History of the Louvre Chapter 10: The Louvre under Siege
WW2 threatens the destruction of the Louvre and its masterpieces
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The following is an excerpt from our History of the Louvre series. Get access to the entire History of the Louvre series exclusively on our Patreon.
Chapter 10: The Louvre Under Siege
The conflict that engulfed the world between 1914 to 1918 was supposed to be The War to End All Wars. Internationalists hoped to create a community of nations, centered around The League of Nations & open economic communities, which would ensure peaceful coexistence. The Great Depression, Japanese imperialism & the rise of fascism in Europe rapidly disillusioned the world. As early as October 1932, director of national museums Henri Verne ordered Louvre curators to come up with a list of works to evacuate in case of a large-scale European war. This proved incredibly far-sighted, as the Nazi Party had only won a plurality three months prior & Adolf Hitler would not become dictator for another 6 months. Verne was not the only person predicting deadly future conflicts. That same month the League of Nations passed a resolution declaring that monuments & art should be conserved. Furthermore, they declared it illegal for belligerent nations to export art or artifacts of those under military rule. The days of one country invading another and seizing their cultural heritage were over. Or so the world hoped.
These lofty ideals were quickly challenged during the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936. During the war moderates, democrats, syndicalists, socialists, anarchists and communists fought on the side of the Republic, while royalists, conservatives, Catholic reactionaries and fascists formed the Nationalist force. The war took on an international element as the Soviet Union supported the communist faction while the fascist states of Italy, Germany and Portugal supported the nationalists. The French government did not want to commit itself to a major war, especially as Germany was rearming, and so it joined 27 nations who pledged not to intervene. However, this did not prevent French people from getting involved and roughly 10,000 joined the International Brigades to fight for Spanish democracy. Ultimately, their efforts failed, and in the bloody conflict half a million Spanish refugees entered France.
In addition to the human cost, the war threatened Spain’s great art. As Madrid came under fire the leaders of the Museo Nacional del Prado moved their most famous artworks, first to Valencia, then Girona. By 1938 Catalonia came under direct threat of Nationalist invasion, and the curators decided that the art was no longer safe within the country. They contacted the French government and agreed that the assistant director of national museums, Jacques Jaujard, would oversee the removal of Spain’s most prized treasures through France and to the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva. Jaujard had quite a task in front of him, as moving artworks is not a simple task. The art must be catalogued and placed in proper storage to prevent damage. Paintings had to be taken out of frames, marbles and statues often removed from pedestals. Large paintings or statues measuring 4 meters or more often needed custom boxes. The objects needed to be moved carefully to prevent blunt force trauma. Paintings also needed to be kept dry to prevent damage from the humidity. The objects needed space and sometimes padding to prevent damage from the jostling that is part of every train ride. Jaujard assessed each problem and applied himself with energy & bureaucratic gusto. He led the successful removal of Spanish art across France and into Switzerland, in what was one of the greatest evacuations of art in history. His professionalism in the face of an unprecedented and difficult task saw him elevated from assistant director to director of national museums in 1939 and director of the Louvre in 1940. Moreover, it gave him valuable experience for what was to come. During World War 2, Jacques Jaujard would ensure the safety of the Louvre’s masterpieces and lead the most successful preservation of art during wartime in all of human history.
Since Jaujard is going to be one of the most important figures in the Louvre’s history, it’s worth detailing how he became the exact right man for the job. Jaujard was born in a small commune just outside Nanterre in 1895, though he moved to Paris to attend high school. When the First World War broke out he joined the military, but quickly fell ill and was dismissed from service. After his dismissal he became a journalist. From 1922 to 1924 he was an assistant to Paul Painlevé, a leading socialist politician. From 1924-1930 Jaujard became Painlevé’s chief of staff, at a time when the left-wing Cartel des gauches dominated the government. From there he became a functionary in the office of national museums, before advancing up the ranks to assistant director in 1933 and director in December 1939. For 17 years before World War 2 he served as a bureaucrat and administrator during a high-stress period in France’s history. Since 1929 the Great Depression ravaged the country. During the 1930s the far-right and far-left regularly engaged in street fighting against the other. On 6 February 1934 far-right leagues marched on the National Assembly but were dispersed when police opened fire on them. While this was probably just a demonstration of force, many on the left believed that the right-wing had been preparing a Mussolini-style March on Rome, or a Hitleresque Beer Hall Putsch to overthrow the government and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. Between The Great War and the turbulent Interwar period, Jaujard learned how to lead and operate effectively during a crisis.
