SEVENTEEN

The Darkest Years

They only call me in in disasters.

—Pétain at Bordeaux, 1940

ON 10 MAY 1940, Hitler struck in the West. With forty-five divisions von Rundstedt attacked through Belgium and Holland. Under the Schlieffen Plan of 1914, the German thrust had started in north Belgium, without breaching Dutch neutrality, and then wheeled southwards. TheSichelschnitt⁶⁸ Plan of 1940 struck immediately to the south, through the supposedly “impenetrable” Ardennes, followed by a hook north-west to the Channel ports, encircling the elite of the French and British forces that had moved eastwards to help Belgium. By 13 May Hitler’s General Guderian had broken out across the River Meuse at Sedan, north of where the Maginot Line ended. Two days later, scattering piecemeal French armoured counter-attacks, the Panzers ripped a hole 60 miles wide in the French defences, and poured in, apparently in the general direction of Paris. The force with which von Rundstedt speared France had in effect a steel tip but a soft wooden shaft; the tip formed by the few elite Panzer and motorised divisions— the shaft made up of the mass of second-rate infantry divisions, often still dependent on horse and cart. France possessed no concentrated and determined armoured force (such as de Gaulle in France and Liddell Hart in England had urged), capable of slicing into this soft section of the German Army. As the sides stood in May 1940, under Sichelschnitt the Germans marched to one of the most outstanding blueprints for victory in the history of war. ¹

The Dutch capitulated on the 14th, the Belgians two weeks later. Amid an atmosphere of incredulity mixed with panic, the Reynaud government discussed leaving Paris, as in 1914; then Reynaud’s resolve hardened, declaring that it “ought to remain in Paris, no matter how intense the bombing might be.” On the 16th, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister for less than a week, flew to Paris for a meeting in the Quai d’Orsay, that same building where less than twenty years previously the victorious Allies had drafted the peace treaty for the defeated Germans to sign. Present were Reynaud, Daladier (now Reynaud’s Minister of National Defence) and the French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin. “Everybody was standing,” Churchill recalled in his memoirs.

At no time did we sit down around a table. Utter dejection was written on every face. In front of Gamelin on a student’s easel was a map, about two yards square, with a black line purporting to show the Allied front. In this line there was drawn a small but sinister bulge at Sedan . . .

Churchill asked Gamelin: “Where is the strategic reserve?” then: breaking into French, which I used indifferently (in every sense): “où est la masse de manoeuvre?”

General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of the head and a shrug, said: “Aucune.”

There was another long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d’Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives on to them.

It would be impossible to have any more graphic sign of defeat and collapse than Churchill’s picture of the air outside filled with whirling scraps of charred paper—state secrets and battle plans reduced to the same ash as meaningless inter-departmental memos.

It seemed like 1914 all over again; but this time there was no Governor Gallieni in Paris; and the French Army was not the army of 1914. Churchill returned to London with the grim realisation of what the future would hold. Reynaud, a lone voice of resistance, spoke that night on the radio, admitting to the French public that the Germans had managed to create “a broad pocket, south of the Meuse,” but “We filled in plenty in 1918, as those of you who fought in the last war will not have forgotten!” However, the city went from maelstrom to mausoleum in a matter of days, with two-thirds of its residents departing in every manner of transport. Ilya Ehrenburg, who stayed on as a correspondent of Hitler’s Russian ally, was moved to compassion while, as he watched, “An old man laboriously pushed a handcart loaded with pillows on which huddled a small girl and a little dog that howled piteously.” In contrast, a recently promoted brigadier-general, de Gaulle, related how in the course of an arduous journey through the night, attempting to reach his newly formed 4th Armoured Division, he passed a long stationary line of refugees:

Suddenly a convoy of luxurious, white-tyred American cars came sweeping along the road, with militia men on the running-boards and motorcyclists surrounding the procession; it was the Corps Diplomatique on its way to the châteaux of Touraine.

One of the great beauties of Sichelschnitt as a plan was that it left the Allies in the dark as to whether the Panzers were heading for Paris, or for the Channel, until it was far too late. On 20 May, after a series of staggering advances, the Germans reached the Channel, bypassing Paris but cutting the Allied armies in two. Reynaud, at last sacking Gamelin, called in the two old soldiers of the First World War: Pétain, aged eighty-four, to be Deputy Premier, and Weygand, seventy-three, who had never held battle command, to succeed Gamelin. Both were committed anti-parliamentarians, and committed defeatists.

Weygand attempted one ill-coordinated riposte to slice through the narrow “Panzer Corridor,” then soon made it plain that there should be only “one last battle,” for the sake of the army’s honour, before France should sue for a separate peace. Within a week of his arrival, Weygand was dangling before the cabinet’s eyes the spectre of a Red coup, of a new Commune taking over in Paris; a prospect that seemed to afflict him more than surrender to Hitler. Momentarily, Hitler lost his nerve before Dunkirk and issued his controversial “halt-order,” which was to save the British Expeditionary Force. The “Miracle of Dunkirk” came to pass; 337,000 men—including 110,000 French—were evacuated by the Royal Navy and the “little boats.” But the campaign then became largely a matter of marching for the Germans, a pursuit down the highways of France. Then, on 11 June, Weygand decided to declare Paris an “open city.” Unlike Warsaw it would capitulate without a struggle—and be preserved for posterity.

