CHANEL & THE RITZ

As we’ve seen here, Deauville was the cornerstone of Gabrielle Chanel’s success from 1913 onwards. Biarritz followed in 1915, then Paris in 1921 – where she had already set up a shop at 21 rue Cambon as a hat designer – with 27, 29 and then the ever-popular 31 Cambon street.

The Chanel revolution is underway. The success of her flowing dresses, which abolish curves, shorten hems and give women freedom of movement during the WWI, endures and outlines an androgynous feminine silhouette that would become all the rage between the wars.

At the same time, Gabrielle Chanel becomes a socialite, renowned for her dry and often cruel sense of humor, her unfailing patronage of struggling artists, and her lovers, who are almost always from the European nobility – the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch of Russia, the Duke of Westminster – or from the world of the arts – the poets Pierre Reverdy or Paul Iribe. She rubs shoulders with Misia Sert, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Jeanne Toussaint, Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and is dubbed “the Queen of Paris” by journalists of that time.

Perfume will complete the Chanel oeuvre. Couturiers’ perfumes hardly existed at the time: only Paul Poiret had tried to launch its perfume it in 1911, and it was not a great success.

Gabrielle asks the perfume nose Ernest Beaux for “a woman’s perfume with a woman’s scent”, a composition as fabricated as a dress. It will be n°5 – named after Ernest Beaux’s test number – a skillful blend of natural ingredients and synthetic elements. The design of the bottle is as pure as the dresses created by Chanel and stands out in a market oversaturated with twisted, convoluted bottles.

Gabrielle Chanel’s marketing genius is to create an effect of desire: n°5 is initially offered to close friends and clients only. Given the perfume’s success, she joins forces with the Wertheimer brothers, owners of the Bourjois brand, to distribute the precious fragrance. Their commercial agreement gives birth in 1924 to the company Parfums Chanel, 70% owned by the Wertheimer brothers, who assume all financial risks, and 30% by Gabrielle Chanel.

No. 22 follows in 1922, Gardénia in 1925, Bois des Iles and Cuir de Russie in 1926. But the star of the house remains n°5, which in 1929 becomes the world’s best-selling fragrance.

On the eve of WWII, the Chanel company, with four thousand workers if most biographers are to be believed (two thousand five hundred, according to the biographer Henry Gidel), is on the path of a limitless success.

The last collection which precedes the Occupation period, is made up of gypsy dresses surprisingly marked at the waist and touched with blue, white and red. We’ll never know if the combination of these colors reflected an artistic choice or a patriotic desire in Coco Chanel’s mind.

This is the last Spring for dancing, and for a long time to come. Gabrielle Chanel closes her couture house without notice and fires all her workers. She resists the injunctions of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which wants her to persevere in the name of French prestige and, faced with her refusal, speaks of desertion, of capitulation.

But she doesn’t care.

The truth is she is fifty-six. She has already been through a war when she was young, ambitious and supported by her lover, Boy. At the dawn of WWII, her personal survival is no longer at stake, she has a considerable fortune and no lover to support and applaud her ambition, and the days of the evening gowns she enjoys designing, are no more.

Yet her ancestral fear is still vivid. Even though her perfume boutique remains open and provides her with a regular and more than comfortable income, she cuts ties with all the members of her family to whom she used to pay a pension and stays in touch with her nephew André only – the son of her late sister Julia – whom she has been looking after for some twenty years.

Leaving Paris is a matter of a few weeks. Caught up in the madness of the exodus that follows the collapse of the French army in May 1940, she joins her nephew André in province, then finally returns to Paris.

Gabrielle Chanel lived at the Ritz hotel before the Occupation – the few rooms of the iconic apartment she occupied 31 rue Cambon were only used for receptions, and her fear of solitude always led her to the lively life of hotels.

Returning from her short exodus, she is surprised to find the Ritz requisitioned and occupied by the Luftwaffe since June 1940. Hermann Göring has taken over the imperial suite, but in reality it is a very motley crew that lives within the walls of the Parisian palace, which continues to welcome its clientele (for more on the Ritz during this period, read Philippe Collin’s fascinating “Le Barman du Ritz”).

The Nazis and art dealers who loot the Parisian works of art unknowingly mix with resistance fighters hiding in the hotel’s maids’ rooms, and German personalities such as Inga Haag who plans to assassinate Hitler as part of Operation Valkyrie, the barman Franck Meier, who conceals his Jewishness, or resistance fighters whose social position is in the spotlight, such as the manager’s wife, Blanche Auzello, who is eventually unmasked, tortured, deported and then fortunately freed (but unfortunately murdered by her husband after the war).