While the Spanish Civil War provided French officials in the Ministry of Culture with vital experience in protecting art, events in the east convinced them that they needed to prepare for the worst. In 1935 Germany reintroduced conscription in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Then in 1936 Hitler sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Locarno. The Fuhrer really wasn’t a fan of international treaties. While these actions drew international condemnation, no nation was prepared to fight Germany for arming and relocating troops within its own borders.
In August 1937 education minister Jean Zay ordered plans drawn up to protect heritage sites across France in case of war. Thinking back on the destruction of Reims Cathedral & recognizing the devastating power of bombers as demonstrated in the Spanish Civil War, he claimed that “no bit of territory may be considered safe from aerial attacks.” Officials developed plans to relocate moveable objects, including dismantling stained-glass windows at cathedrals.
In March 1938 German troops occupied Austria and incorporated it into Germany. In response, in July, King George VI of Britain and French President Albert Lebrun met in Paris as part of a symbolic reaffirmation of the Franco-British alliance. The two made an official state visit to the Louvre where Jaujard led them through the museum. In September Jaujard and René Huyghe, the Louvre’s head conservator, ordered the Louvre’s employees to practice storing and evacuating the artworks & artifacts. That October Germany annexed German-speaking areas in Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, which Hitler claimed was, “the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe,” a line that fooled no one. Meanwhile education minister Zay oversaw the dissimilation of sandbags, fire extinguishers and other necessary items to protect history sites. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that under Jaujard, Huyghe and Zay the national museums of France were better prepared for the outbreak of war than the military.
In March 1939 Germany annexed Czechoslovakia. In response, France and Britain looked to Hitler’s next target: Poland. The two nations agreed to defend Poland in case of invasion and warned that a violation of its territory would trigger a war. On 23 August the Soviet and German foreign ministers negotiated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which guaranteed the other side’s neutrality in the event of a conflict. Meanwhile German troops massed along the Polish border. It was clear to all that another major European war was about to break out.
Jaujard did not waste a minute. On 25 August 1939 he ordered the closure of the Louvre. In a single night workers removed 800 paintings from their frames and began the difficult task of cataloguing, boxing and removing all of the museum’s masterpieces. It was a slow and arduous task, as workers from the museum, the École du Louvre and employees of local stores carefully removed the masterpieces and placed them into softwood crates. Paintings with too fragile a varnish had to be moved upright. Larger paintings such as Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, and David’s Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon, were rolled up. As usual the Mona Lisa got special treatment and was moved in an ambulance stretcher. Jaujard employed a system devised by his predecessor Henri Verne of using colored circles to denote the value of each piece. Most containers were painted with a yellow circle. Great works had a green circle, while masterpieces were given a red circle. The Mona Lisa’s container had three red circles.
In just 3 days 200 people packed more than 4,000 masterpieces. In total, 203 vehicles evacuated 1,862 crates of the world’s greatest masterpieces. These works went to the Chateau du Chambord where many where then rerouted to other chateaux which served as storehouses. These chateaux were ideal since they were away from large urban areas, industrial or munitions plants, and often a ways from any road or railway. The buildings had vast amounts of space for storage and were sturdy and thus more resilient to bombings. They were often close to water supplies in case of a fire. They were also not too cold nor too humid to damage delicate paintings. If a property was privately owned the state offered to pay the owners for its use, while curators, guards and their families were allowed to live-on site indefinitely. (Karlsgodt)
One of the most difficult pieces to move was The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, an enormous painting measuring 5 by 7 meters, or roughly 16 by 23 feet. Workers had to move the painting without a crate and place it on the back of a trailer loaned by the Comédie-Française which normally moved stage decorations. The vehicle had barely made it outside Paris when the painting caught on a tramline and caused a power outage at the commune of Versailles. Thinking quickly, workers paused and contacted locals all along their route, asking them to measure or even remove obstacles so that they could transport the oversized works. It is remarkable how many fragile objects were transported safely, as the Louvre’s employees moved both their own collections, those from provincial museums in the north and the stained glass from the windows of the Chartres, Strasbourg, Rouen and Amiens cathedrals. Jaujard’s work was just one part of a national effort to safeguard French art from the ravages of war. Curators across France evacuated hundreds of thousands of objects from national museums and two hundred smaller regional museums, in the largest reallocation of art during the war, perhaps of all time. Public officials even offered to safeguard private collections, often among wealthy Jews, who handed over their art in the belief that the objects would be returned after the war.