The brilliant six-week blitzkrieg had cost the Germans no more than 27,074 in killed—only marginally more than Britain’s dead on that one first catastrophic day of the Somme in July 1916. Contrary to the received image, the French Army—or at least its effective units—had fought bravely: it lost in killed alone 100,000 men, roughly equal to the rate of casualties at Verdun in 1916. But 1 million prisoners of war had been taken, and they would remain in miserable conditions, sometimes exploited as slave labourers, in Germany for the next five years.

Disobeying civilian authority, Weygand refused “to leave the soil of France even if put in irons,” should the government decide to continue the war in Africa or elsewhere, and refused to carry out Premier Reynaud’s proposal that France seek only a military capitulation. “For twenty-three years I have followed closely the work of the politicians,” he declared acidly, “and I am thoroughly aware of all their responsibilities in the current drama.” On 16 June, Reynaud stepped down in favour of Pétain, who, within hours, was approaching the Germans for an armistice; six days later it was signed in the railway coach at Rethondes where Foch had received the defeated Germans in November 1918. Two days later, in another act of indiscipline (for which he was condemned to death in absentia), the lanky forty-nine-year-old brigadier-general, Charles de Gaulle, unfurled in London the standard of the Cross of Lorraine, of defiance and revolt against Pétain and the armistice.

For the next four years France and her army would be split between Vichy and Free France; two governments, each of them headed by a soldier. De Gaulle was dubbed by Winston Churchill, with his deep sense of history, “the Constable of France,” who brought with him the honour of an undefeatable nation. Nevertheless, the post-1940 split imposed agonising dilemmas of loyalty—which Anglo-Saxon armies had fortunately been spared, since Cromwell, or the American Civil War. As an indication of the dimensions of this crise de conscience, one small group of French officers, including several from the old nobility, were unable to accept the legitimacy of either Pétain or de Gaulle. Instead they took themselves to the Soviet Union, where they formed the Normandie-Niemen Air Squadron. It fought with utmost courage and dreadful losses on the Russian front for the rest of the war.⁶⁹

The terms of the armistice imposed by Hitler were draconian. France was divided into an Occupied and an Unoccupied zone. Occupied France included Paris and the whole Channel and Atlantic seaboard, from which Hitler planned his “Sea Lion” invasion of Britain, and— later—he installed huge bases for U-boats which would all but strangle Britain’s convoy lifeline. The rump, including the Mediterranean coast and France’s overseas empire, was administered by Pétain’s regime from Vichy—a damp, glum spa best known for its evil-smelling waters. It was greatly to Weygand’s credit, however, that the French Army, as permitted under the armistice, was reconstituted, and the mainstream of its traditions kept alive. He also succeeded in barring the Germans from French North Africa, where the 120,000-strong core of the new “Armistice Army” was safely maintained—although he was to become one of the principal post-Liberation whipping-boys of the Gaullists. In North Africa were officers like de Lattre de Tassigny, now a general, whose division had been one of the few to acquit itself with distinction in May 1940—and would again in the Liberation of 1944.

FRANCE NOW DISAPPEARS into what became known as the “Dark Years”—the darkest and longest fifty months of her long existence. Neither the Tsar’s entry into Paris in 1815, nor the Prussians in 1871, would approach the humiliation that she would suffer between 1940 and 1944, when the light of the ville lumière would be extinguished. Even with the euphoric moment of La Libération in August 1944, the darkness would not end; out of the pit there would follow the bitter épuration or purge, the savaging of one Frenchman, or one group of Frenchmen, by another—a merciless civil conflict that would add thousands more victims to the huge figure of war casualties. Worse, it would leave wounds still unhealed after two generations. Then, the ending of this épuration would be followed by another decade of deprivation and reconstruction of a shattered country, internal political wrangling far more debilitating even than that of the Third Republic, and murderous and costly colonial wars.

THE STORY OF THE OCCUPATION is so unredeemingly terrible that an Anglo-Saxon historian is confronted with great difficulties. How, anyway, can we Anglo-Saxons begin to comprehend the pressures and stresses imposed on both collaborators and members of the Resistance—we who, thank God, were never occupied? In writing the official biography of Harold Macmillan, when the subject of de Gaulle’s rejection of Britain’s entry into the EEC came up, I remember being profoundly shocked to hear him remark, “If Hitler had danced in London, I would never have had any difficulty with de Gaulle.” At the time I thought it the most cynical remark I ever heard Macmillan make—then I realised its underlying truth. After all, what most sets us in Britain apart from other European nations: we alone were never conquered by a foreign army. But does our ignorance, our lack of experience entitle us to pass condemnation? I often wonder, which of us would have been collaborators, the Cêlines, the Drieu la Rochelles, the Brasillachs—or even a Sartre or a Cocteau? Or which of us would have joined the maquis in the Welsh mountains? What option would a South Kensington or Islington mother choose—watching her children slowly starve? What might we have done—especially in those early days of no hope, when Germany seemed certain to emerge triumphant? Smugly we think Drancy and the deportations could not happen here.

