Read And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris for Free Online

included a section claiming that Jews were “masters of French cinema.” ( LAPI/Roger-Viollet )

    Among the most virulently anti-Semitic French writers was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, shown at the opening of the Institut d’Études des Questions Juives in Paris. ( Roger-Viollet )

    Among the most virulently anti-Semitic French writers was Lucien Rebatet, shown signing copies of his memoir, Les Décombres. (Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet )

    Goebbels frequently invited French artists to Germany to underline cultural cooperation between the two countries. Among French movie stars leaving the Gare de l’Est for Berlin in March 1942 were, left to right, Viviane Romance, Danielle Darrieux, Suzy Delair and Junie Astor. ( LAPI/Roger-Viollet )

    In October 1941, a high-level delegation of French artists leaving the Gare de l’Est for Germany included the leading Fauvist painters Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen and André Derain. ( LAPI/Roger-Viollet )

    In November 1941, a group of French writers returned to Paris by train after attending a European writers’ congress in Weimar. In uniform on the left is Gerhard Heller, the German official in charge of literary censorship; beside him in a trilby is Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a leading collaborationist writer; next to him in a white raincoat is Robert Brasillach, the editor of the pro-Nazi weekly Je suis partout; and on the far right, wearing glasses, is Karl-Heinz Bremer, the deputy director of the German Institute in Paris. ( LAPI/Roger-Viollet )

    Many popular French singers, including Maurice Chevalier, left, and Édith Piaf, right, traveled to Germany to perform in camps holding some of the 1.6 million French prisoners of war. ( left: Roger-Viollet; right: Ulstein Bild/Roger-Viollet )

    The opening of Arno Breker’s sculpture exhibition at the Orangerie in May 1942 drew senior Vichy officials as well as many French artists and intellectuals who would later be accused of collaboration. ( LAPI/Roger-Viollet )

    Among those in attendance were the dancer Serge Lifar, seen here, at left, in costume for the ballet Joan de Zarissa by the German composer Werner Egk, and, at right, the artist and poet Jean Cocteau. ( left: AndrÉ Zucca/BHVP/Roger-Viollet; right: Ulstein Bild/Roger-Viollet )

    Jean Paulhan, a literary critic and book editor, seen at left in a dark suit with the artist Georges Braque, was a pivotal figure in the intellectual resistance and a cofounder of Les Lettres Françaises , a clandestine newspaper published by writers. ( Roger-Viollet )

    The Communist poet Louis Aragon was an important resistance figure in southern France. ( Rue des Archives )

    The American socialite Florence Gould, shown in a portrait from the late 1930s, held a weekly literary salon in occupied Paris. It was attended by both collaborationist and resistance writers as well as by some Germans, among them the renowned novelist Ernst Jünger, who was stationed in Paris with the Wehrmacht and is seen here on horseback leading a parade. ( top: Florence Gould Foundation; bottom: Marbach/Rue des Archives )

    The Kiev-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky spent her last beach vacation in 1939 with her daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, and her husband, Michel Epstein. From May 1940, the family lived in the Burgundy town of Issy-l’Évêque, where she wrote her best-known work, Suite Française , published only in 2004. In July 1942, she was arrested by French gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz, where she died one month later. ( Fonds Irène Némirovsky/IMEC )

    Late in the occupation, the young writer Marguerite Duras joined the resistance along with her husband, Robert Antelme, right, and her lover Dionys Mascolo. Antelme was subsequently arrested and deported to Germany, but he survived the war. ( Collection Jean Mascolo/Sygma/Corbis )

    The popular writer Colette spent much of the occupation in her apartment in the Palais-Royal, where her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, was forced to hide