Paris under Lockdown

Never were we freer than under the German occupation.

— Jean Paul Sartre

The exhibition 1940: Parisian Exodus, now on view at the Musée de la Libération de Paris, marks the 80th anniversary of the invasion of the city by Hitler's army.

On June 5, 1940, from positions along the Belgian frontier, the Germans advanced against France's Maginot Line. Hitler's objectives: the capture of Paris and the annihilation of France's government. Panicked by the onslaught, two million French men, women and childen—three-quarters of Paris's population—left the capital in a harried 10-day flight that journalists came to call the "Parisian Exodus."

The exhibition has prompted many Parisians to compare 1940's Exodus and the subsequent German occupation of the city to today's Covid-19 pandemic. Both saw mass flights by civilians, followed by severe lockdowns.

One Parisian who witnessed the German occupation was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In an article in The Atlantic, Sartre wrote in 1944, "Never were we freer than under the German occupation." Living “nakedly”—experiencing isolation, hardship, and continuous police surveillance—brought to light Parisians' authentic freedom, Sartre said. "At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death."

Contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini, one of the Parisians who likens the current lockdown to the German occupation, believes "the pandemic offers an opportunity to relearn what it means to be free."

Writing in Psyche, Baggini says Covid-19 has driven home for Parisians the fact that, normally, we're trapped. We do most things "wantonly"—on a whim or out of habit; or due to peer-pressure; or because we've been manipulated by media and marketers. 

"Very little of what we do every day is the result of a considered decision," Baggini writes. "Being able to do what we want without constraint, but also without thought, is the lowest and least valuable form of freedom."

But the lockdown has taught Parisians, constrained and facing death, to consider their every choice.

"When my options shrunk and any activity required more planning, the choices I made became more authentic because they had to be more thought-through," Baggini says. "This capacity for reflective decision-making is the highest and most valuable form of freedom a human being can have."

In short, Parisians were never freer than now.