The very last object to be evacuated from the Louvre was the Winged Nike of Samothrace. The towering statue standing on the prow of a great ship, weighs 465 kilograms, or 1,025 pounds. Such a work could not be removed in one piece and so workers detached the statue from the pedestal. They then constructed an ad hoc wooden ramp down the long staircase and used a series of pulleys to guide the statue downward. Some museum workers covered their eyes as they were sure the enormous statue would fall over and smash into a thousand pieces. Yet, amazingly, the statue was safely brought down the stairs and moved southwest to join the rest of the masterpieces. That same day, 1 September, 1939 Germany officially declared war against Poland. The Second World War had begun.
The war got off to an explosive start as Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland, but afterwards settled into an 8-month period of calm. The Franco-British generals completely misread the situation, believing that Germany would launch a sudden strike against France. Furthermore, they believed that this would be another defensive war, not realizing that modern technology favored offense as artillery, tanks and air power advanced enough to sufficiently break enemy lines. The Allies prepared to hold off an offensive that never came and amassed 110 divisions on France’s border even while Germany had as little as 23 on theirs. The British called this time ‘The Phoney War,’ the French: Drôle de guerre, and the Germans: Sitzkrieg, or ‘sitting war,’ itself a pun on ‘blitzkrieg’ the German strategy of lightning war. On 10 May 1940 Germany ended the standoff by invading the Low Countries and then rapidly moving into France. The Allies were caught off guard by the Germans’ speed and use of novel military tactics, which fully synergized air power and tanks to break through lines, allowing infantry to spill through, then surround enemy combatants. The Germans caught much of the British forces in the north, who chose to evacuate around Dunkirk. With the British out, the Germans dominating the field, and Italy invading from the southeast French leaders realized that defeat would be inevitable. On 22 June Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice. In just six weeks France had fallen Subsequent negotiations divided the country, as Germany annexed Alsace-Moselle, occupied the north and all territory bordering the Atlantic, leaving a rump state in the south.
The armistice agreement allowed the French government to operate in Paris, even if the city was under German control. Historian Elizabeth Karlsgodt writes, “Pétain hoped to establish his headquarters at the nearby Versailles palace. It was a rather appropriate idea, as one of his aides would later quip that the Marshal ended up consolidating more power than Louis XIV.” However, Versailles was a symbol of opulence, corruption & disconnected aristocracy. Instead, one of the Marshal’s advisers suggested he establish the government at the Louvre. The Louvre was the best of both worlds: it was a massive and extravagant palace, which appealed to the rich and powerful. Yet, it was in the heart of Paris and it was a symbol of popular, democratic values, as both the ‘People’s Museum’ and as a contrast to the destroyed Tuileries. However, Pétain never got to move into the Louvre as Hitler broke the agreement and did not allow the French government to reside in Paris. Instead, the government hastily moved to the spa town of Vichy, which is why the political state ruling the southeastern half of France during this time is known as Vichy France, even though its real name was l’État français, the French State.
On 23 June 1940, the day after the armistice, Adolf Hitler visited Paris. As a failed artist he finally had the opportunity to see the European center of art and aimed to both admire and criticize the city. He reportedly called the Garnier opera house, “the most beautiful theater in the world!” and the Louvre’s façade “one of the most brilliant ideas in architecture.”
During the Battle of France 49 museums were destroyed in the fighting. Yet, most, if not all the art, was saved due to preemptive and intricate planning. This led then-Louvre employee and future curator Germain Bazin to quip, “If the army had prepared equally well, would it have won?” For the time being the art was safe, scattered throughout the Loire and the south. Then, on 30 June 1940 Hitler demanded all art objects be returned to their original locations & “decreed all art objects would be placed under German surveillance as a guarantee for peace negotiations.” (Elizabeth Karlsgodt). All art was placed under the control of the director of the Kunstschutz, Count Franz Wolff Metternich. In case you were wondering the answer is ‘yes,’ this Metternich was part of the Metternich family that included Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian prince who orchestrated the post-Napoleon balance of power known as the Concert of Europe.
