Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation [Paperback]

This is an interesting but not riveting book telling the stories of various American citizens from 1939 to 1945 in France. Although the narrative is somewhat disjointed and at times incomplete, I liked the author's work. It is definitely worth reading if one is interested in World War II. However, to put the stories into context, I recommend reading "Hitler's Empire -- How The Nazis Ruled Europe" by Mark Mazower.

A quick check in my library of other works concerning France under German occupation in WWII revealed essentially no information on the people covered by this work. Books like "France Under The Germans", "Verdict On Vichy", "The French Against The French", "Soldiers Of The Night", "Vichy Two Years Of Deception" and "Paris Underground" failed to mention the principal characters in this work, and Ambassador Bullitt only rated a single line in all of the above. Obviously, the French and writers of the French occupation years are interested in only presenting the stories of French citizens -- usually to depict how heroic they were in resisting the Germans. The actual story as we now know is that collaboration was widespread and Vichy was the only Non-German government that voluntarily rounded up and shipped off Jews to Germany for extermination.

So to me, at least, this story of Americans in France during this time was essentially unknown. Some of those individuals covered in this work actively resisted the Germans and some didn't. Nonetheless, I found all of the characters important to form a complete picture of the situation, although some like Charles Bedaux present complex and sometimes contradictory behavior. One must remember that most of the Americans who remained behind in France after Ambassador Bullitt recommended that all American citizens leave after the outbreak of the war in September, 1939, exhibited a strong streak of Francophilia and tended to look to France as their cultural and spiritual fatherland. The author also shows this tendency when he speaks of Paris as the cultural capital of Europe, and by extension, of the world. France certainly got a lot of mileage out of assisting the US in its Revolutionary War and has been repaid many times over for that involvement. And the author is incorrect in stating that "... 17,000 Frenchmen had answered the Marguis de Lafayette's call to fight for American independence." No such thing occurred -- the French soldiers in Rochambeau's army were fighting against England after France declared war on England.

The writing is relatively good, but the stories are sometimes thrown together haphazardously. For example, the story of Drue Leyton stops at one point where she is in Southern France, and she next appears near Paris. How did she get there with her name on the Gestapo list for immediate arrest and execution? Then her story mysteriously stops while running a ratline for downed fliers. It would be nice to know that she survived the war, but she rates no mention in the Epilogue. Drue (born Dorothy Parsons in Mexico in 1903 of American parents and who grew up in Mexico) had been an accomplished Hollywood actress but one of the curious tribe of American women who favor all things foreign to the exclusion of all things American, yet still consider themselves American patriots. Late in life she returned to the US after experiencing French xenophobia first-hand, and died in California in 1997 where her foreign exploits and "exotic" lifestyle were welcome.

The treatment of Ambassador William Bullitt also could have been expanded. He was a fascinating character who eventually fought as a Major in De Gaulle's Free French Army without losing his citizenship. As the author points out, Bullitt fell from Roosevelt's favor when he stayed in Paris rather than following the French Government in their flight to Southern France and was ultimately removed as Ambassador. Robert Murphy became an important player in Torch and other time during the war although he was often viewed as a somewhat controversial diplomat. Charles Bedaux is a major character developed in this work, but the mystery of why the American Government continues to refuse to allow access to documents (to this day) concerning his activities certainly indicates that there is more to his story than is being told.

All in all, this is an interesting book that does not quite rise to five stars due to so many missing elements. I also hope the author will include some photos of many of the characters in the final edition (this review is being made from the Vine advance proof.) Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to anyone interested in World War II.

The anecdotal material buried inside this 400-plus page book is fascinating, but the reader sometimes has to dig deep to find the nuggets -- such as the octagenerian African-American French Legion veteran who appears in the opening and closing chapters, only to vanish in between; the story of Mary Berg (American only in name) who miraculously is sent from Warsaw to an American internment camp (which isn't, incidentally, in Paris at all...) and Drue Leyton, who runs a Resistance and evasion network when not interned as an enemy alien.

The problem, I think, is that Glass has approached his subject in an almost encyclopedic way, cramming together the stories of anyone and everyone who was American and who happened to be in Paris between June 1940 and August 1944. The result is jarring, as we move from Sylvia Beach (a fascinating story of the experiences of a Left Bank bookseller and patron of such writers as Hemingway and Joyce) to unknown heroes, like the doctor at the American Hospital in Neuilly, who sacrifices himself to save Allied airmen and others as part of the Resistance. Some have fascinating stories, but simply don't fit well into the overall story, like Charles Bedaux, at whose home the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married, and who appears to have had no interest in anything but doing business -- with whatever regime he happened to be tied to at the point in time. Technically an American -- and someone who died in American custody -- he's not really representative of the experience of Americans in Paris during this time.

