores of downed Alliedairmen and the passing on of information about the enemy.
The American Hospital and the American Library figureprominently throughout the account. Count Aldebert de Chambrun, born in Americaof French parents and a direct descendant of Lafayette, labored mightily to keep thehospital functioning. His wife, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, born in Cincinnati and sister toTheodore Roosevelt’s son-in-law Nicholas Longworth, administered the library.Neither was an easy task.
Charles Bedaux’shigh-mindedness was more problematical. An extremely wealthy naturalizedAmerican of French birth, he had made his fortune initially as a kind ofefficiency expert. Thereafter he branched out into varied business interests,all of which he diligently pursued during wartime regardless of nationalitiesor political ties.
Ambassador Bullitt,however, was a brave and resourceful individual, so highly regarded by Frenchauthorities that they asked him to negotiate the surrender of Paris as an open city, thus making him itsunofficial “American mayor.” After the occupation he did not want to representhis country in the nominally independent Vichy-governed half of France, so heleft. Turned down when he sought to join the U.S. Army at 53, Bullitt wangled acommission in Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces and fought with them untilthe liberation of Parisin August 1944.
Glass summarizestheir post-liberation fates. Beach closed her shop when she was interned forseveral months and did not reopen it upon her release (though it was started upagain much later by someone else). The wartime associations of the de Chambrunsand Bedaux seriously tarnished their reputations. The Chambruns were seen ascollaborators; their son René was married to the daughter of Pierre Laval, theVichy France prime minister, and Clara never made a secret of her sympathy for Vichy and dislike of deGaulle.
Bedaux was a victimof his own ambition. He seems to have been a genuine American patriot, yet heexploited his business contactswhether Allied, Vichyor Germanrelentlessly, most notably for a trans-Saharan pipeline to transportpeanut oil from West Africa to Europe. Heended up being brought to Miamiin 1944 to face treason charges, which he avoided by committing suicide.
The Jacksonswere arrested only weeks before the liberation of Paris; father and son were sent to slavelabor camps. There is enough suspense in their stories that you should be leftto discover their fates yourself, but they were not uniformly happy.
