Quotes About Hôtel Ritz

For most of those who lived in Paris during the occupation, however, survival depended on how adeptly one could navigate the nuances of wartime reality. At the Hôtel Ritz, the shades of gray were at their most impenetrable. In its spaces, astonishing things happened. In those gray areas—where courage and desire collided with brutality and terror—were powerful human stories.

The propaganda maestro of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, famously declared that the capital would be gay and happy—or else. Orders from Berlin specified that the Hôtel Ritz would be the only luxury hotel of its kind in occupied Paris.

For those rooms at the Hôtel Ritz, the Germans would take a 90 percent discount—paying a mere twenty-five francs a day on average. As "guests" of the French people, they would ultimately send even that reduced bill to the new French puppet government of the occupation, the Vichy regime,

Oscar Wilde might have despaired of the modern plumbing, but the early American visitors praised the Hôtel Ritz as the pinnacle of new luxury hotels.

For those who had lived as guests at the Hôtel Ritz during the German occupation, the liberation was the end of one story about luxury and modernity and Paris. It was the passing of the generation that had changed the shape of the future in the 1910s through the 1930s.