Standpoints of criticism are so very different. What many Frenchmen today hold against former President Mitterrand is not that, in his twenties, he was in some way involved in the deportation of Jews, but that the truth was caché all those years. Before consigning them to the lowest circle ofcollabo hell, it is worth remembering that men like Céline and Darnand had all fought heroically in the First World War, before that pacificism which it generated led them to take the wrong turning of collaborating with the Nazi oppressor. Even Pierre Laval at his post-war trial proved to be a man of great courage as he faced the inevitable death sentence. Events were just too big for them—including the old Marshal, at the head of it all in Vichy.

THE PRINCIPAL VICTIM—as well as the arena—of the Nazi Occupation was, of course, Paris.² What was so particularly shattering for Paris, and it was to set the tone for the whole ensuing four years of Occupation, was the sheer speed of the German takeover. One day Parisians were swapping bargains at the stamp market on the Champs-Élysées; the next moment the refugees from eastern France were straggling in; then it seemed—just like at the Marne in 1914—the invading hordes were turning away and leaving Paris in peace. But, no! Just as their blueprint for 1940 intended, suddenly the Germans were there, marching across the Concorde. Here was the end of a centuries-old tradition: Paris the “fortress” had become the “open city.” As the Germans came in, the Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, reckoned that three-quarters of the pre-war population fled. The fashionable western arrondissements were all but empty. Three weeks later some 300,000 returned, forced by destitution and pressure from the Germans. Exhaustion shows in photographs of a working-class family trudging home on foot, wheeling an exhausted grandmother in a child’s pram. Some could not face the future; like the eminent neuro-surgeon, who, having seen the Germans arrive on the Champs-Élysées, injected himself with strychnine.

Under strict orders, the first Germans to arrive behaved well —sehr korrekt. In the Métro members of the Wehrmacht ostentatiously gave up their seats to women and old people. The widely disseminated slogan was “Have confidence in the German soldier.” Initially, the German Army made every attempt to woo the Parisians. Every day brass bands played in the Tuileries; the Glockenspiel topped with clusters of tiny bells, with its echoes of the sentimental rusticity of pre-war Bavaria or Austria. It all helped lend the naive Parisian a simplistic illusion that the Occupation was going to mean “Mozart in Paris.” In their smart feldgrau the occupiers looked like serious soldiers compared with their own demoralised beaten rabble. There were sharp comparisons made, too, with the Tommies who had sailed off and left France at Dunkirk—and with Woodrow Wilson’s Americans, who let France down so badly in 1919, and were not lifting a finger to help her now. Within the month would come the unspeakable news of the Royal Navy sinking the French fleet, without warning and killing 1300 French sailors, at Mers-el-Kebir. It was a deed for which an agonised Churchill took personal responsibility, fearful that—afloat under its Vichy commanders—the fleet might fall into Hitler’s hands, and tip the whole balance of the war in the Mediterranean.

ON HIS WAY HOME from having danced his little jig of revenge outside the surrender wagon-lit in the clearing at Compiègne, on Sunday 23 June, Adolf Hitler himself paid a surprise visit to a prostrate Paris. In less than three hours he managed to “do” the whole city. Like a peculiar day-tripper, he was photographed on the deserted steps of the Trocadéro— with the Eiffel Tower in the background. He took in the Louvre, the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame, condemned Sacré Coeur as “appalling,” and angrily ordered the destruction of the statue of First World War General Mangin behind Les Invalides. It reminded him of the French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s.

The oppressive reality of the German occupation very soon became apparent. There would be a strict curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. each night. Loudspeakers warned the inhabitants: “The German High Command will tolerate no act of hostility towards the occupation troops. Every aggression, every sabotage will be punished by death.” That first winter, as rationing was imposed, the conquerors pillaged the rich granaries of Occupied France.

