Known throughout the world as the City of Light, and considered by many to be one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Paris was a darkly shrouded dystopia of fear, distrust, loathing and sadistic oppression some 75 years ago.
On June 14, 1940, the German army entered Paris, strutting into the city under the Arc de Triomphe. Eight days later, Germany and France signed an armistice agreement that effectively made France a hinterland “province” of the Thousand-Year-Reich. The city would remain occupied until Aug. 25, 1944 when the defeated German soldiers fled.
Charles Belfoure, a Baltimore-based architect, historian and teacher, has written a compelling and gripping story about Paris during those hellish years. The Paris Architect depicts the ever-present dread of those days, the constant knot of tension and fear of ordinary Parisians who were trying simply to survive, to lead their lives without intrusion by the ubiquitous German forces.
But that was impossible.
Like ink that seeps darkly and fully into the very texture of the cloth on which it spills, the Nazi occupiers spread their malevolent influence into all aspects and spaces of life in Paris.
Belfoure describes that horrific effect through a swiftly paced, moving clutter of events in the life of Lucien Bernard.
We meet Bernard on the very first page of the book. We quickly learn he is a talented architect but morally detached, typically Gallic in his shrug of indifference toward the fate of others. Like most architects during the war years, he is struggling to make a living and looking aggressively for work.
Suddenly he finds a commission, or, rather, the commission finds him. A quixotic individual of considerable means and courage wants to hire him to design a hiding place for a Jew who is being sought by the Nazis.
Bernard accepts the work, tentatively and timidly.
Consequently, he enters an uneasy, foreboding world where he must regularly interact with members of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, with collaborators and Resistance fighters, with sociopaths seeking to exploit and profit from the Nazis’ bloodlust for Jews, and with the pitiful innocents seeking escape from their pursuers.
And thus, too, begins Bernard’s moral transformation from moral apathy to moral purpose.
“Like most Frenchmen, he hadn’t given a damn about what was happening to the Jews; all that mattered was saving his own skin. But he realized that the sheer hatred and brutality heaped upon the Jews was something he now couldn’t ignore.
“They were being hunted down like wild animals.
“He made his decision because he’d seen almost every Frenchman turn his back on these people, and that cowardice now filled him with disgust.
“When he asked himself why he was risking his life, the answer wasn’t the cash…or the sheer thrill of the challenge. He was risking his life because it was the right thing to do.”
Bernard had travelled a long road to arrive at that conclusion. Along the way, he witnessed unimaginable human deprivation and human depravity. Nightmare and fear were his constant companions. The doors of the black Citroen parked across the street could open at any moment to disgorge a cadre of Gestapo goons intent on swooping in and perpetrating their violence upon him or other terrified quarry. Even the most elemental act of human kindness – a husk of bread to the hungry or shelter for the homeless – if detected, would elicit swift, brutal execution by the SS.
Belfoure based the premise of his book upon the actual case of Nicholas Owen, an architect during 16th century Elizabethan England who rescued many priests – considered heretics and traitors to the Crown – by designing secret quarters – “priest holes” – in which they could hide from the Queen’s soldiers.
The plot of The Paris Architect moves quickly. Events intertwine. Developments interconnect. Lives intersect. Distrust and danger are the unceasing atmospheric pressures under which the main characters make decisions that determine the fates of so many individuals. The reader is caught up in the suspense and unease.
The Nazi occupation is the background to the novel’s action. To a great degree, however, conveying the essence of the occupation is Belfoure’s chief literary purpose. He reflects upon the innumerable changes – economic, demographic, cultural, sociological, psychological and behavioural – that the occupation wrought upon France.
“The occupation, Lucien realized, hadn’t just bred hatred of Jews, it had brought out the very worst in human beings. Hardship had bred pure self-interest, setting group against group, neighbour against neighbour, and even friend against friend. People would screw over each other for a lump of butter.”
Belfoure also depicts the numerous ways in which the Germans despoiled the country even as they slaughtered the inhabitants they considered to be enemies of the Reich.
“The Germans made things [food and other shortages] worse with their plundering. The official exchange rate between the franc and the mark made them instantly rich, and soldiers descended on Paris like locusts devouring crops. First, they swallowed up luxury goods like perfume, then staples like wine and tobacco. When their tour of duty ended, German officers would board trains with dozens of suitcases filled with their booty.”
Belfoure writes professionally about architectural history and preservation, and he succeeds in richly detailing the many architectural aspects of the story. The Paris Architect is his first novel. Sometimes the writing becomes clichéd, but never to the point where it distracts from the taut, tension-laden story.
The ending is a bit contrived, the way a Hollywood movie might be. But it enables the reader’s emotions to settle down and be rewarded, so to speak, for the relentless drama and the fraying of nerves page by page and scene by harrowing scene.
