Paris, 1940s

Like many countries in Europe, France in the 1940s was marred by World War II. Paris started mobilizing for war in September 1939, and France was attacked by the Germans eight months later. The French army was defeated quickly, with the French government leaving Paris on June 10 and the Germans occupying the city on June 14. The occupation lasted until August 1944, when the city was liberated by French and American troops. After the war, Parisians wound up needing to do much more rebuilding mentally than physically. Though the Nazis had been comparatively less destructive to Paris than they had been elsewhere in the country, Paris also had to work to overcome the shame of the four year occupation and the country’s history of collaboration with Germany.

The result was a wave of violent purges called “l’épuration sauvage,” or “wild purification,” where Parisians turned on each other, targeting anyone suspected of colluding with the Germans. Because these purges happened before the establishment of the French Provisional Government’s authority, these executions, public humiliations, and assaults lacked any institutional justice. From 1944 to 1949, the French conducted “épuration légale” (“legal purge”), a series of trials that saw over 300,000 cases investigated. While the total number of executions that took place before and after the liberation are unknown, estimates range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.

However, despite the wartime backdrop, the Paris that Baldwin moved to in 1948 was one of revitalization as a new generation of artists, writers, musicians, and actors gathered in the cafes and nightclubs of the Left Bank to bring French culture back. Philosophers and writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus commanded the attention of the world with existentialism. Sartre and Camus would both go on to win Nobel Prizes (with Sartre refusing his out of fear it would limit the impact of his writing), though existentialism’s appeal faded over the next decade as economic recovery set in and the dark postwar mood lifted. It wasn’t long before Paris regained its position as one of the world’s leaders for intellectual creativity.