Chanel's Riviera

 

Anne DeCourcy, “Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival In Peace and War, 1930 - 1944,” St. Martins Press, 2019, 276 pp.

The Cote d’Azur along the Riviera in 1938 was a world of wealth, luxury, and extravagance, inhabited by a characters included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joseph P. Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, Colette, the Mitfords, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, and Somerset Maugham. At the center of it all was Coco Chanel (b. 1883), while at her villa, La Pausa, made it the ultimate place to be. I enjoyed and appreciated this book as it provided a comprehensive insight into how the elite dealt with the coming war.  In a matter of months France surrendered to Germany. 

Pg. 29:  Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born on 19 August 1883, to unmarried parents.  Her absentee father was an itinerant peddler, her mother died when she was eleven, upon which her father took his three daughters to an orphanage for girls.  Here he left them, and vanished forever from their lives.  Their youngest brothers aged nine and five were treated even more harshly, placed with peasant families to be regarded, as was customary, virtually as slave labor.  The orphanage was strict, secluded, monastic and monochrome.  The girls wore black skirts and white blouses and were3 closely chaperoned on days when they emerged into public view.  When she was eighteen she found work as a seamstress and also sang in a cabaret-concert to earn extra money. 

Pg. 128:  From 16 May 1940 to the day the Germans entered Paris on 14 June about two million people left Paris with as many of their belongings as they could transport.

Pg. 161:  The Vichy government, by 569 votes to 80 gave all government powers to Petain on 10 July and ushered in a regime that was authoritarian and rigidly Catholic in its approach.  Relentless persecution of the Jews began within a week with the denaturalization law, which resulted in the withdrawl of citizenship from 15,000 people, 40 percent of them Jews.

Pg. 166fff:  Along with her deep and abiding love for France, Chanel was vociferously antisemitic, even though some of her best friends and clients were Jewish.  When her competitor the Wertheimer family had to flee France to escape the antisemitism and left the secret Chanel #5 formula behind, Chanel saw this as an opportunity. 

Pg. 205:  In 1938 Mussolini introduced severe anti-Jewish laws in Italy and when he declared war foreign Jewish men in Italy were rounded up and interned.  But the Italians did not deport Jews.

Pg. 265:  In the period between 1944 and 1951, 6,762 people were sentenced to death by the official French courts.  Of those, 3,910 were tried in absentia.  However, only 791 collaborators were actually executed; more were subjected to the degradation nationale punishment, which included the loss of their political, civil and professional rights.  Of the 76,000 French Jews who were deported by the Vichy government, only 3 percent survived.