Part of the trauma of defeat derived from the astonishing speed and Teutonic efficiency with which the new German administration established itself, even while the battle outside Paris still continued. Had Hitler mounted Operation Sea Lion with similar dispatch, Britain would surely never have survived the grim summer of 1940. Almost overnight there appeared outside the Opéra a maze of signs directing to various military sections, HQs, units, hospitals, “kinos,” hotels, recreation centres and every other kind ofWehrmacht function. As the war moved on, by summer 1944 there was even a helpful arrow pointing “To the Normandy front.” The grand Hôtel Crillon on the Concorde (named after Henri IV’s brave lieutenant) was requisitioned to house the sinisterSicherheitsdienst (security service); the Luftwa fe—directed by Goering’s eye for luxury—occupied Marie de’ Medici’s Luxembourg; for their officers’ club the Luftwa fe also occupied the choice address on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré which later became the American Residence. Supreme insult, the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon—where Daladier had stood up and declared war on Germany just nine months previously—now decked with swastikas, was requisitioned for the offices of the Kommandant ofGross Paris. The Gestapo moved into 74 Avenue Foch, where, as the Resistance developed, neighbours would be kept awake at night by the screams emanating from the interrogation rooms.

THROUGHOUT THE OCCUPATION one of the most influential of all the Nazi organs was the post of German Ambassador, held by Otto Abetz. Only thirty-seven in 1940, Abetz was by his own lights a genuine francophile—married to a Frenchwoman—who had spent much time in pre-war France. He had been a keen member of the Comité France-Allemagne, which aimed at Franco-German friendship but was in fact a Nazi front organisation. A skilled persuader, Abetz convinced Hitler that France, if treated considerately, might swiftly accept a subordinate place in the “New Order.” His job in Paris was to work on “elements receptive to conditioning public opinion favourably”—and he was immeasurably successful. Around him Abetz collected a powerful support team of Francophone Germans. Among them was an unusual figure called Ernst Jünger, who had won the highest German decoration in 1918 and whose book, The Storm of Steel, was one of the most remarkable on the First World War to come out of Germany. As asympathique writer he ranged widely through the salons of Occupied Paris, and wrote perceptively in his Parisian diaries³—though the reality of the suffering of the Jews seems largely to have passed by this curiously detached, dehumanised spectator. Illustrative of how fashionable society reacted to the more sortable among the former enemy is Baron Élie de Rothschild’s account of the parties given at his town mansion on the Avenue de Marigny while occupied by a Luftwa fe general. On returning from prison camp, Rothschild observed to the old family butler, Félix, that the house must have been very quiet during the war; the butler replied:

“On the contrary, Monsieur Élie. There were receptions every evening.”

“But . . . who came?”

“The same people, Monsieur Élie. The same as before the war.”⁴

Least considerable, and generally unheeded, was the “Embassy” of Pétain’s regime in Vichy, capital of Unoccupied France. Set up in style at the Matignon, residence of prime ministers of France, the Vichy Embassy had derisory powers and little influence, and kept Vichy eminently ill-informed as to what was happening in Paris. Although Abetz adroitly always showed it a smiling face, under Laval’s policy of total collaboration it earned the contempt of the German military.

Under the mantle of Abetz, censorship in the shape of the “Bernhard List” proscribed 150 books to be removed from the libraries. Also under way was the requisitioning of Jewish houses in Paris and the works of art contained in them, as well as in Jewish-owned galleries. The Jeu de Paume became a huge depot for pillaged works of art on their way to Germany. It was Vivant Denon in reverse. By the end of the war it was estimated that some 20,000 works of art followed this route to Germany. Perhaps between 500 and 600 paintings deemed “unfit for sale” were burned in the Louvre courtyard—including works by “decadents” like Miró. Many more were destroyed in air-raids, or never recovered; that so many were located and returned safety was greatly due to the courage and tenacity of the conservatrice at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland, who managed to keep a discreet inventory of every item that passed out of the building.

WHILE THE GERMAN MILITARY instinctively inclined towards dealing with the right, Abetz’s preference was for collaborators of the left, notably among the pre-war pacificists and those committed to the belief that Versailles had given Germany a raw deal. From the first, his wide network of French contacts included writers like Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle and Jean Luchaire, editor of Le Matin, which reappeared in the earliest days of the Occupation. Abetz and Luchaire were reckoned to have an almost symbiotic relationship. Equally dedicated to the success of Germany, Jacques Doriot—originally a metal-worker—had started on the Politburo of the Communist Party, then swung right to form the Fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF). Also from the left, Marcel Déat had at one time been violently anti-war and regarded as Blum’s successor in the Socialist Party. Now his Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) appealed largely to the middle aged and middle class. Among the most ardently anti-Semitic of the collabos was the apocalyptic Céline, so obsessed by death and destruction. He declared to Ernst Jünger (who seems to have been taken aback by his vehemence), “how surprised he was, in fact stupefied, that we soldiers are not shooting, handing over, exterminating the Jews.”⁵This from a prize-winning French author.

Then there was Robert Brasillach, released as a prisoner of war to take over editorship of the splenetic, extreme right-wing Je Suis Partout, which rose to have an astonishing circulation of 300,000. Brasillach later explained himself (in 1944) in clearest terms:

The German genius and I had an affair . . . whether one likes it or not, we lived together. Whatever their outlook, during these years the French have all more or less been to bed with Germany, and whatever quarrels there were, the memory is sweet.

