Two bird brooches from Cartier Paris, made during and immediately after the German occupation and believed to have been designed by Pierre Lemarchand, form a pair whose meaning depends on reading them together.
The Caged Bird (1942)
The first brooch, made in 1942 during the occupation, showed a bird inside a cage. Cartier Paris placed it in the shop window. The symbolism was not subtle: a confined bird in a city under occupation. And the German authorities apparently noticed it, though they could not demonstrate the intent. The brooch sold.
The Victory Bird (1944)
When Paris was liberated in August 1944 (the German military governor defied Hitler's order to destroy the city's monuments and bridges, and surrendered as de Gaulle entered the capital), a companion piece was created, again attributed to Lemarchand. This bird was free. Its wings were spread, and it was singing. Its colours were red coral, white diamonds, and blue lapis lazuli: France's national tricolour. The colouring that the Germans had apparently suspected in the caged bird was in this piece entirely open. The Victory Bird became in time a symbol of the Liberation, and of Cartier's role as a house that had remained in Paris through the occupation years.
Context
The two brooches are often discussed alongside each other because the narrative they carry runs across both pieces. The caged bird only fully registers when you know what came after it; the victory bird only lands as it does because of the bird that preceded it. The two were produced across a period of roughly two years, in the same workshops, for the same house, separated by one of the sharpest turning points in the city's modern history.
Lemarchand is better known today for the panther jewels, extravagant, technically virtuosic, designed for peacetime and celebration. The bird brooches represent a different register entirely, and the range between the two says something about the breadth of the work that came out of Cartier Paris in the mid-twentieth century.
For the full story of the Liberation Bird, see Cartier's Victory Brooch by Pierre Lemarchand.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 9 (“The World at War, 1939–1944”) and ch. 10 (“Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 19, 45 et al.
