Status Updates From Suite francesa

“The difficulty here is, as ever, the practical side of things. A newspaper, a kind of radio. Freedom, the Germans secretly paying him a subsidy.”

Some of the most notorious figures of the occupation were the Frenchmen who led political groups or published newspapers in Paris in return for the high life of the occupied capital and, in many cases, direct subsidies from the German Embassy.

The most hated men in France in 1942: Philippe Henriot and Pierre Laval. The first as the tiger, the second as the hyena: around Henriot you can smell fresh blood, and around Laval the stench of rotting flesh.

If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it.