Could anything be less ambiguous? All these grands collaborateurs acted in the certain belief that Hitler was going to win (which, in summer 1940, looked a fair bet). They would pay a heavy price. Next came the French Communists, sullenly committed by Stalin’s pact of the previous August to supporting the Germans. Until Hitler turned round and savaged the Soviet Union the following year, L’Humanité was allowed to thrive. Typical was a headline of 14 July: “It is particularly comforting, in these times of misfortune, to see numerous Paris workers striking up friendliness with German soldiers . . . Bravo, comrades, continuez. . . .”

While at the other end of the social scale, those with most to lose took the Germans into their salons, lower down the staircase of collaboration came the massed ranks of the petit bourgeoisie, the merchants, artisans and grocers, bistrotiers and restaurateurs—the majority of Frenchmen dependent on “business as usual.” Most often their relationship with the occupiers, in the shop and in the street, would be one of wary correctness. Isaiah Berlin once offered a useful definition on the propriety of collaboration with an enemy: “You have to ‘get on’ with them; but you don’t have to be cosy.” Many in the Occupied Zone—not just the ideologically committed—were distinctly “cosy” with the former enemy. Already by October 1943, 85,000 illegitimate children had been fathered by Germans in France, which French writers considered to be “only the tip of the iceberg.” But, apart from the eminent ladies, like Coco Chanel and Arletty, who lustily acquired German officer lovers, the ordinary collabo horizontale perhaps deserves more sympathy now than she found at the time. With 2 million French males sequestered in Germany, perhaps these relations were no more than “a minor victory for human nature.” Many of the occupying Wehrmacht were attractive and well behaved; but, most of all, as wartime conditions became harsher, sleeping with a German might be the only way a woman could keep her children from starvation.

Harder to understand were the professional compromises made by artists and intellectuals. To be published at all, writers and journalists had to perform the Faustian commitment of submitting their work for approval. As of September 1940, the association of French publishers signed an agreement with Abetz amounting to “self-censorship”; in exchange for suppressing works by Jews and “subversives” the publishers were granted a margin of discretion in deciding what to publish and what to censor. During the Occupation the number of publications actually grew, so that in 1943 France led the world with 9348 titles— compared with Britain’s 6705 and even the USA’s 8320. Well-known authors published under the occupation included Cocteau, Simenon, Saint-Exupéry, Camus, de Beauvoir and Sartre. “Politically,” Beauvoir complained (in La Force de l’âge), “we found ourselves reduced to a position of impotence.” But she and Sartre spent their time either gossiping at the Café Flore or bicycling in the countryside—apparently undisturbed by war or occupiers—while also freely publishing their works. Sartre’s first play, Les Mouches, was staged in 1943 at the Théâtre de la Cité (formerly the Sarah Bernhardt) and highly praised by the drama critic of the German Pariser Zeitung; while in June 1944, as the Allies were landing in Normandy, his best-known play, Huis Clos, with its famous line “hell is other people,” opened in Paris. Sartre meanwhile joined the Comité National d’Écrivains, acidly described by David Pryce-Jones as being “less interested in resistance than in drawing up lists of other writers and journalists whom they would proscribe and silence after the war.”

Perhaps closer to the norm was Colette, who during the Occupation fell back on a philosophy of “le sage repliement sur soi”—translatable, in less poetical terms, as lying low. A close French friend of mine who later joined de Gaulle, and married a heroic member of the Resistance, deported to Ravensbrück, commented to me on what it had been like to be twenty-three years old, in paralytically boring Vichy: “You didn’t listen to the news, you didn’t read newspapers; you wondered where your next meal would come from—and who you would date. You just got on with life.” ⁶Almost certainly the same priorities would have ordained life in the Occupied Zone.

FOR THE INHABITANTS of Occupied France, particularly the Parisians, the winter of 1940–41 was one of a “constant hunt for fuel and food,” remembered as the worst of the war—possibly because the populace was so ill-accustomed to real hardship. Just as in 1870–71, for the poor with no purchasing power, the food shortage hit hardest. On a wage of perhaps ff1000 a month, how could one survive when potatoes cost ff20 a kilo, and butter ff150–200? Unemployment reached a total of over 1.1 million. As in the worst years of Napoleon, in-between men made considerable fortunes profiteering on scarce commodities; leather fixed at ff9 a kilo would cost ff70 by the time it reached its ultimate (German) purchaser. An operator called Szkolnikoff managed to make off with an estimated ff2 billion in real estate deals. With communications still interrupted there was a scarcity of fuel for heating, and no petrol for civilians. Strange-looking vélo-taxis, rustic bicycle rickshaws, often seen propelled by an emaciated woman with two strapping Germans and their girlfriends in a cartlike trailer, made an appearance on the streets.

