Does anyone know about the prevalence of telephones in WW2? Specifically, I'm wondering whether a senior police commander in Paris would have a phone in his home. Is that super unlikely?!
I don't know why it would be?
I looked, in case I was missing some weird gap in French history where they didn't want phones, and found one thing saying there were more radios than telephones in households in France in 1939, and one explaining that the network expansion lagged behind that of the U.S., but picked up during WWI, when the U.S. gave up on having military members who didn't speak French try to work as operators connecting calls and managing the networks and just brought hundreds of French women to do it, and had American companies, which were more advanced than the French telecom, work on the network, which apparently helped bring it up to speed.
Can't find a specific % of households in France that had phones then but my French is the suck. In the U.S. 37% had them in 1940, 62% in '50, so... even if lower, no reason to think it'd be odd for someone with a job that'd require being called to gave a phone.