House of Fragile Things: How France Betrayed Jews

On June 14, 1940, when the German army finally arrived in Paris, Béatrice de Camondo and her husband, Léon Reinach, two wealthy collectors whose families had already left major bequests to France, were still at home in their sprawling apartment on the outskirts of the city. By then, Paris was largely deserted: shops boarded shut, the streets eerily silent. The collapse of the French Republic happened so quickly that it defied comprehension, even among those who were in the room when it officially expired and who watched France became an authoritarian dictatorship with a show of hands.