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Don't Mention The War
Further to last month's story about the exhibition of photographs showing life in Occupied Paris, The Independent has a closer look at the background of the photographer, André Zucca.
It seems the exhibition has caused red cheeks in the Paris city hall. The assistant cultural affairs mayor said that it the expo was "embarrassing, ambiguous and badly explained." The mayor's office quickly released a leaflet claiming that Zucca's photographs gave a "distorted" picture of life under Nazi rule.
The work, it added, "chooses to show nothing, or little, of the reality of Occupation and its terrible consequences."
The problem seems to be that Zucca depicted life as carrying on much as normal.
It's true, some of the images are almost glamourous. Little is seen of the suffering of the city's Jews (just two yellow stars in the show) and there isn't much in the way of the jackboot of Nazi oppression.
According to the Paris city hall, this is because Zucca was following his German masters' brief to show Paris life continuing much as normal - hence his use of colour film for German magazines, a rare commodity in wartime France.
More sceptical souls, including the Independent's John Lichfield, suggest that Zucca was merely showing what he saw: In his defence, Lichfield quotes philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who was scathing about the myth of Parisians being ordered about by gun-toting Nazi officers. Sartre wrote that Parisians invented this fantasy in order to assuage their guilt at not doing enough to resist the Occupation: In the years since the war ended, France has cultivated the image of suffering Paris, doubtless inspired by General de Gaulle's myth that during the war, Frenchmen were either Resistance (the vast majority) or collaborators.
Lichfield adds,
"French myths, and "bad conscience", about the war die hard. Hence the edginess about an exhibition which suggests that ordinary Parisians led relatively ordinary lives under Nazi rule.
"If anything, the exhibition should be praised for portraying an awkward, but important, historical truth. There is a kind of courage in even the most banal and contented photographs in the exhibition. The determination of Parisians to be themselves, to get on with their lives, was, itself, a kind of resistance to Nazism."
