The Dark Years of Paris

The French often refer to the Nazi Occupation of France as “the dark years,” not least because of the Vichy government’s complicity in genocide. Walking through Paris and stopping at interpretive remnants of the Second World War — commemorative street placards, sites across the city, and traces embedded in public memory — this experience explores the narratives of bravery, complicity, and collaboration that emerged during the occupation, and the moral fractures revealed between 1940 and 1944. Led by a novelist and expert in Holocaust Studies, the experience combines historical context with literary insight, drawing on the history of fascism and the psychology of genocide. It examines the Nazi occupation of Paris and how this period has been remembered, misremembered, and mythologized within the city. The walk concludes in the Latin Quarter, where the conversation continues over a drink, allowing time to reflect on history, memory, and the lasting imprint of this period on Paris.

Being guided by Samuél Lopez Barrantes is what sets this experience apart. With an MA in the psychology of genocide and an MFA focused on the invention of historical narratives, his approach to the Nazi occupation of Paris goes beyond the surface of monuments and plaques. It explicitly draws on narrative theory, psychology, and storytelling to examine memory and meaning. With a focus on the historical context of Nazism and the complex narratives surrounding the French Resistance, the experience revisits how this period is commonly understood, grounding discussion in evidence, place, and lived consequence rather than mythology. His approach invites participants to sit with ambiguity rather than resolution, and to consider how history is carried forward. The experience remains rooted in the city itself — its streets, markers, and silences — offering a reflective, evidence-based encounter with one of Paris’s most difficult chapters.

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes is a novelist and musician with an MFA in Creative Writing (dissertation: History Is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction) and an MA in Holocaust Studies (dissertation: The Humanness of Cruelty: Viktor Frankl, Alfred Adler, and the Psychology of Genocide). He taught creative writing at the Sorbonne for five years before focusing on writing and leading historical walks on modernism, existentialism, and the Nazi Occupation of Paris. His first novel, Slim and the Beast, shares its name with his indie rock band, which has played extensively across Europe. His second novel, The Requisitions, is a work of historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland. He is a board member and fiction editor at SOUVENIR Magazine, an arts and literature publication co-founded with his wife, photographer Augusta Sagnelli.

A notebook for curious note-takers. Umbrella or rain jacket during the rainy season.