Sleeping with the enemy: New book claims Frenchwomen started a baby boom with Nazi men during Vichy regime



Paris in the month of May was in full aphrodisiac bloom.



The girls were swinging along the boulevards in their short, flowery skirts, their hair flowing loose behind them.



On the radio, the singer Tino Rossi - France's answer to Rudolph Valentino - belted out his latest romantic favourite.



But a few short weeks later, on June, 14, 1940, the German army marched into the capital and occupied it for four years.

War of the sexes: French women used their looks as currency to trade with the German invaders

France has never forgotten its humiliation - or its bewilderment - in having to adjust to a life of close proximity to the old enemy, with all the resentment, guilt and, worst of all, sneaking

Everyone was surprised the tall, blond invading newcomers did not set about raping the population as the French had expected. Instead, they handed out bread and tarts.

Moreover, they were so handsome and so brave in comparison with the drunken French soldiers who had surrendered the fight.

Soon, every French child was crying out that he wanted to be German, while every young French girl was lusting after the newcomers as though they were allies, not enemies, offering them oranges and standing on tip-toe to look into the plush interior of their limousines.

And French housewives, deprived of companionship while their soldier husbands were held prisoner, were happily sleeping with the enemy.

The French have long sought to draw a veil over these aspects of the occupation, claiming heroic acts of resistance during the period when, in fact, they were little more than collaborators.

Now, with uncharacteristic daring, Patrick Buisson, director of France's History Channel, TF1, has set the record straight by writing a book, whose titillating title - 1940-1945: The Erotic Years - shows the extent to which his fellow countrymen actually enjoyed their wartime experiences.

The revelation comes at a time when Paris is being asked to come to terms with a series of unsettling memories of the era.

An exhbition of photographs on show at the city's History Library depicts Parisians enjoying themselves immensely during the occupation - and some people are finding it distinctly distasteful.

Indeed, the deputy mayor of Paris said he wanted to be sick on seeing the pictures of well-dressed citizens shopping next to a market piled high with fruit and veg, giving no inkling of the wartime hardship France usually likes to complain about.

One photograph shows punters crowding into the nightclubs. Others show women wearing bikinis frolicking in a swimming pool, or wearing fancy hats at Paris's most fashionable racecourse.



Everything gives the impression that far from being a time of hunger, fear and resistance, life during the war was one big party.

And although one picture depicts two Jews wearing the obligatory yellow Star of David brought in by the Vichy government in 1941, there is no acknowledgement that the French sent 76,000 Jews to their deaths while their countrymen were making merry.

The lead for this behaviour, according to Buisson's book, came from the top.



The aged Marshal Petain, who ran the Vichy government, was convicted of collaboration after the war, but he had been allowed to give his 84-year-old libido full rein, shamelessly seducing his younger staff, while recommending the motto 'work, family, country' to the rest of the nation.

Buisson claims that the wives left behind in occupied Paris had a similar attitude.



They could not get enough of the blond barbarians, and many factors conspired to help them.

First, there was a curfew between 11pm and 5am, forcing everyone to stay at home.



Also, Paris was immediately plunged into German summer-time, which - along with the black-out and the rationing of electricity supplies - ensured it got dark two hours earlier than usual.

Then there was the particular harshness of the first occupied winter, when the bedroom was by far the warmest place to be.

But it was more complicated than that. The two nations used sex both as a weapon of war and a means of survival.

In the Rhineland, French prisoners enjoyed liaisons with local girls as a way of getting revenge, while back home their wives and girlfriends formed close friendships with the German officers stationed in their midst, or indeed with anyone else who could give them a handout when food, heating and clothing were in short supply.

According to Buisson, nubile young French girls were as likely to succumb to their bosses, their neighbours or even the greengrocer if they owed him money, and became adept at escaping the vigilant eye of their mothers-in-law and any other would-be killjoy in the community in pursuit of their illicit pleasures.

Many of these took place in the cinema. During the four years of occupation, the whole country was going to the movies at least once a week in surprising numbers, leaving children by themselves at home.



Soon, the attendance figures were achieving staggering new highs - 224 million tickets were sold in 1941, rising to 310 million in 1943 as the French sought the escapism, the dark, the warmth and the erotic adventures the cinema offered.

It was a lot cheaper than a hotel room and more private than home. Even the Metro proved a handy venue for sex during the blackout. No wonder these were called the 'dark years'.



Naturally, there were the inevitable consequences. While the British birth-rate fell during the dark days of the Blitz, the French birth-rate soared in the years after the Germans arrived, despite the fact that more than two million redblooded French men were locked away in prison camps.

Up to 30 per cent of live births were illegitimate in some parts of Paris. This gave the French authorities a particular headache. For a long time, they had been lamenting that France was underpopulated; now they did not know whether to rejoice or deplore each new arrival.

And not only was there a huge rise in births, but also in illegal abortions - in 1941 nearly 20 per cent of female bodies left at the criminal morgue in Paris had died as a result of botched terminations.