APART FROM THE POOR, there was one particular section of the French left more dispossessed and persecuted than any other. Within the briefest interval of the Occupation establishing itself, Jews were forbidden to stand in food queues. By 27 September 1940, the German authorities had put in place the first ordinances proscribing the Jews in France, the jaws of the deadly trap that would close around them; Vichy followed suit with its own statute a week later, defining what constituted a Jew. Of approximately 300,000 Jews in France, a quarter were of foreign origin, notably those who had fled from the Nazis and other anti-Semitic regimes in central Europe during the 1930s. What was remarkable, and in some ways incomprehensible, was that all but a few thousand of the Jews in Paris went docilely to register. One of the first to do so was a frail old man of eighty-two, a non-practising Jew, an académicien and Nobel Prize winner—the famous philosopher Henri Bergson. Only three months later (mercifully) Bergson died, leaving these last brave words: “I would have converted, had I not foreseen the formidable wave of anti-Semitism that was about to engulf the world.”

Property and business premises were requisitioned. Pettily, Jews were also not allowed to use public telephones. Jewish professors were forced to resign from the Sorbonne—as being hostile to the German Reich. As Jewish writers and artists were censored into obscurity, in September 1941 an anti-Semitic exhibition was mounted in the Palais Berlitz entitled Le Juif et la France. Over 200,000 visited without exciting protest, criticism or demonstration. Then came the enforced wearing of the yellow star; the odious stigma of the East European ghetto under Hitler. Parisian reactions to it were mixed; generally it was “better not discussed,” though there were a few disgusted Parisian Gentiles who actually volunteered to wear the yellow star themselves. The collaborationist press vigorously supported the Nazi measures, with Au Pilori publishing an article, on 8 November 1942, that declared: “The Jewish question must be resolved immediately by the arrest and deportation of all Jews without exception.”

On 27 March 1942, the first of the deportations to Auschwitz took place; out of 1148, nineteen survived. Starting with the non-French Jews,⁷⁰ the victims were systematically swept up into bleak temporary camps either at Drancy, a suburb close to Le Bourget, or inside the “Vél d’Hiv,” the huge cycling stadium in the 15th arrondissement. Even Ernst Jünger was moved, watching the grande rafle of 16–17 July 1942:

A large number of Jews were arrested here in order to be deported—first of all the parents were separated from their children, so that their crying could be heard in the streets. Not for a single moment can I forget how I am surrounded by wretched people, human beings in the depth of torment.⁷

Of the French role, damningly a native writer like Jean-Paul Cointet declares: “The enterprise would have been impossible to carry out without the assistance of the French administration.”⁸ Although one-third of those deported were French citizens, the French police, and—later—the milice aiding the Gestapo would act with shocking brutality.⁷¹ Equally shocking was the frequency of délations— or denunciations of Jews in hiding.

The family of Alfred Dreyfus was affected like many others. Alfred’s granddaughter, Madeleine, who joined a Resistance group in the south-west in her early twenties, was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, where she died—weighing 70 lb—in January 1944; his nephew, René, one of the most decorated of the family in the First World War, also never returned from Auschwitz. Nor did Rachel Dreyfus Schil’s sixty-three-year-old son Julien, denounced by his concierge in the 16th arrondissement and deported to Auschwitz by the Gestapo—readily assisted by the French police. Another related Parisian Jewish family was that of Nissim Camondo, once known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” who had moved to Paris from Turkey under Louis-Napoleon, establishing themselves in the notably Sephardic area of the Parc Monceau. Of the next generation, Isaac Camondo, a passionate lover of music, helped finance the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, famed for introducing Stravinsky and Diaghilev. His cousin, Moïse Camondo, built a magnificent house at 63 Rue de Monceau; tragically his only son, Nissim, was shot down in 1917 as a young lieutenant in the French Air Force. Moïse never recovered, selling his share in the family business and turning the house into one of the most remarkable small museums in Paris, named after his son, Nissim. His daughter, Béatrice, converted to Catholicism; nevertheless she, her husband Léon Reinach, and her children, Fanny and Bertrand, were all shipped off to Auschwitz. All died there in 1943; the family was extinguished, the French authorities doing nothing to save them. In a melancholy house full of ghosts, the photograph of a young boy in a big floppy cap, Bertrand, looks out at you reproachfully. Meanwhile a foreign Jew like Gertrude Stein was fortunate to sit out the war, unmolested, down at Culoz in the south-west.

A total of 75,721 Jews, possibly more unrecorded, were deported; only 3000 survived. The shame remained.

IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE, the war continued. Surprisingly, Britain had survived the Blitz, and in Egypt had severely mauled the Italian Army. Churchill was defiant; de Gaulle was at his side, gradually rallying the Free French, who now began to seem like a serious force, even retaking from Vichy some of the French colonies in Africa. It was not done without bloodshed. In 1940, an operation to take Dakar, incompetently and insecurely organised by the Free French, was repelled by Vichy forces; a successful effort to take over Syria and the Lebanon also met with heavy resistance, with fewer than one in six of the French troops there opting to join de Gaulle. More distinguished were the heroic march from Chad by General Leclerc (his real name, Philippe de Hauteclocque) to join the Allied armies across the Sahara, and General Koenig’s brave defence of Bir Hakeim in Libya in 1942.