When Jaujard first met Metternich on 16 August he was prepared for the worst. The director of the Louvre worried that the Germans would ignore international laws regarding art conservation just as they ignored every other international treaty. Furthermore, Metternich was by all accounts a brilliant man, who served as a professor of art history at the University of Bonn before he was elevated to head the Kunstschutz. Metternich would have made for a powerful enemy. As fate would have it, Metternich turned out to be Jaujard’s greatest ally. When Metternich arrived he appeared relieved to find the Louvre empty because that meant it would be more difficult for his country to seize France’s heritage. The German professor was not a member of the Nazi party, nor was he a fanatical warmonger or even a self-promoter who used his position to seize plunder from occupied territories as so many other top officials would. Metternich was a genuine admirer of art and culture. During his tenure at the Kunstschutz he did everything in his power to keep French art hidden away from the museums and prevent German looting.
Jaujard trusted Metternich so much that he gave him maps with locations of the various chateaux housing the relocated art and artifacts. The head of the Kunstschutz kept German troops from accessing the depots. He provided gasoline for the Louvre’s curators to make trips to the sites to maintain the objects. He oversaw a transfer of art from the Banque de France’s vaults to a less humid storage facility. He even broke the law and allowed French guards to carry weapons at the depots! Finally, he repeatedly rebuffed efforts by top-level Nazi party members to seize artworks. In the early part of the occupation Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to France, claimed that Hitler had issued orders to repatriate Germanic art back to the Fatherland. When Metternich said he would only comply with a written order Abetz backed down. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had a list drawn up of artworks to be confiscated and sent back to Germany, but without official word from the Fuhrer Metternich would not allow him to act on the plan.
On 29 September 1940 the Reich ordered the reopening of the Louvre, which many Germans hoped would be refilled with all the masterworks from the pre-war era. Literally none of the originals were returned. All that was on display were a few plaster copies of statues. Jaujard led a German delegation through the laughably empty museum in what must have been the most awkward tour of the Louvre in history. At the end of the event Metternich gave a speech on the importance of preserving art.
Throughout the war Jaujard and Huyghe coordinated the preservation of artworks, sending out fans during the summer and heaters during winter. They also utilized humidity measuring machines and trained caretakers to deal with fires and other emergencies. In the meantime, curators took advantage of the museum’s emptiness and renovated the structure.
While the Kunstschutz protected French art from the German embassy a third German organization stepped in and successfully began looting art, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR. The ERR was a special unit led by the leader of the Foreign Policy Office of the Nazi Party Alfred Rosenberg, tasked with acquiring art from conquered territories. Rosenberg had Hitler’s official approval to seize art, leaving Metternich and Jaujard with little ability to stop him. France’s only saving grace was Rosenberg’s realization of how unpopular seizing public art would prove. Instead, he went after the private collections of prominent Jews. The greatest of these collections belonged to the Schloss family, which comprised 333 Dutch and Flemish paintings. This collection was world famous among art critics, as it comprised the greatest collection of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces in all of France. When French agents working with the Gestapo uncovered the hiding place of the Schloss collection they transferred the works to Paris. While most of the works fell into German hands, Jaujard was able to purchase 49 of the paintings for the Louvre. While Jaujard and Huyghe later claimed that they only wanted to secure the paintings to give back to the Jewish families, their private correspondence clearly shows that they were hoping to acquire these masterpieces for the Louvre to fill in the gaps in their holdings. Their actions regarding seized Jewish paintings is something of a moral grey area. On the one hand, Jaujard and Huyghe were protecting art from the Nazis. Further, if the Jews were executed in death camps, perhaps it would have been better to keep the art, rather than let it fall into the hands of their murderers. Yet, in hindsight, it seems quite cynical to profit off of injustice. I am not sure whether their actions were right, justifiable, or wrong. Perhaps in such dire circumstances there was no ‘right’ option. Jaujard’s efforts to snatch Jewish-owned art before the Nazis could seize it was a morally ambiguous decision, though it was exactly what one would expect of a Louvre director utterly devoted to his job. In this sense, Jaujard emulated the Louvre’s WWI-era director Paul Jamot, who refused to display the museum’s masterpieces in public, as he wanted to protect the art, even though it meant that many people would be deprived of much needed emotional relief during a traumatic time. Like his predecessor, Jaujard could be cold to the point of cruelty, yet he was fanatically devoted to his mission to protect France’s heritage, making him the perfect man for his time.
