The Strangers: Occupied France, 1940-1944.
Previously: A Shattered People: The Fall of France, 1940.
In a nerdy version of the Kevin Bacon game, my college girlfriend once told me that her mother, visiting Paris in her youth, had been pinched on the butt by Jean-Paul Sartre. I can’t remember if she was honored by the attention, but we were all feminists, and Sartre’s reputation for womanizing made him an object of scorn. For me, this attitude bled into a disdain for his philosophy, which only grew as I became aware that I was an analytic philosopher, and he a Continental. He played for the other team, and must be shunned. I never read his work. Being and Nothingness seemed a laughably-pretentious title, and the book surely contained hundreds of pages of overly-subtle nonsense, which could easily be dissolved by one semester of undergraduate logic.
But maybe that ability, to read the deepest of meanings in the most minor of cues, is just the sensitivity needed to explain life in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Or maybe the causation runs both ways: the weird unreality of living under occupation, the paradox of being a stranger in one’s own land and among one’s own people, helped produce existentialism’s obsession with the inescapable in-betweennesses of life.
To start with the material conditions, their new German overlords required the French to set their clocks ahead an hour, to synchronize with Germany’s time zone. This mismatch, between the sun’s location and the clockface, was just one way that occupation defamiliarized everything around them. Of course there was also the fact that one needed to carry one’s identity papers with one at all times. And then there was the famine.
Food was rationed, and (quoting Ousby, as before) by 1944 “People said that the meat ration was so small it could be wrapped up in a Métro ticket.” In another bit of existentialist double-vision, the substitutes for now-rare foodstuffs were substituted in disguise: