No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [43]
Piaf’s official return, a gala at the Salle Pleyel, took place later in September. More nervous about appearing at this prestigious theater than about the Germans, she felt “excessively fearful,” she explained: “Standing there for an hour in my schoolgirl’s mourning dress … trying, without artifice, interlude, or trickery—with only sixteen popular songs—to please all those strangers who came just for me, seemed such a hopeless task, one at which I was so likely to fail, that before going onstage, I told myself that the organizer was crazy.” Once onstage, she went into a trance; the hour passed quickly. She ended with “Le Fanion de la légion,” its vision of the besieged garrison that holds out against the enemy stirring thoughts that France too would one day “cry victory.” The audience gave her a standing ovation.
“Edith Piaf has more astonishments in store,” Paris-Soir wrote of this concert. “She possesses the best quality an artist can have—sincerity.” This tribute from a newspaper with strong collaborationist leanings may have made her feel that she need not worry about the censors.
For the rest of the year, Piaf performed without incident at L’Aiglon, the A.B.C., and the Folies Belleville—until December 6, opening night of the A.B.C.’s winter revue. Edith went onstage after a singer whose servile attack on the English, intended to please the German officers present, unsettled the audience. She began with “Le Fanion.” The audience held their breath as she evoked the legionnaires’ defiance of “les salopards” (“the bastards”); when she turned to face the Germans, the crowd erupted in condemnatory whistles—the song’s iconic flag again stirring thoughts of victory over the swastika. The next day, the Kommandantur ordered her to remove “Le Fanion” from her repertoire.
All forms of cultural expression were now being vetted by the Germans. Giving in to the pressure for self-censorship, the Society of Authors, Composers, and Editors of Music (SACEM), which handled song rights, blocked disbursals to Jewish composers even before the Germans could tell them to do so. Works by Jewish songwriters were also verboten on the radio. Three of Piaf’s songs were prohibited: “Mon Légionnaire” and “Le Fanion” for their references to a unit of the French army, and “L’Accordéoniste” because its author was Jewish. (By then Emer had gone into hiding.) When Edith’s friend Pierre Hiégel, the popular radio host, accidentally played her 1936 satire “Il n’est pas distingué,” listeners were stunned to hear her intone, “I can’t stand Hitler.” The censors took note but did nothing.
Though Piaf detested the occupiers, she had to go on singing—to earn her keep, and because she could not do otherwise. “On the one hand,” her friend Henri Contet explained, “she felt an instinctive hatred of the Krauts.… On the other, she was hardly bothered by the Occupation.” Her loathing for the Germans kept her from making the compromises that would call other singers’ careers into question; she was relatively undisturbed, because the occupiers meant to maintain the appearance of normality by distracting the French with uncontroversial entertainment.
At the same time, the situation changed dramatically for Jewish Parisians. Starting in the autumn of 1940, the Germans issued a series of decrees defining Jewish identity and ordering all Jews to register at the Préfecture de Police. Overnight, Jewish shops were marked with signs indicating their owners’ origins; soon many business and cultural activities, ranging from banking to attendance at the Conservatory of Music, were verboten for Jews.
Through the spring of 1941, Edith kept busy with appearances in Paris and the provinces. Feeling the need to refresh her repertoire, she missed her composers, who either had been called