Robert Doisneau, the wartime years: Paris show hails photographer’s ‘spirit of resistance’

In 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris, a Polish refugee knocked urgently at the door of French photographer Robert Doisneau. Serge Dobkowski desperately needed fake papers and he’d heard that Doisneau was the man for the job. Usually it took Doisneau 48 hours to make a false identity card. But Dobkowski was being followed and there was no time to waste. So Doisneau quickly took and printed his photo and glued it to his own identity card. Dobkowski was now free to cross the demarcation line out of occupied France and spend the rest of the war as Robert Doisneau.  

This generous gesture is one of many “acts of resistance” documented in a new exhibition at a museum near Paris on the celebrated French photographer Robert Doisneau.   

Long before he became known for his 1950 photograph, ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville’, where a dashing young couple embrace on a busy Parisian street, Doisneau worked as a forger during WWII and documented daily life during Nazi-occupied Paris.   

By 1940, Doisneau already had form as a forger. He frequently doctored his time card when working as an industrial advertising photographer for car manufacturer Renault before the war to cover up for his repeated lateness. (He was later fired for always being late). 

After a short spell in the army in eastern France in the early days of the war, he began forging papers at the start of the German occupation of Paris in June 1940.   

Drawing on his training as an engraver and lithographer, he started making passports, identity cards and Ausweise (visas used to cross from Nazi-occupied territory into the Free Zone), to help out his friends and those “in the shit”. 

In June 1941, a “Monsieur Philippe” (an alias for the painter Enrico Pontremoli) contacted him and asked him to reproduce a police inspector’s card. Satisfied with the results, he asked Doisneau to reproduce more official documents. Without knowing it, Doisneau was now working for the Communists and the major resistance networks – the Comet Line and the United Resistance Movement (MUR), which later became the National Liberation Movement (MLN). In his southern Paris studio in Montrouge he reproduced official Nazi stamps and made fake membership cards for Vichy’s loathed paramilitary milice. 

If discovered, he risked deportation or execution. He hid his work in progress in the roller blinds in the glass roof of his studio and destroyed his negatives and prints once the work was done. His flat was searched for compromising photos three times during the war.   

'Petrified of the sound of German boots'

Although he helped to protect numerous people persecuted by the Vichy regime and the occupying German army, Doisneau didn’t like to be thought of as a hero. He just wanted “to be of service”. 

He said he “was petrified of the sound of German boots on the cobblestones”, recalled his daughter, Francine Deroudille, 76, the youngest of Doisneau’s two daughters, at the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of National Resistance in Champigny-sur Marne.  

But despite the dangers – and a July 1940 law banning all outside photography in the French capital – he continued to quietly chronicle daily life in Nazi-occupied Paris: German soldiers strolling under the Eiffel Tower, immaculately dressed Parisians sheltering from the air raids in the metro, a resistance fighter on a bicycle scattering illicit tracts like confetti in the streets of the French capital.

He bartered for film on the black market to snap the queues outside sumptuous shops with little on the shelves and a grocer weighing out minuscule amounts of butter on his scales. A ration card for coal is shown against a background of streets thick with snow.   

There are portraits of the “popular, anonymous, secret hero” Paul Barabé, the concierge of Doisneau’s building, with his enormous pet rabbit. When the Germans raided the building, Barabé took advantage of their lunch break to burn a register containing the names and addresses of some fifty communist activists in Montrouge.  

Molotov cocktails and manning the barricades 

Doisneau also captured more joyful occasions. Friends and family gathered in a cellar around a dark-haired girl clad in white to celebrate her first holy communion. When the air raid sirens rang out, the precious leg of lamb procured on the black market to mark the ceremony was among the first items to be sheltered, Doisneau recalled. 

Then from August 1944, when resistance fighters rose up to battle the occupying Germans, he was free to cover preparations for the Paris uprising with a frenzy. 

He captured Parisians tearing up paving stones, lifting asphalt, moving vehicles and collecting sandbags. Insurgents of all ages form a human chain and build the barricades. Professor Audibert of the Collège de France mixes Molotov cocktails with a wry smile on his face, as if preparing drinks for a party. 

Then a week after the Liberation, Doisneau began work on a sequence of photos for the arts and literary magazine Le Point to pay tribute to the clandestine printers who had played such a vital role in the French Resistance. 

To photograph the men and women who had printed and distributed tracts, reports, posters, poems and other kinds of resistance propaganda during the war would have put them at huge risk. 

But now Doisneau, who had respected workers’ fraternity since his days at Renault, was free to work on a reconstruction of their underground work: machine workers setting type in a cellar, an editor examining a poster calling for a “Parisian insurrection” and when the power cuts out, a typist on a bicycle keeps the back-up generator going. He takes portraits of the key figures involved: the printer Paul Elie Harambat and the painter Pontremoli confer on the next edition of an illicit print job and he captures the underground atmosphere at Claude Oudeville’s print shop – a location that lends itself perfectly to clandestine work with its double entrances.  

In his later years, the mild-mannered, unassuming Doisneau was incensed at being considered part of the French Resistance. 

“I very rarely saw him angry,” said Deroudille. “He was always in a good mood … but he was absolutely furious at being ranked alongside people who had risked their life for the Resistance.” 

A streak of gentle rebellion

“He had known the resistance fighters during the war,” said Deroudille. “He thought it was fraudulent … to be considered a resistance hero.”   

She finds it appropriate, therefore, that the exhibition frames his wartime work within his broader “spirit of resistance” and the streak of gentle rebellion that runs like a vein throughout his life and work. 

Doisneau rebelled against what he considered his stiflingly bourgeois childhood in the southern Paris suburb of Gentilly to become a photographer, working his own hours at Renault so he could find time to document life in the streets. The same streak inspired his post-war work with Swiss-French modernist writer Blaise Cendrars in the suburbs of Paris and his solitary, dangerous work as a forger for the Resistance. 

Dobkowsky, known as “Dobko”, survived the war and became a great family friend.   

“There was so much emotion in his voice when he spoke to us and he was so very affectionate with us, that sometimes it annoyed me,” confessed Deroudille. 

“Then my mother said to me one day: ‘you must always be very kind to Dobko because his nieces were killed [in Poland] during the war’.” 

Doisneau was always reluctant to speak about the war and the part, however discreet, he had played. The stories of ‘Dobko’, and the atmospheric images in this exhibition are a fitting tribute to a quiet, mischievous man and a great humanist photographer. 

‘Robert Doisneau: l’esprit de résistance’ is on display at the Musée de la Résistance from October 15, 2023 to April 28, 2024.