Inside France, under the British-run Special Operations Executive (SOE) an incipient Resistance movement was already raising its head. That first bitter winter of deprivation had shown the Nazis at their harsh worst. In December the first execution took place, of a harmless Parisian engineer called Jacques Bonsergent, involved in a minor scuffle with a drunk German soldier leaving a brasserie—in no way an act of resistance, or terrorism. Thrown into the prison of Cherche Midi, he was sentenced to death and executed at Vincennes on Christmas Eve. Then, in June 1941 an earthshaking event occurred which, as well as changing the course of the war, profoundly affected French attitudes to it. Hitler invaded Russia. Frenchmen with a sense of history recalled the horrors of 1812, and where that had led Napoleon and the Grande Armée. Most immediately, the powerful French Communist Party, from being an ally of Hitler, became a bitter enemy. Automatically the maquis and the Free French of the Interior (FFI), backed and supplied by the SOE from London, began to form a potent arm of resistance at the back of the Wehrmacht.

The first real réseau, or resistance network, was formed among ethnologists in the Trocadéro’s Musée de l’Homme. One of them was a remarkable woman called Germaine Tillion who, among other deeds, helped British prisoners of war to escape after Dunkirk. Inexperienced, imprudent and betrayed, the réseau was tracked down before it could become much more effective than courageously producing an underground newspaper, Résistance. Between January and March 1941 arrests were carried out one by one, totalling eighteen. The following February, seven of the ethnologists were executed at Mont-Valérien; the remainder were deported. Tillion was the only one of the four leaders to survive Gestapo torture and three years in the appalling women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück, for which she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, avec palme, and the Légion d’Honneur.

The incredible courage and dedication required to set up and maintain a réseau in Paris, the dangers and difficulties involved, are hard for us to imagine so many years later. Paris was not the maquis or the massif central, where members of the Resistance had at least some prospects of escape and regrouping. With no transportation, in Paris they had to rely almost exclusively on the Métro, always watched by the enemy. Under permanent surveillance and the ever-present fear of délation by vigilant neighbours, constantly having to change their abode, and racked by hunger and fatigue, the agents lived a frightening and exhausting life of clandestinity. Radio operators with their primitive and heavy equipment were readily tracked down by sophisticated German radio directionfinding vans. Typical among the radio operators was the heroic Indian princess, Noor Inayat Khan, sent in by the SOE and caught and executed in 1944. There were many, many others like her. The Resistance found itself progressively caught between on the one hand the German security service and Gestapo, and on the other, the French police. They soon came to realise that there was little difference between being arrested by the Germans, and by their own people. In the estimate of one expert, David Schoenbrun: “Practically everyone in the resistance was eventually arrested by the French police or the German gestapo. Some escaped and carried on, but the majority suffered torture, deportation, concentration camps and death.” ⁹

Following the invasion of Russia came, in April 1942, the creation of the Communist-dominated Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), which added a new ruthlessness to the savage cycle of acts of assassination and sabotage against the German and Vichy French authorities, followed by the execution of innocent and uninvolved hostages taken at random by the Nazis. It was, however, a serious—and denigrating—distortion of history to suggest, as did the controversial post-war film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971),⁷² that all the serious resistance was carried out by the Communists, and that the rest tended to be gay eccentrics.

On 21 August 1941, Pierre Fabien shot a German naval officer at the Barbès Métro station in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, heralding a long series of such killings. A week later there was an assassination attempt at Versailles against Laval and Déat at the launch of the Légion des Volontaires Français (LVF)—poor fools enlisted to fight alongside the Wehrmacht in Russia, photographed departing for the East in trains with graffiti that proclaimed their abiding obsession, “Mort aux Juifs,” painted on the sides of the train doors. Given the odium attached to seeing Frenchmen clad inBoche uniforms, the news of the attempt provoked “a lively satisfaction in Parisian opinion,” according to J-P. Cointet.¹⁰ After each such act the executions enacted in reprisal were often of those swept up out on the streets after the curfew. The Germans blamed everything on the Communists, hundreds of whom were executed at Mont-Valérien, in the hopes that Parisians would become sickened by the killings. In Tulle in south-east France, on 9 June 1942, ninety-nine inhabitants were hanged by the SS, following an ill-prepared attack on a German garrison by the maquis. One witness thought that they were “laying out or repairing telephone or electricity lines. All the ladders . . .” He could not believe the sight of the bodies when he saw them dangling: “I asked myself if I was the victim of a hallucination.”