When German officials uncovered French artworks they moved them to the Jeu de Paume. Originally built during the Second Empire for elites to play a game that was the pre-cursor to modern-day tennis, it became an art gallery under the Third Republic. During the Occupation the Germans used it as a warehouse for confiscated art. The Jeu de Paume was just down the street from the Louvre and the German workers needed French curators to handle the delicate artworks, which Jaujard lent out so that they could keep an eye on German activities. The most important of these French figures was Rose Valland. At great risk to her own life, she covertly recorded every single painting and where they were sent, a list which included 22,000 objects. The Jeu de Paume became a favorite of Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who visited it twenty times and acquired roughly 600 paintings for his own collection, among them works by Rembrandt, Matisse, Vermeer and Renoir.
Jaujard and Metternich largely succeeded in keeping art in France but this became increasingly difficult as time passed. Metternich’s vigorous defense of France’s heritage became a major irritation to Goebbels who summoned him to Germany in September 1941. The Minister of Propaganda accused him of working with the enemy and demanded he repatriate art immediately. But Metternich turned out to be one hell of a smooth talker, something he probably inherited from his ancestor, and he convinced Goebbels that moving art during wartime was a bad idea. He did have a point. The French State would be furious and probably less likely to collaborate, the Resistance might sabotage or even destroy outgoing trains. Furthermore, Germany was two months into Operation Barbarossa, its war against the Soviet Union. The idea of diverting manpower, however meager, to seize artworks seemed ill-advised. Metternich argued that instead of seizing the art now the German government should wait until they won the war. Their forces would be free to act, the resistance movements could be crushed easily, and subjugated countries would have far less capability of frustrating German ambitions if the large German army was unoccupied with a major war. Goebbels was a brilliant, sociopathic and stubborn man; the fact that Metternich made him change his mind shows that he had unbridled charm and persuasive skill.
No amount of charm could keep Metternich in his position indefinitely. In June 1942 Göring removed him from the Kunstschutz and the old aristocrat returned to his position at Bonn where he resumed teaching. As luck would have it, Metternich’s assistant Bernhard von Tieschowitz replaced him and continued his work of foiling German art seizures. Yet, the frustrated Nazi leadership grew tired of the constant excuses and looted local art museums. One of the greatest treasures they took was the famous Bayeux Tapestry commemorating the Norman invasion of England. Then on 2 August they took The Adoration of the Lamb of God, a national treasure entrusted to France by Belgium and attributed to the van Eyck brothers. The Germans had done so with permission from the collaborationist prime minister Pierre Laval and education minister Abel Bonnard, both of which looked to Germany as a model for what they wanted to do with France. In response, Jaujard wrote to the central government, vehemently protesting the seizure. The pro-German government was furious. Bonnard wanted to fire Jaujard, but the Louvre’s staff were devoutly loyal to him and the government feared that if they fired the director his underlings would all resign. Instead, Jaujard was simply reprimanded for stepping out of line.
On 8 November 1942 the Allies launched Operation Torch, a large-scale assault by an American and British-led force to take over Northwest Africa. The operation was a resounding success, as the Allies defeated and captured over 100,000 Axis forces. Realizing which way the war was turning, the Vichy French forces that controlled North Africa as colonial territory switched sides. The sudden and dramatic Allied victory terrified the German high command. Under the Fuhrer’s orders, German troops entered Vichy France on 10 November with the objective of securing the southern coast. Now all of metropolitan France was under occupation. But even at this dark moment there was still great hope. The Soviet Union was holding the line, albeit at tremendous cost. The Allies were rolling across North Africa. There was talk of opening a second front in Europe in the west. Resistance movements across Europe sprung up as people believed that Nazi Germany was facing inevitable defeat. Jaujard and his fellows only had to a protect the art for a while longer.
