The students stood lightly panting before it when a convoy of black cars wended down the long driveway and turned out onto the road. The path cut right in front of the boys, and one sedan stopped in front of them. Out stepped Adolf Hitler. The priest, stunned, began explaining that he and his group had just come to look—but Hitler was in a playful mood, not suspicious in the least, and began questioning the boys, many of whom were Austrian, about their backgrounds. When Hitler got to Robert, the priest said that this boy was French. Robert tried to make an impression, and began speaking to Hitler in the German he’d acquired living in Austria. But the phrases emerged with an unmistakable accent, and when Robert finished, Hitler just patted him on the cheek. “Franzose,” he responded. (“Frenchman.”) And then he moved on.
In a moment, the führer was back in the car and out of view. The encounter was as brief as it was shocking: The boys had seen, had even been touched by, the most famous man in Europe, the shaper of history himself. They looked at each other, and Robert couldn’t help but feel giddy.
The bliss wouldn’t last, however. Austria was quickly losing whatever independence it had, and when Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg said in a radio address in February that he could make no more concessions to the Nazis, a frenzied, yelling mob of twenty thousand Fascists invaded the city of Graz, ripped out the loudspeakers that had broadcast Schuschnigg’s address, then pulled down the Austrian flag and replaced it with a swastika banner. A month later Hitler invaded, and within days the Anschluss was complete.
Robert saw a demonstration in Salzburg a few days later, where everyone shouted, “Heil Hitler! Long live Hitler!” He felt the threat of violence begin to cloud the interactions of everyday life. The Nazis occupied the buildings next to the Marist school and one day Robert looked in a window and suddenly a man stormed from the building, insulting and threatening him, simply for peering inside. Robert began to second-guess a führer who would champion these bullies. By the end of the school year, he was happy to leave Austria for good.
Now, at the beginning of the Occupation, he saw a similar malice embedded within the French newsreels: Everyone smiling too hard and striving to look the same. With each passing day, the Frenchmen he encountered seemed to follow in the Austrians’ footsteps, embracing a fascism they were either too scared or ignorant of to oppose. One exhibition defaming Freemasonry attracted 900,000 Parisians, nearly half the city’s population. Another, called “European France,” with Hitler as the pan-national leader, drew 635,000. Meanwhile, the German Institute’s language courses flourished to the point that they had to turn away applicants. For 90 percent of France, La Rochefoucauld later mused, Pétain and Hitler’s alliance represented the second coming of Joan of Arc. The historical record would show that collaborators, those who subscribed to newspapers committed to the cause and joined special interest groups, were never actually a majority, but Robert could be forgiven for thinking this because all around him people declared themselves friends of Hitler. The founder of the cosmetics firm L’Oréal turned out to be a collaborator. So was the director of Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the curator of the Rodin Museum, even the rector of the Catholic University of Paris. By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty … to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler.”
It was all so disorienting. Robert felt like he no longer recognized La France. He was eighteen and impetuous and London and de Gaulle called to him—but couldn’t he do something here, now? He wanted to show the Germans that they could control his country, his faith, his house, but they could not control him.
One day he met in secret with his cousin, Guy, and they launched a plan to steal a train loaded with ammunition that stopped in Soissons. Maybe they would blow it up, maybe they would just abscond with it. The point was: The Germans would know they didn’t rule everything. Guy and Robert talked about how wonderful it would be, and ultimately Robert approached a man of their fathers’ generation, whom Robert blindly suspected of being in the fledgling Resistance, and asked for help.
The man stared hard at Robert. He told him that he and his cousin could not carry out their mission. Even if they stole this train, what would they do with it? And how would it defeat the Germans? And did they realize that their act risked more lives than their own? German reprisals for “terrorism” sometimes demanded dozens of executions.
Already, an amateur rebellion had cost the community lives. A Resistance group in Soissons called La Vérité Française had affiliated itself with one in Paris that formed in the Musée de l’Homme. It was a brave but naive group, unaware of the double agents within its ranks as it published underground newspapers and organized escape routes for French prisoners of war. The German secret police raided the Musée and Vérité groups. One museum résistant was deported, three sentenced to prison and seven to death. In Soissons, two members of Vérité Française were beheaded, six shot, and six more died in concentration camps. The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid worked in an elegant gray-stone building—across the street from the cathedral where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally attended Mass.
So their plan was foolish, the man said, and Robert and his cousin were lucky to be stopped before the brutal secret police or, for that matter, the army officers billeting in Robert’s house could get to them.
The scolding shamed La Rochefoucauld, and stilled his intent. But the situation in France continued to worsen. The French government was responsible for the upkeep of the German army in France, which cost a stunning 400 million francs a day, after the Nazis rigged the math and overvalued the German mark by 60 percent. Soon, it was enough money to actually buy France from the French, one German economist noted. Oil grew scarce. Robert began biking everywhere. The German-backed government in Vichy imposed rations, and Robert soon saw long lines of people at seemingly every bakery and grocery store he passed. The Germans set a shifting curfew for Paris, as early as 9 p.m. or as late as midnight, depending on the Nazis’ whims. This would have annoyed any college-aged man, but the German capriciousness carried a sinister edge, too: After dark, Parisians heard the echo of the patrolling secret police’s boots and might wake the next day to find a neighbor or acquaintance missing and everyone too frightened to ask questions. In 1941, the terror spilled out into the open. Small cliques of Communist résistants in Nantes and Bordeaux