Back from the waterfront, the city of 1940 was little changed from the previous two centuries. Its imposing centre, dominated by the town hall, the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville, boasted impeccably manicured tree-lined squares, fine restaurants and elegant frontages. These led to broad boulevards radiating out towards the port’s trading and residential quarters. Beyond the main roads, this was a city of little restaurants, cafés, scurrying markets and narrow cobbled streets, lined with shops and first-floor apartments. Here a cacophony of humanity jostled with a jumble of cars, vélo-taxis, bicycles, lorries, barrows and horse-drawn carts.
The city’s political landscape was also one of contrast. During the 1930s, communism found a strong foothold amongst France’s intellectuals and working classes. Most of the dockworkers, who lived in the city’s crowded Bacalan quarter – where the restaurants were as rough as the wine they served – were, if not communist, then communist sympathisers; as were the cheminots (the railway workers) and the post office workers. In the countryside, too, especially in the Landes region lying between Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, communism and socialism had strong roots. Many of the Bordelais, however, regarded communism with a fear amounting almost to paranoia – seeing it as some kind of modern reincarnation of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. A secret British wartime report observed that ‘[amongst] the upper bourgeoisie [there is] an apprehension of Russia and a real fear of the former French Communists and of the mob … [they believe that] only evil can come to France from the disorder which would follow the coming to power of the extreme left’.
Those in charge of mercantilist Bordeaux were above all pragmatists. What was good for trade was good for the city. Foreigners came and foreigners went. But if trade (and especially the wine trade) went on, the city prospered, whoever was in charge. The city’s bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie embraced the politics of conservatism and of ‘order’. Among these classes, right or centre-right views were dominant, extreme right nationalism not unusual, and anti-Semitism commonplace.
‘England’, regarded by some in France as the centre of modern Jewry, was often thrown into this mix of political foes. ‘The English, the yids, the capitalists, these are the true enemies of France which is threatened, like every other country, by the Bolshevik sword of Damocles,’ declared one local right-wing activist of the time. When it came to anti-Semitism, Bordeaux was by no means unusual in the France of the 1930s and ’40s. ‘The Jewish question was a subject of lively discussion in France at the time,’ one respected French commentator wrote. ‘There was a strong resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment in the period before the war and during the years of the Vichy government.’
Von Faber du Faur did not waste time imposing his rule on the city. He laid on a grand military parade through the streets of Bordeaux, designed not just as a spectacle, but also as a show of force. The salute was taken by, amongst others, Erwin Rommel (who requisitioned a nearby château for holiday use). On 1 July 1940 a curfew, enforced by armed soldiers with dogs, was imposed between 2300 and 0500 hours, with curfew-breakers risking long terms of imprisonment or forced labour. All clocks were advanced one hour to match German time. All firearms, including hunting weapons, had to be handed in to the local mairies; all official notices (including street signs and administrative requests) had to be in German as well as French, and the swastika emblazoned on a red banner was hung outside all principal official buildings. Controls were introduced on traffic in the Gironde estuary and on all major road intersections and railway stations. In time, German oversight would be extended to cover the postal service, telecommunications, newspapers, cinemas, cultural events, agriculture (including, inevitably, wine), commercial transactions, the refining and distribution of petroleum products and the passage of goods and people over the demarcation line into Vichy France. Laws were passed to require farmers to give up a percentage of their produce to the German occupiers – though in most cases, thanks to peasant cunning, these were honoured more in the breach than the observance. German soldiers were under strict instructions to behave politely towards the French, and mostly did. But the terms of occupation were clear. On 10 October 1940 the city’s military administration published a decree stating: ‘Anyone who gives shelter to a member of the British Forces will be condemned to death.’
Almost overnight, it seemed, the German authorities also established an iron grip on the region, turning the whole of the Gironde estuary and the Médoc peninsula into one gigantic military base. Concrete pens were constructed in Bordeaux harbour to house the German submarines engaged in the deadly business of cutting the Atlantic lifeline on which Britain depended to save it from starvation. Italian submarines also had a base in the city. The Bordeaux quays were fortified with concrete pillboxes, a system of interlocking trenches and underground bunkers. This would soon also become the base for a small fleet of converted merchantmen which – fast, lightly armed and German-crewed – acted as blockade-runners, bringing in vital raw materials from Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East.
The Atlantic beaches running south from the mouth of the Gironde, considered a likely place for an Allied invasion, were fortified with a network of defences, including heavy coastal guns in thick concrete casemates; searchlights; numerous machine-gun nests, and a small fleet of riverine patrol vessels. Some 60,000 German troops were stationed in and around Bordeaux. By the end of the war, this would include two infantry divisions, a Panzer division and an army headquarters. A Luftwaffe force of 150 aircraft was assembled at Mérignac airport and on small local airfields. Kriegsmarine units were brought in to protect the Gironde and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Aquitaine.
The city itself was soon crammed full of German troops and dotted with a profusion of headquarters for the major military units, which jostled with buildings housing the German harbour authorities, civil government and the various security organisations charged with keeping order. A requisitioned passenger liner, the Baudouinville – last used by the Belgian cabinet when they took the fateful decision to surrender – was brought to Bordeaux and tied up along the quay at the Place des Quinconces as overflow billeting for German and Italian troops. There was also an array of soldiers’ brothels and watering holes: the Lion Rouge nightclub was specially reserved for Wehrmacht officers, the Côtelette for Abwehr intelligence officers, and the Blaue Affe (the Blue Monkey) for ordinary soldiers.
For most citizens of Bordeaux, shortages now became a way of life. The price of baby milk rose by fifty per cent; fish was limited to one tin of sardines per month and sugar was almost unobtainable. Even saccharine tablets were rationed to a hundred pills per person for every six months. Shopkeepers had to accept the Reichsmark at an exorbitant fixed rate of exchange and butchers were prohibited from selling meat on Wednesday and Thursday, with Friday reserved for horsemeat and tripe only. Most metal came from recycled stock. Leather was only available on the black market, or with an official authorisation; gloves and belts were difficult to find and most shoes had only wooden soles. There was a severe shortage of elastic (though this did not affect the availability of ladies’ suspenders, one British secret agent noted, cheerfully). German soldiers had priority on public transport, and horses were used extensively. Real coffee was such a valuable commodity that it became an article of barter, with most cafés and restaurants serving a roasted acorn substitute christened ‘café Pétain’. Unsurprisingly – and very quickly – a flourishing and all-pervasive black market was established, as the French population in both town and country tried to find ways round these new discomfitures in their daily lives.
Despite this – and contrary to the early hopes of the intelligence community in London, who claimed that ‘occupied Europe was smouldering with Resistance to the Nazis and ready to erupt at the slightest support or encouragement’ – secret feelers put out by the British and the Free French reported that the ‘spirit