Les Zazous

Pretty much everyone has heard of the jazz-loving teens in Hitler's Germany known as the Swing Youth, who developed a subversive Anglo-American sensibility and style in diametric opposition to National Socialism. Likewise, those who are interested in this period and in subcultural and counter-cultural forms of resistance to the Third Reich are probably also familiar with the Edelweiss Pirates. But far less well known are the French equivalent of die Swingjugend, called les Zazous.

The Zazous were a group of mostly Parisian based hipsters living under German occupation during World War II who chose to defy their Nazi overlords and display their nonconformity by wearing outlandish clothes, carrying umbrellas, growing their hair long, and dancing to jazz, swing, and bebop.

Whilst boys favoured wearing oversized, often knee-length box jackets, peg leg trousers, and suede brothel creepers, the girls wore short pleated skirts, striped stockings and shoes with thick wooden soles. Often the girls would bleach their hair, worn in long curls, and paint their lips bright red. Both sexes also had a penchant for sunglasses, whatever the weather.

When not hanging about on the terrace of the Pam Pam café drinking cocktails, the Zazous often frequented vegetarian restaurants and ordered grated carrot salads. If there's a subtle political gesture in this choice of lunch, I have to confess it escapes me. But their decision to voluntarily wear the yellow star of David, in solidarity with French Jews, was certainly an overt and courageous sign of dissident behaviour in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and silent complicity with the Nazis (if not active collaboration) was shamefully often the norm.  

And for this, one cannot help affording them great affection and respect. Perhaps they didn't risk their lives in the same manner as their German counterparts, but they were nevertheless detested and targeted by the Nazis and members of the Vichy government who saw them as a threat to the moral well-being of the nation.

Articles published by the authorities at the time, branded them as decadent, work-shy, anti-patriotic egoists and, after 1942, les Zazous were often attacked and beaten on the streets by pro-fascist groups, or arrested and sent to labour in the fields and farms of the French countryside. 

Disappointingly - though not surprisingly - members of the official French Resistance movement had little time for the Zazous either and afforded them no support or protection. In fact, the communists and other ultra-leftists dismissed the Zazous in much the same terms and for many of the same reasons as the fascists.

But, despite such hostility from both ends of the political spectrum, they still continued to dance, to dress-up, and make their daring and dandyish revolt into style.