The stories are often compelling, but a good book is more than just a series of stories tied together in chronological chapters; it has some kind of overarching theme or point to it. A book of a similar kind that I've re-read several times, How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War deftly combines themes and chronology for a fascinating tale of day-to-day experiences of British civilians in the war. In this case, Glass has no overarching theme: it's simply stories about these individuals and their very disparate experiences.

That is part of what made this a frustrating book for me to read. Moreover, in addition to a choppy narrative and the absence of an overall theme or focus, the writing is often dry and ponderous, along the lines of 'X went to Y, where she met A. They played tennis and golf, and had dinner. Then Y went to meet with Z..." The prose style began to feel almost like a metronome. I realized just how irritating this had become when I read a passage in which a Parisienne describes the sounds of the night under occupation, the military footsteps of five soldiers marching with precision; occasional bursts of gunfire, etc. and it conjured up such a vivid mental image that I shivered. Glass's own prose comes nowhere close to conjuring up that sense of time and place, alas.

Most irritating at all, there are a host of characters who simply vanish from the book altogether -- we don't find out what happens to them by war's end or after the war. The most egregious example of this is Pierre Laval, who was executed for treason by the French in 1945. True, he's not American, but his daughter was married to the son of two of the primary characters in the book, Comte Adlebert and Comtesse Clara de Chambrun (she American; he, American-born and a dual citizen; a descendant of Lafayette) and Laval himself appears frequently throughout the book. One would imagine that a dramatic ending to his life would be worthy of noting. Similarly, it's only thanks to another reviewer here that I learned what had happened to Drue Leyton!

There is a tremendous amount of research in this book, and many parts of it are very intriguing. But at the end of the day, what it succeeded in doing was whetting my appetite for some of the original source material on which Glass based his book, rather than inspiring admiration for the book itself. I've ordered some of them, and will start by reading about Sylvia Beach and her store, Shakespeare & Company.

I'm sure this will find a host of eager readers among those who are interested in World War II anecdotes -- and I don't think there is another summary book on this subject. Still, it doesn't come close to being what it could have been, and ends up feeling rambling and chit-chatty where it should have been focused and created a sense of dramatic tension. I've rated it 3.5 stars, rounded down. Only for those very interested in the era and without the time or patience to seek out some of the biographies or primary material about these individuals and their lives.

The title is imprecise: The geographical scope is wider than Paris, and the featured Americans had stronger ties to France than to the U.S. That is why they stayed there after the French army's collapse and the division of the country between a German-occupied zone and the territory of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Leaving would have entailed the sacrifice of extensive business interests or close personal friendships or humanitarian enterprises.

Americans in Paris follows the fortunes of about half a dozen of these Franco-Americans. They are not a representative sample. Except for a few who show up only in vignettes, all have been the subjects of other books. They include industrialist and efficiency expert Charles Bedaux, the aristocratic de Chambrun family (père an American citizen in his own mind, mère and fils in reality), Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Paris, and Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the original Shakespeare and Company, Paris's leading English language bookstore. I suspect that octogenarian Charles Anderson, a minor business functionary married to a French woman, is more typical. He gets only a passage near the end of the book, and that passage aims to score points against American racism rather than illuminate the experience of living in wartime Paris.

The advantage of the atypical main characters is that they have fascinating, and very different, stories. On one side is Dr. Jackson, who used his hospital position to help downed Allied airmen escape from the Germans. More ambivalent are the Chambruns, who worked to keep the American Hospital and American Library out of Nazi hands but showed no sympathy for the Resistance and were on good terms with Pierre Laval, whose daughter Chambrun fils had married. M. Bedaux alternately fought with and sought to profit from both Vichy and Berlin. At the end of his life, he was facing treason charges in the United States; the post-war French government awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Legion of Honor. Sylvia Beach, fiercely anti-Nazi but intent on keeping her bookstore running, kept her head down.

Because the author's sources are, for the most part, his subjects themselves or their family and friends, all look at least a little bit heroic. Because all but Miss Beach were comparatively affluent, their sufferings were doubtless less than those of a Charles Anderson. There is room for a more comprehensive study of expatriate Americans' "life and death under Nazi occupation". This one, nevertheless, fills part of the niche quite admirably.

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