Paris & Her Secrets

There are plenty of sites that reveal Parisian secrets from the past, insists Amanda Lees .

As much as any of the characters in the book, Paris has her own story to tell. During WW2, her citizens suffered enormously under German occupation, with food being severely restricted and even the leather for their shoes reserved for German troops so they had to make do with wooden clogs. In the face of this, many Parisians were magnificently defiant, especially the women who insisted on dressing and looking their best at all times to show the occupiers they were not cowed.

This took some ingenuity but they were more than up to the task, slashing on red lipstick and curling their hair into elaborate styles while coping with the daily grind of finding enough food to feed their families. Some coped by resorting to what was euphemistically termed ‘horizontal collaboration’ while others worked for the Resistance, transporting weapons across the city hidden in their babies’ prams or shooting German soldiers in broad daylight, as 19 year-old Madeleine Riffaud did, to send a message to their fellow citizens.