The Haunting Of Paris

A familiar name, a recovered painting, that street in Paris: Who was Georges Mandel and what does his murder 75 years ago have to do with France today?

- James McAuley

The story was a story for about five minutes. It was another internet flash, this time about a painting stolen by the Nazis and returned to the rightful heirs—a headline clicked on in midafternoon, shared, forgotten.

I even forget where I saw it. Perhaps a wire report, perhaps a French news site.

And yet here I am, one week later, standing in a forest before a concrete monument. It is five feet tall and nearly as wide, pocked and discolored from years of weather, a block standing in the grass among stubby trees next to a highway about an hour outside Paris. On the monument a man’s face—the face of the man from whom the painting was stolen—is shown in profile, his eyes fixed in the distance, the lapels of his coat casting shadows in relief.

The words below the face tell anyone driving by this forest or biking along its punishing trails that he was killed on the 7th of July, 1944. “Est mort assassiné par les ennemis de la France.”

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 understanding 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.