He was like Dick Whittington. In 1835 a young boy of 14 set off walking to Paris looking for a job and to learn a trade. Today his company, Louis Vuitton, is a $42 billion dollar a year brand in a conglomerate with Moët and Hennessey. But what of its past that it doesn’t want to talk about. A past during the dark days when France was occupied by the Nazis. Follow me back to the time when Adolf Hitler ruled Europe and it didn’t look like that was going to change.

I can tell you that you were very unlikely to have heard Edith Piaf singing one particular song after May 1940 that she sang once only after the Nazis had occupied Paris. The songs lyrics tell of happiert times for the French – a time when they were confident of beating the Boche again. Some of the lyrics go “I can’t stand Hitler, the Nazis seem to forget that we were the people who slammed them in the first world war”. Edith Piaf had recorded that song after World War 2 had started but before the shock of the collapse of France just 8 months later. Probably by accident one day after Paris was occupied by the Germans, French radio presenter, Pierre Hiegel, accidentally played the “B” side of one of Edith Piaf’s records and THAT song went out on the air. It seems that nothing happened to him. He was a lucky man.

Tag words: Dick Whittington; Louis Vuitton; Moët and Hennessey; Nazis; Adolf Hitler; Boche; Edith Piaf; Pierre Hiegel; Clemence Emilie Parriaux; Monsieur Maréchal; Empress Eugénie de Montijo; Napoleon III; Tuileries Palace; Château de Saint-Cloud; LV; Maréchal Phillippe Pétain; Battle of Verdun; Third Republic; Gestapo; Vichy; Julius Caesar; Unsinkable Molly Brown; Château d’Yquem; Veuve Clicquot; Marc Jacobs; Guerlain; Pierre-François Guerlain; Chalimar; TAG Heuer; Edouard Heuer; Techniques d’Avant Garde; Bvlgari; Sotirios Voulgaris; la dolce vita; Fendi; Sephora;