ALAMY^(CHATEAUDE^CHAZERON,^STREETSIGN,STAMP)Assassinated on this spot, shot 16 times by
French soldiers loyal to the Nazis.
His name was Georges Mandel. If you
live in Paris, you probably know his name
from street signs on the elegant avenue
that bears his name, which extends from
the Place du Trocadéro toward the Bois
de Boulogne. You probably would not
know that he was a resistance fighter who
struggled to save France from being taken
over by the Nazis and who was gunned
down for his efforts in this place where
today Parisians picnic on buttered bread
and wine.
I knew that street, and I saw the story
about his painting, and now I’m standing
in a forest, trying to get closer to under-
standing why the man on the concrete block was assassinated, why
the return of his looted artwork 75 years later made the news, and
why any of this matters.T
he Bibliothèque Nationale de France is a complex of mono-
lithic glass towers that line the Seine near the eastern edge of
the city. You book in advance the items you want to see, and
they land with a thud in your cubicle. On the subject of Georges Man-
del there are some good biographies, some bad biographies (one of
which was written by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy), and
a host of newspaper clippings on microfiche that are barely legible.
What struck me most, however, was a memoir by the essayist Emman-
uel Berl, one of Mandel’s closest friends, that was a best-seller after
the war but has long since faded into historians’ footnotes. It brings
you closer to an understanding of the man than anything else does.
Mandel was actually born Louis Georges Rothschild, in 1885, to
an affluent Alsatian Jewish family in the suburbs of western Paris.
He dropped “Rothschild” when, at 21, he became a reporter for
L’A u r o r e, a left-wing newspaper owned by Georges Clemenceau, who
later became France’s prime minister and the lead negotiator onthe Treaty of Versailles. Mandel thought
the name Rothschild was too identifi-
ably Jewish and, moreover, too Roth-
schild; it suggested that he belonged to
the pan-European banking dynasty that
was so often the subject of anti-Semitic
invective and outlandish conspiracy the-
ories. So he decided on his middle name
followed by his mother’s maiden name:
Georges Mandel.
Berl, a lifelong confidant, was not sur-
prised at this attempt at reinvention. “He
suffered, I think, from his unattractive
physique,” Berl wrote. “More small than
big, more fat than thin, stooped from the
behind, bulging from the front, his fleshy
face with features too sharp seemed to
combine the unfortunate traits of intensity and idleness.”
What appeared most consequential in Mandel’s understanding
of himself was not so much his birth name as his Alsatian identity.
Alsace-Lorraine, a region in eastern France, has passed back and
forth between France and Germany for centuries, and its culture
has always been a curious pastiche of the two countries: kugelhopf
in the cafés, Voltaire in the schools. Before the Second World War it
was also home to a sizable Jewish community that had had to make
a choice about its future a couple of generations earlier. In 1871, after
the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army took control of the region
from the French, and citizens of the famously hybrid enclave were
allowed to choose which nationality they would keep.
Few of those who chose France embraced the cause more strongly
than the Alsatian Jews; moving from Strasbourg and Mulhouse to
Paris, many became crucial contributors to the cultural ferment of
the French fin-de-siècle. Most of all, they were patriots.
These were Mandel’s people.
Pierre Birnbaum, one of France’s most revered historians, has great
tufts of graying hair and kind eyes. He lives in a sprawling, book-
strewn cave on a high floor of a gray, unadorned apartment buildingAfter fleeing Paris
for Bordeaux, Mandel
attempted to escape from
the German forces by
going to North Africa. He
was arrested in Morocco
in 1940 and transported to
the Château de Chazeron,
in central France. Below: A
dispatch from the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency about
Mandel’s imprisonment by
the Vichy government.“You fear for me
because I am a Jew,”
Mandel said, refusing
to flee France.
“Well, it’s just
because I am a Jew
that I will not go
tomorrow.”