However, Jaujard’s role was just as dangerous, as before, if not moreso. In late 1942 officials ordered Jaujard to fill out ancestry lists of his entire staff. Given the frequent round-ups of Jews that were occurring Jaujard knew that the German government aimed to send them east for forced labor or extermination. Jaujard did as he was told, though only after securing passage for his Jewish workers to the south where they were safer and could go into hiding. Another problem the museum director faced was securing the depots. If France was to become a warzone, the chateaux housing them could be targets for aerial bombardment or used as forts for infantry. Thus, he moved what art he could to more rural areas, paying particular attention to Egyptian artifacts and the Mona Lisa, which moved multiple times during the war. Jaujard was unmoved by the danger as the Louvre’s director believed the war would be won and did everything he could to support the Allies. During the war Jaujard used his apartments in the Louvre to store arms for the Resistance and even hid one member from the Gestapo. He was in contact with the Allies since 1942, telling them which chateaux were occupied by Germans and which were depots for their works.
On 5 January 1944 officials at the Kunstschutz ordered the French government to return the dispersed art to Paris. Minister of Education Abel Bonnard agreed and relayed the demand to Jaujard. Now, the Louvre’s director had the combined weight of the French and German governments pressing against him. Jaujard maintained his sang froid and emphatically protested that it was not safe to return the artwork. He claimed he did not have the staff to properly sort them and if they were moved by train they could be targets for bombardment or Resistance attacks. But Bonnard was determined to bring the art back to the Louvre and made an agreement with the military governor Heinrich von Stülpnagel whereby German troops would escort the masterpieces. Jaujard remained firm and even convinced an important official at the Kunstschutz to support his decision. Ultimately, the French government backed down.
During this time Alexandre Parodi, who succeeded Jean Moulin as the most important leader of the French Resistance, contacted Jaujard. Parodi told him that the Resistance prioritized securing France’s artworks and wanted to know where they were. To facilitate communications between the resistance and the Louvre, Parodi informed Jaujard that he was sending his personal secretary with the codename ‘Mozart’ to meet him. Mozart turned out to be none other than Jeanne Boitel, a French movie star who had appeared in 30 films, including those by legendary director Jean Renoir. Yet, she gave up her career to join the Resistance. Boitel and the married Jaujard very quickly became lovers, tied to each other for their passion for saving France’s heritage, mutual patriotism and the realization that every breath might be their last.
On 6 June 1944 the Allies launched the largest amphibious assault in history, as American, British and Canadian forces established beachheads in Normandy. By the end of the month nearly 900,000 Allied troops entered France, spreading out in all directions as they rapidly liberated the country. With German resistance crumbling at every turn local Resistance groups took the offensive. Even as people cheered inevitable victory, this remained the most dangerous time for French art, as the chateaux were in danger of attacks by the Germans, Allies and Resistance. Workers at the various chateaux cut the grass to read ‘Musée Louvre’ so Allied bombers would pass by without dropping their loads.
Shortly after the Normandy landings René Huyghe had a tense stand-off at the chateau de Montal, where he was stationed. This stand-off was not between the Louvre guards against Germans but the guards against local maquis. The maquis wanted to seize the chateau and use it as a base to launch attacks against the local SS division Das Reich, which was then moving northward. Huyghe stayed true to his mission as the Louvre’s curator and told them they could not have the chateau. As a captain in the resistance group Forces françaises de l'Intérieur Huyghe persuaded them to leave. On 9 June Das Reich entered the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane. There they gathered up 642 men, women and children and massacred them all. Huyghe could not have known that the SS division was planning a massacre. Even if he did it is not clear the maquis could have prevented it had they been allowed to operate from Montal. Huyghe later justified his actions by claiming that if he gave up the chateau then the Germans would have simply changed the location of their atrocity from Oradour-sur-Glane to Montal, where they would have destroyed not only innocent lives, but great French art, including the Mona Lisa. Like Jaujard, Huyghe was utterly devoted to his mission, even though it meant he prioritized saving art over his fellow Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.
As the Allies rapidly moved towards Paris the ERR wanted to evacuate with as many masterpieces as they could stuff into a train before the inevitable liberation of the capital. On 2 August they crammed 148 crates containing 967 paintings onto train cars set for the station at Aubervilles outside Paris. From her position at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland informed Jaujard of the plan, which he in turn related to Resistance fighters. Logistical problems, exacerbated by trainworkers’ strikes bought the Resistance enough time to derail two trains further along the track, stranding the shipment, which was later secured by the French army.