Buisson's analysis of his compatriots' active sex lives while Europe was fighting will hardly thrill his French readers, but his scholarly 500-page treatise is packed with damning evidence.

Paris changed just as soon as the Germans arrived and draped all the old landmarks, including such luxury hotels as the Crillon and the Ritz, with the Nazi flag.

The first people to take advantage of the new arrivals were the prostitutes. Soon, even the high-minded Simone de Beauvoir could not ignore their presence in previously upmarket locations on the intellectual Left Bank.

Yet not all of the women had been prostitutes before the war. Some had been respectable housewives and mothers, and claimed they were prostituting themselves only to eat.

To the Germans, this behaviour was only to be expected. In their popular imagination, France was immoral, debauched and licentious - and by the end of their first summer in Paris, they had made sure it was living up to its reputation.

The newcomers brought their formidable talent for organisation, including compulsory medical check-ups and treatment for venereal diseases, to the city's most famous brothels, including Edward VII's favourite establishment, Le Chabanais near the Louvre.

Meanwhile, their officers enthusiastically attended Paris's famous nightclubs and cabarets, while the locals reacted by enjoying themselves, too, in the many illegal dance halls that sprang up in garages and behind bars.

One of the first things the French learned at German hands was a worship of youth and the body.



Their most high-profile symbol for this was the tennis player and Wimbledon champion Jean Borotra (always remembered on this side of the Channel as the 'Bounding Basque').

He was recruited for an advertising campaign enjoining the entire French nation to kit themselves out in shorts and take hearty, Germanic exercise - swimming, running and jumping - so much so that traditional educationalists started to complain that French schools were abandoning their intellectual standards in favour of physical prowess.

You may have thought that a country under the crush of the jackboot would have reacted against too much hero worship of the male physique, but Frenchmen were unusually drawn to masculine attributes, as they embarked on a period of soul- searching, asking themselves whether a vanquished man could still be a man.

Their army had given up the fight, but the country was flooded with cadet movements all trying to emulate Hitler Youth attributes.

By contrast, the women had no such identity crisis. Intoxicated between the wars by American culture, they smoked, defiantly wore short skirts and believed in the liberation of women.



With another war, they came into their own, using all their inventiveness to present a glamorous face to the world, even when clothing was rationed.

'French women have never worn as little as they did in the first years of the war, and they have never been so beautiful,' observed one commentator.

Soon, with their men away, they also raided men's wardrobes, donning their husbands' trousers, empowering themselves to live like men and successfully beating off the Roman Catholic Church and government edicts against the masculine fashions - and liberated behaviour that went with them.

The young, too, deprived in many families of the firm hand of paternal guidance, took every opportunity to break all the rules - and apparently there was nothing that could be done about it.

One father who chastised his two daughters for sleeping around was told by a judge in south-west France that his attitude was excessive and ordered to pay a substantial fine. Even the authorities, it seems, could not wait to let their hair down.

Most spectacular of the rebels were the 'zazous', the Bohemian unisex young.



Distinguished by their outlandish fashion sense, which consisted of Teddy boy jackets for the men, worn with thick-soled shoes and long, greasy hair, and short skirts and striped stockings for the women, accompanied by large sunglasses, dyed blonde hair and red lipstick, they were inspired by jazz and swing music from the U.S., which many people still thought decadent.

The 'zazous' took their name and their dress sense from the zootsuited black American musician Cab Calloway and his famous song Zah Zuh Zah. They haunted the boulevards and cafes of St Germain, living a hedonistic lifestyle which has gone down in history.

Champion of the movement was singer Charles Trenet, who later composed the Bobby Darin hit Beyond The Sea.



Gay at a time when homosexuals were aggressively persecuted by the Nazis - though the practice became known in France as 'the German vice' by those who saw the invasion as sexual penetration - he disguised his leanings by dating U.S. tobacco heiress Doris Duke, among others.

Many other household names protected themselves by more dubious means. The Nobel prize-winning writer Andre; Gide, who had been introduced to homosexuality by Oscar Wilde, did not bother to conceal his sexual orientation.

Instead, he lived in the South of France, well away from the advancing Wehrmacht, openly claiming he was quite beguiled by Hitler.



He believed the Fuhrer would end up leader of Europe, bringing enormous progress, and that the only flaw in his policies - his attitude to the Jews - was forgivable.

Ironically, many of the filmmakers and artists who trod the fine line between collaboration and resistance are the names the world now remembers.

While everyone else was fighting, France was blazing a trail in alternative thinking which would be taken up after the war in New York and London - especially when the new ideas were made respectable by philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, who dignified the 'anything goes' way of life as the definitive new creed: existentialism.

As Sartre himself said after he was released from prison camp for health reasons, he had never felt as free as during the war years, while de Beauvoir presented sex as a positive obligation which helped people feel alive when all around was falling to pieces. This, indeed, was the beginning of modern times.