“In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” –Bertolt Brecht
When people imagine life under an authoritarian government, they probably don’t picture expressions of joyful nonconformity. The government itself would certainly prefer they do not — fascism, in particular, typically disdains individualism. In his essay “The Doctrine of Fascism,” Benito Mussolini wrote that the ideology “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State.”
This was especially true when it came to young people living under the Nazi regime. The Hitler Youth had existed since 1926, before the Nazis came to power, but in 1939 membership for children ages 10 to 18 was made mandatory by law. While the organization was first and foremost intended to indoctrinate the nation’s young people into the Nazis’ fascist, antisemitic ideology, it also furthered the image of a totally unified society.
But there was a major fly in the ointment of this plan: Multiple youth subcultures weren’t willing to go along with that project and had their own ideas about self-expression. Some of the most distinctive of those movements emerged not from Germany but France, under the German occupation and collaborationist Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. The so-called Zazous proliferated on Paris’s iconic Champs-Élysées, where they smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and partied to swing jazz.
Male Zazous wore oversize jackets and long hair that they slicked back, while the girls wore broad-shouldered jackets, bright red lipstick, and curls or braids they let hang down. The style was partly in imitation of the wide, high-waisted “zoot suit” popular in the US among figures like the flamboyant bandleader Cab Calloway, whose song “Zaz Zuh Zaz” is believed to have inspired the group’s name.
That style, however, was also a deliberate, practical middle-finger to the Nazis and the collaborationist regime. To contribute to the war effort, citizens of occupied France were expected to conserve cloth and cut their hair to be made into slippers. Thus, to be a Zazou wasn’t just to defy the state’s idea of who a good French young person should be, it was to actively deprive the state of raw materials.
The Zazous “opposed the regime by ignoring it, which was a political act whether they knew it or not,” the American musician and jazz critic Mike Zwerin wrote in his book Swing Under the Nazis. “Wearing long jackets with wide collars and plenty of pleats is a political provocation during a highly publicized campaign for sartorial austerity.”
After the Nazi occupation mandated that all Jewish people in occupied France wear the yellow Star of David, a number of sympathetic gentiles donned their own stars with alternate messages, such as “Goy,” “Buddhist,” and naturally, “Zazou.”
Isabella Segalovich, who writes and produces videos on history for Hyperallergic, tells Teen Vogue, “One of the things that totalitarianism does, and fascism does, is the totalitarian leaders want everyday people to feel alone and helpless, and putting something on your body to show you are not happy with the state of things is something everybody else can see. And even if they’re not in that place to do that, they can feel more strength so they can keep going on.” Segalovich compares the Zazous’ wearing badges to non-Palestinians who have taken up the traditional keffiyeh cloth in solidarity during the war in Gaza.
