Suite Francaise

France entered the Second World War on September 3, 1939, alongside the United Kingdom, in response to the German leader Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Allies’ recognition that he had an imperialist mission. Hitler’s side, the Axis powers, initially had the upper hand in the war. The Battle of France, fought between May 10 and June 22, 1940, marked the beginning of the German occupation of Northern and Western France, which lasted officially until December 1944. The Vichy republic of the Southern and Eastern areas of France remained nominally under French rule until November 11, 1942, when the Axis powers invaded it.

The first two books of Némirovsky’s Suite address the immediate aftermath of the Nazi invasion and occupation. In Storm in June, she portrays the confusion surrounding the news of the German invasion, as her Parisian characters flee the capital in search of rural safety. After weeks on the road, facing the shortages of food and fuel that occur when a country is at war, they realize that the German invasion of France has advanced more than they anticipated. The characters’ eventual return to Paris signals an attempt to return to normal and a reestablishment of some sort of status quo, as they embark on a new normality as occupied citizens.

Life as an occupied citizen is the focus of Dolce, which is set in Bussy, a suburb to the east of Paris. Whereas Storm in June is full of displacement and violence, Dolce depicts the new order, bounded by curfews, mutual curiosity between invader and invaded, and varying degrees of admiration and respect. Némirovsky shows that it is only the most fervently ideological, like Madame Angellier, the aggrieved mother of a French prisoner of war, or returning soldier Benoît Sabarie, who can consistently regard the occupying force they encounter daily as a dehumanized enemy. The rest of the village’s citizens begin to individualize their oppressors and even collaborate with them to get ahead. For example, children accept the Germans’ sweets, the aristocratic Montmorts feel relieved that their presence suppresses class struggle, and the young women are attracted to them as enticing young men with an air of exoticism. Collaboration with the occupying Germans would be a controversial topic in postwar France, with the most obvious collaborators seeing their lives and status at risk.

Jewishness is barely mentioned in The Suite—except at the beginning of Dolce in the form of the occupying forces’ posters about “the detestable tyranny of the Jews” (200). However, Némirovsky was reduced from a Parisian literary celebrity to a stateless person of Jewish descent who was forced to wear a gold star on her clothes. She applied this experience in her unflinching portrayal of the ways that French people made each other the enemy. As Bruno tells Lucile in Dolce, the occupying army were faced with enough denouncements by French people of each other to ensure that “everyone in the region would be in prison” (319). Thus, in The Suite’s first two books, Némirovsky is most interested in the division and conflict between French people.