Gabrielle Chanel is part of this motley crew. She is evicted from her luxurious suite overlooking Place Vendôme by the Luftwaffe and, ultimately happy to save money, moves into a small attic suite overlooking… rue Cambon.

She faces the enemy, lives with the enemy. What will she do?

As is often the case with Coco Chanel, the truth is plural. Her biographers (Henry Gidel, Edmonde Charles-Roux and Justine Picardie, to name but a few I’ve read) are still struggling to establish the intentions of this secretive, lying woman, in search of her own legend and who found herself in the eye of the storm of an espionage operation, a spoliation of Jewish property, and then the radical purge at the Liberation.

Let’s start with the facts:

Her nephew André is taken prisoner in June 1940 and Gabrielle Chanel uses every means at her disposal to have him freed. This includes contacts with the occupying forces – to which we’ll return later.

In 1941, she also tries to take advantage of the anti-Semitic laws to take over the management, if not all the shares, of the Parfums Chanel company (claiming in the process a right to reparation for the damage – we don’t know which one – suffered over seventeen years).

Since the creation of the Parfums Chanel company, she has felt aggrieved by the capital structure of the company, in which she is a minority shareholder and the Wertheimer brothers majority shareholders, to such an extent that the issue became an obsession.

The Wertheimer brothers are Jewish and, according to her, gave up their property when they fled to New York, entitling her to the management of the Parfums Chanel company – which would pave the way for the recovery of all the shares. What she doesn’t know is that the Wertheimer brothers are smarter – and perhaps more lucid – than she is (about the world and about her): before leaving for America, they transferred the ownership of their shares to a trusted friend, Félix Amiot – a Catholic – so that he could hold their shares. The loyal Félix Amiot will return the shares to them after the war.

Among the means at the disposal of the always pragmatic Gabrielle Chanel is Hans Gunther von Dincklage, nicknamed “Spatz” (which means “sparrow” in German) and who, beneath his effectively light exterior, actually belongs to German military intelligence. Was it an old acquaintance or the desire to free André that brought her into contact with Spatz? We’ll never know. In any case, she takes him as her lover – and their romance survives the war.

The social and professional circle to which Spatz belongs sees an opportunity in Gabrielle Chanel’s past relationship with the Duke of Westminster and her long-standing friendship with Winston Churchill. She takes part in Operation Modellhüt (“Fashion Hat”), the essence of which lies in establishing a dialogue between Winston Churchill and certain members of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich’s central security office, in order to negotiate a separate peace between Germany and the United Kingdom. Gabrielle Chanel is supposed to deliver a handwritten letter to Churchill via the British Embassy in Madrid, but Operation Modellhüt ends up to be a bitter failure, and no further attempts will be made.

In recent years, declassified British, German and French archives have presented Gabrielle Chanel as an Abwehr agent from 1943, code-named “Westminster” – the name of her former lover.

However, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2023, two documents presenting Gabrielle Chanel as an occasional agent of the French Resistance have resurfaced.

The first document, dating from 1948, is a register of occasional agents in the ERIC Resistance network headed by René Simonin (repatriated to France in 1943), which had links with the British secret service and operated in Eastern Europe. According to this record, Gabrielle Chanel was an occasional agent of the French Resistance from January 1, 1943 to April 17, 1944.

The second document, dating from 1957, is a certificate of membership of the Forces Françaises Combattantes. It’s late and unusual, but – as we’ll see later – 1957 was the year during which Gabrielle Chanel won the Oscar for Fashion in Dallas.

There’s plenty to intrigue World War II historians and Coco Chanel biographers, who had never seen these documents before.

Guillaume Pollack, specialist in the French Resistance and author of “L’armée du silence. L’histoire des réseaux de résistance en France” is astonished by the paucity of the file dedicated to Gabrielle Chanel in the French military archives – her file contains nothing more than these two documents, which is very rare indeed. Similar files are usually packed with information and testimonials detailing the actions and role of the resistance fighter. As we know, recognition as a member of the Resistance has always been subject to certain conditions determined by French regulations and verified by veterans’ and resistance fighters’ associations. In short, not just anyone can be a member of the Resistance.

In addition, the certificate of membership of the Forces Françaises Combattantes bears neither a stamp nor a signature, and the word “Éric” has obviously been scratched out and rewritten (which makes me, a lawyer, circumspect).

Finally, why didn’t Chanel emphasize her past as a Resistance fighter during the Liberation period?

We will never know.