“It’s fiction, but there has to be a grounding in truth.” Chris Lloyd, author of the Eddie Giral novels set in Paris in 1940, considers the delights — and the dilemmas — of using real people as characters in historical fiction.
One of the biggest dilemmas I feel that historical fiction writers face is whether to use real people in our stories. And the moment you answer that question by deciding that you are going to include characters taken from real life, you open up a whole new can of worms for yourself: a rolling cascade of sub-questions about how you’re going to do it, in what situations you’re going to put them, how you treat them and how you feel about them. In many ways, this feels even thornier a path the nearer your historical period is to the present-day.
In the case of Occupied Paris, that decision is taken away from me to some extent. Given the huge importance that the actions and beliefs of some key historical figures have on the events that form the backdrop to the stories, it would be impossible – and a little strange – not to make reference at least to the senior Nazi officials and French politicians and players whose decisions and roles affected the lives of everyone.
It’s perhaps a small step from that to seeing a need to include them in the books in order to highlight their participation in this period and to act as a foil for ‘my’ characters to tell their tale. This is simply because there are times when the demands of the story I’m trying to tell call for these and other figures to become characters in the book. It would be false not to.
This is where you see the cascade of dilemmas begin to roil and tumble in front of you. By writing about our made-up characters in a given historical period, we’re already playing fast and loose with the history to some extent, but the moment you bring in a real person, that’s when you really start messing with the past.
In Banquet of Beggars – and the Eddie Giral books as a whole – no matter how much care and research I put into the real people I include, I know that I’m placing them in situations that didn’t happen, making them talk to characters that didn’t exist, making them say words they didn’t utter and doing actions they didn’t take.
It’s a fiction, but that’s fine because fiction is what I’m writing, but there has to be a grounding in truth, which is where the delights and dilemmas comes in.
As a historical fiction writer, I try as impartially as possible to ensure that, even though the stories, scenes and dialogue that include these people are fictitious, the traits that I ascribe to them are as accurate as they can be. Much of this is based not only on what the history books tell me about them, but on descriptions of them by others who knew them.
Once the step of featuring the great and the good was taken, I realised that what I really wanted was to write about the lives of ordinary people under the Occupation. In many ways the actions they took and the decisions they faced interest me far more.
So again even if I don’t use specific individuals, I do use the stories told by countless French people and their experiences of this time to try and give some idea of what it felt like to be alive under these extraordinary conditions.
One such person, whose life turned tragically extraordinary, was Jacques Bonsergent. He was the first French civilian to be executed in Paris by the Nazis, part of their desire to set an example when unrest was on the increase.
As told in Banquet of Beggars, Jacques was involved in a minor incident with some German soldiers on an evening out with friends. This occurred shortly after the demonstrations of 11 November ,1940, Armistice Day, when the Occupiers had been shaken by the strength of feeling against the Occupation.
While walking home, one of Jacques Bonsergent’s friends accidentally jostled some German soldiers. This led to an argument, in which one of the Frenchmen is said to have raised his fist to one of the soldiers. By all accounts, Jacques was very much a spectator in a particularly trivial incident rather than being actively involved, but he was the one arrested and tried.
At his trial, a German military tribunal, he bravely refused to name his companions and took responsibility for what had happened. In an appallingly fast process, he was handed down a death sentence, his subsequent appeal was turned down, and he was executed by firing squad on 23 December. He was 28 years old. A square and a Metro station are named after him in the Tenth Arrondissement, close to where he lived at the time.
The decision I took to include his story in the book was partly because it was an event that exerted an influence on the prevailing mood at the time the story was set, but mainly because I wanted to commemorate Jacques Bonsergent and keep his memory alive. Out of respect, however, I felt I should only make reference to him rather than have him appear as a character.
This is in contrast to another character taken from real life who I used in Banquet of Beggars. Otto Abetz was a self-professed Francophile, married to a Frenchwoman, who had been booted out of France before the war for meddling in French politics.
A die-hard Nazi party member and protégé of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, Abetz returned to Paris in the summer of 1940 as the German Ambassador. From day one, he set out to undermine Wehrmacht military authority in Paris to place greater power in the Party structure, at the same time feathering his own political and personal nest.
A key link between Berlin and Vichy, he worked hard at winning over the French elite through favours and lavish receptions at the top Parisian restaurants, the German Embassy and his residence in Chantilly, and through his use of the French media. Regarded as a charming, urbane man, he was also said by both his supporters and detractors to have had a vicious temper that could turn at the drop of a hat. All of this is grist to the mill to a fiction writer. That thumbnail portrait of him alone brings him to life and creates the perfect climate for conflict and temptation with Eddie.
Which brings us to Eddie. A long time ago, I met two former Resistance fighters who left a deep impact on me, almost entirely because they were such damaged and unpleasant men. Eddie isn’t based on them, but they did sow the seed of a hero not necessarily being the nicest of people, and whether one was a prerequisite or a product of the other, which was fundamental in my discovering Eddie as a character.
If anything, rather than being based on any real person, Eddie was based on a dilemma. On the impossible situations he would have been placed in as a detective in Occupied Paris and how far he’d be prepared to go to stand up to the demands made of him and how much he would accept to survive.
To conclude, I should mention a third character taken from real life who was supposed to play a part in Banquet of Beggars. I lovingly wrote an outline in which this person played a key role, and it was only when I started on the detailed research that I discovered that not only were they not in Paris at the time the story is set, but they weren’t even in France. Another dilemma.
Play fast and loose with the timing, or change the story. I changed the story. Knowing this person was not in Paris would have made me feel I was being untruthful if I included them.
As so often happens, this meant going back to the drawing board, which offered what I hope has turned out to be a far more satisfying story. Which also demands that we should always question the use of real people in our stories. If they are essential for the purposes of the story, use them, but use them wisely and honestly. But when the story is better served by using made-up characters as they allow greater freedom of imagination and for an unfettered development of the narrative, then that’s the time to kill your darlings, real or imaginary.
Banquet of Beggars by Chris Lloyd is published on 15 August, 2024.
Find out more about this book.
Win one of five copies of Banquet of Beggars in our exclusive giveaway!
Get a taste of the second book in the series, Paris Requiem, in our extract from the beginning of the novel. And you can find out more about the historical background to Chris’s books in The French Resistance: shadier than you think and The bureaux d’achats: how the Nazis bled France dry.
We also interviewed Chris after he won the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2021 for The Unwanted Dead, the first book in the Eddie Giral series.
AJ West, who also won an HWA Crown Award — for his debut novel, The Spirit Engineer, in 2022 — wonders about a similar topic in Should historical authors feel guilt when they write real people as antiheroes?
Images:
- Wachtparade in Paris, 1940–41, coloured by Ruffneck88: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Street scene in Paris, 1940: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- German soldiers outside a restaurant in Paris, June 1940: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Jacques Bonsergent: Paille for Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- German soldier, Eiffel Tower in background, January, 1943: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia (Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