On 12 August 300 German soldiers launched a punitive raid on the commune of Valençay. The forces approached the château, apprehended the guards and searched for maquis. They forced the Louvre workers outside and had them lie facedown on the lawn as they sprayed the windows with bullets. A fire broke out in the château and one of the workers asked the Germans if they wanted to go down in history as the men responsible for destroying the Venus de Milo. A commandant replied that the workers could put out the fire but when they stood up the Germans started shooting at them, killing one. The Germans eventually allowed French firefighters to put out the blaze, due to the fact that the House of Talleyrand-Périgord, which had owned the chateau, had been afforded German nobility, and they did not want to destroy ‘German’ property.
As the German military machine collapsed Adolf Hitler became desperate. Filled with despair and rage he ordered then-military governor General Dietrich von Choltitz to place explosives all across Paris, concentrating on railways and cultural landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. His order was to leave Paris a smoldering heap of debris. Thankfully, Von Choltitz disobeyed the Fuhrer. His forces needed all the ammunition they could to resist the Allied forces and could not spare anything on destroying landmarks. Furthermore, the maquis severely weakened the German hold on Paris, so that even if they had wanted to enact Hitler’s mad plan they probably did not have the ability to do so. After the war von Choltitz claimed that the order to destroy Paris convinced him that Hitler had gone insane, and he refused to do so for his love of French culture. Regardless of the reason, the City of Lights was spared.
On 19 August forces commanded by French general Philippe Leclerc began the Liberation of Paris. Given the Louvre’s strategic location there was regular fighting outside the palace between the Germans on the one side and the Allies and resistors on the other. On the 25 August von Choltitz officially surrendered the city. After four years under foreign occupation, France’s capital was free. Overwhelming relief spread throughout the city and Jaujard placed a Tricolor flag above the Louvre. While the French colors waved above the museum, the Allies held 600 German prisoners of war in the palace’s courtyard. A parade marched down the Rue de Rivoli as Parisians celebrated their liberation.
Joy turned to horror as a few German holdouts stationed in buildings along the road fired upon the crowd. The parade turned into a terrified stampede. When the fleeing crowd passed by the Louvre the German POWs feared that the Parisians might kill them as a form of mob justice. The soldiers burst out of their makeshift prison and ran through the mostly empty Louvre. Yet, there was nowhere they could run. The fleeing Germans were eventually caught, including two who cleverly hid in the sarcophagus of Ramesses III. In the midst of the chaos a resistance leader grabbed Jaujard and accused him of having a hand in the Germans’ attempted escape through the Louvre. He then forced Jaujard out of the building and into the streets at gunpoint. Ironically, while the Germans had not been in danger of mob justice, Jaujard was. As he was marched through the streets a fellow Louvre employee and Resistance member demanded he be released. Jaujard had survived both the Germans and his fellow French who were eager to enact revenge.
Throughout 1944 the German forces were steadily pushed back in the west and south by the Western Allies and in the east by the Soviet Union. On 30 April 1945, as Berlin was about to fall to Soviet forces, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the head. On 2 May Admiral Karl Donitz surrendered Berlin. On 7 May German representatives signed an unconditional surrender in Reims with the Western Allies, then another the following day with the Soviet Union. The news of German defeat went public on the 8 May 1945. The most brutal war in human history was over in Europe and would end in the Pacific a few months later.
When the guns fell silent the survivors began rebuilding. After four years of careful moving and restoration all of the evacuated art and artifacts were returned undamaged. Jaujard and his associates pulled off the most successful defense of a nation’s heritage in war in human history. Their pre-war planning, dedication and expertise was remarkable. Moreover, they had help along the way as locals assisted the beleaguered Louvre workers as best they could and importantly retained their silence about the locations of the masterpieces. Likewise, the resistance and military units respected French art, sometimes even putting it above the well-being of their fellows, albeit at tragic cost. Even the Vichy government, at times, assisted in the preservation of art. France prided itself as the center of European art for centuries and invested heavily in culture. Under Vichy the arts budget actually expanded on paper, though the devaluation of the franc meant that it declined in real terms. The Vichy government determined to support the arts as part of the post-defeat ethos. France had been humiliated on the battlefield and their military severely restricted during the initial occupation before it was outrightly disbanded in 1942 with the total occupation. With their martial glory in the mud, the French government sought to assert itself as the dominant cultural force and maintain the country’s pride. The French people’s utter devotion to preserving its heritage, combined with Allied intervention, a few sympathetic Germans, and a healthy dose of luck meant that France safeguarded its masterpieces better than any other occupied country during the war.
