9
" This horror had many other causes as well. But before going further, we must avoid a misunderstanding: don’t think that it was overwhelming. As I have already said, we lived. What I mean is, we worked, ate, conversed, slept and at times even laughed – even if the laughter was rare. The horror appeared to be outside us, inherent in things. We could distract ourselves for moments at a time, becoming involved in a lecture, a conversation, a love affair; but we’d always return to ourselves and realize that it had not left us. "
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Paris Under the Occupation
10
" Thousands of times the French saw, over the course of those four years, in shop windows, bottles of Saint-Emilion or of Meursault arranged in neat pyramids. They’d approach the window, enticed, only to read on a placard: artificial display. So it was with Paris: it was nothing more than an artificial display. Everything was hollow and empty: the Louvre without paintings, the Chamber without deputies, the Senate without senators, the Lycée Montaigne without students. The artificial existence that the Germans maintained, the theatrical events, the races, the miserable and lugubrious festivals held only in order to show the universe that France was saved because Paris still lived: all were the strange consequence of centralization. "
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Paris Under the Occupation
11
" this petrification of men was so intolerable that many threw themselves into the Resistance to escape it. Strange future, barred by suffering, prison, death, but at least we procured it by our own hands. (If there is an excuse or at least an explanation for collaboration, perhaps we should say that it too was an attempt to give France a future.) But the Resistance was nothing more than an individual solution, and we always knew that; even without it, the English would have won the war, with it they would still have lost if they were going to lose. It had, however, in our eyes, a symbolic valor; and that is why so many resisters had a desperate air about them: always symbols. A symbolic rebellion in a symbolic city: only the torture was real. "
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Paris Under the Occupation