Now let us turn to the leaders of said conservation and detail their fates. During the Liberation of Paris Rose Valland had a similar experience as Jaujard, when authorities arrested her on suspicion of being a collaborationist due to her work at the Jeu de Paume. Thankfully, Valland had extensive ties to the Resistance, whose members vouched for her and she was released. Afterwards, Jaujard contacted the American Captain James Rorimer of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program, whose mission was to protect art in liberated territories. Realizing how vital her information was, the French military made her a lieutenant, then a captain, and sent her throughout Germany to find the stolen artworks. A 2013 French Senate report claimed that she located roughly 60,000 artifacts and works of art. She even managed to recover the Adoration of the Lamb of God, which was hidden in a salt mine. Valland and her associates also uncovered the dispersed paintings seized from French Jews, which the government returned in full to surviving members of their families. Jaujard joined the effort and handed over the 49 masterpieces the Louvre secured from the Schloss family. While in Germany Valland testified at the Nuremburg Trials against Goering for his theft of French heritage. For her work in recovering countless masterpieces she was awarded the Legion of Honor and the Medal of the Resistance from France, and the Medal of Freedom from the United States. When she returned to her home country in 1953 Valland was recognized as a national hero and appointed conservator of the Musées Nationaux. In 1961 she wrote a wartime memoir Le front de l’art, The Art Front. She retired in 1968 though remained part of the Parisian art community. She fell in love with Joyce Helen Heer, the British interpreter at the United States Embassy, and the two lived together in Paris until Heer’s death in 1977. Valland passed away on 18 September 1980 at the age of 81.
Shortly after the war ended Jaujard corresponded with the Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, General Charles de Gaulle. He informed de Gaulle that Metternich and his successor Tieschowitz did everything in their power to protect French art, putting the well-being of Europe above the Third Reich’s orders, their own careers and even their own well-being. De Gaulle rewarded the former heads of the Kunstschutz with the Legion of Honor, which, is a truly remarkable feat when you think about it; two German officers winning the highest award for their military service by one of the countries their nation occupied during the most brutal war in human history is certainly not something you would expect. After the war Metternich became an internationally-recognized art hero and expert who served as director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, a joint German-Italian research institute in Rome from 1953 until his retirement in 1962, upon which he returned to Germany. He died in Cologne in 1978 at the age of 84.
The Louvre’s wartime curator René Huyghe was also awarded the Legion of Honor, among other awards. In 1950 he became a professor at the Collège de France. On 4 November 1966 the Italian city of Venice was devastated by an unusually high tide. In response, UNESCO launched a global effort to restore the historic city with Huyghe acting as president of the commission. That year he won the prestigious Erasmus Prize for his contributions to European culture. Huyghe served in various artistic positions for the next few decades, even trying to create television programs, though these all fell through. Huyghe died in Paris on 5 February 1997. He was 90 years old.
After the war the French state honored Jaujard with the Medal of the Resistance and the Legion of Honor. He was then promoted to Director General of the Arts and Letters. In 1946 Jeanne Boitel became pregnant with his child. Jaujard divorced his wife and married Boitel, who bore him a son. While Jaujard headed government cultural affairs, Boitel returned to acting in film and theater. In 1959 Jaujard was named Secretary General of the Ministry of Culture, a position he held until 1966. The following year he died of a pulmonary embolism on 22 June 1967. He was 71 years old.
During World War 2 up to 70 million people lost their lives, often horrifically. While most people know about the human toll, far less attention has been given to their artistic creations. The things that make up a people’s identity and culture are also important, and these were often another tragic victim of the war, particularly in Eastern Europe. Poland in particular suffered incredible losses. Between the initial invasion of the Germans and Soviets, the Holocaust, which primarily took place in the country, brutal crackdowns on the Polish resistance, then the Soviet reinvasion, the country was devastated like few others. In 1992 the Polish Ministry of Culture estimated that 70% of Polish heritage was destroyed between 1939-1945. France did not suffer as much violence as Poland; few countries did. While the Nazis decried Eastern Europeans as degenerate Untermensch they respected French people and their culture, to a point. This, combined with relatively less fighting and the brave efforts of the French people meant that the overwhelming majority of French physical culture was saved from the greatest threat it ever faced.
For more information on the Louvre see the following sources:
The Louvre: The History, The Collections, The Architecture
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