In spring 1943, the capture, torture and murder of the mysterious Jean Moulin⁷³ struck a shattering blow to de Gaulle’s Resistance movement, after which the focus moved from Lyons to Paris. The cycle of killings and reprisals stepped up, with one in three of those being deported to the death camps by the end of the war being women. In the aftermath of Liberation the Communists made vastly inflated claims as to the number of their own martyrs. As Galtier-Boissière noted caustically, out of the 29,000 Frenchmen and -women executed during the Occupation, no less than 75,000 were claimed to have been Communist.¹¹

IN NOVEMBER 1942, the British and Americans landed in French North Africa. The defending Vichy troops there faced a dilemma: “They might obey standing orders to resist any and all invaders; they might do nothing until clearer orders from higher authority had been received; or they might issue orders on their own authority contrary to standing orders to resist.” Typical was the reaction of one junior officer among the Vichy “defenders”: ¹² “I received two contradictory orders at ten minutes’ interval; one from my major, to rally with my section to the disembarking American troops; the other from my colonel, to resist to the bitter end.” Escaping a ten-year prison sentence for indiscipline, de Lattre de Tassigny fled to join the French forces in North Africa, thence to become France’s top soldier at the Liberation. The Germans invaded unoccupied Vichy France; and, Allied preparations began for the invasion of the country under Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery.

As this prospect grew closer, so—naturally—did the numbers of the Resistance swell; the latest joining becoming sarcastically known as résistants de la dernière minute, or naphtalines insofar as they had only just taken their uniforms out of mothballs. At the same time the two rival groups, Communist and Gaullist, planned their post-victory agendas for takeover in France. The spiral of anti-German violence, followed by more and more brutal reprisals, continued. Darnand’s milice increasingly took over the odious work of repression and deportation from the Germans, as every spare soldier was now required on the Eastern Front. With everything to lose, including notably their heads, the leading French collabos became entrenched diehards. Philippe Henriot, a Vichy journalist and leading milicien, declared in one of his broadcasts: “It is no longer enough to speak of civil war; the truth is that the manhunting season is now open.” Ten days after his own murder in June 1944 came the cold-blooded return killing of the imprisoned Georges Mandel, the Jew who had been one of the most courageous of Paul Reynaud’s ministers in 1940. Even Pétain, from his isolation in Vichy, was sparked to complain to Laval of the “sinister action,” where “proofs of collusion between the milice and the German police are daily provided . . . French prisoners are denounced and handed over to the German police.”

Relations between occupier and occupied worsened as, after 1943, the Germans made it plain that all they now wanted from France was labour and resources, rather than her willing support. By the end of the war, the systematic plundering of France had resulted in the stripping of 50 per cent of her iron output, 99 per cent of cement, 92 per cent of lorry production and 76 per cent of locomotives—not to mention the proportion of industry used for building and repairing German armour, etc. Around 646,000 French forced labourers had been transported to Germany, 60,000 civilians sent to concentration camps, and more than 75,000 made victims of the Holocaust.

AS D-DAY 1944 APPROACHED, Paris burned with impatience. Charles Braibant grumbled gloomily in October 1943, “It has taken twenty days to liberate Corsica, our one and only insular departement . . . At this speed, how many Frenchmen will have died of hunger or cold by the time our ninety departements are liberated?” In the run-up to Operation Overlord, the ruthless Allied Transportation Plan, to sever Wehrmacht communications with Normandy by day and night bombing, brought suffering and heavy casualties to the inhabitants of northern France. When even the area round Montmartre in Paris was heavily bombed in April 1944, the eighty-eight-year-old Marshal Pétain made his one and only visit to the capital to console the wounded. But in unliberated France the grim execution of résistants and hostages went on apace. There were atrocities like Oradour where villagers were herded into the church and burned alive. In the Vercors, the impregnable mountain stronghold near Grenoble, the SS landed in gliders purporting to be Allied, and wiped out the entire Resistance force, as well as hundreds of innocent civilians. Among the Nazi force, and committing some of the worst atrocities, was a division of Cossacks—whose forced repatriation to the Soviets was subsequently to provoke a furore in post-war England.

On 6 June 1944, in a reversal of that invasion of nine centuries previously, five Allied (US, Canadian and British) divisions, backed by 8000 bombers, 284 warships and 4000 landing craft, swarmed ashore in Normandy. A little more than two months later, they had broken out and smashed the German armies. As defeat grew closer, so the desperate brutalities by the occupiers multiplied. Hitler from his bunker in East Prussia determined that Paris should go down with him and his Thousand Year Reich. Specific orders for destruction were sent to the German Commandant, General von Choltitz. He was deeply reluctant, but still an obedient Prussian officer, and following the failed bomb plot against Hitler on 20 July, he was fearful for his own skin and the safety of his family.

IT WAS A QUESTION of whether the Allies could reach Paris before von Choltitz and his SS underlings were compelled to begin pressing the plungers. Eisenhower’s original plan following the breakout from Normandy in early August was to bypass Paris and head full speed for Germany. It was a crucial matter of time, and petrol—Montgomery’s and Patton’s columns being severely limited by supplies, all of which still had to come ashore over the beaches of Normandy.⁷⁴ Repeatedly de Gaulle beseeched Eisenhower to detach a column to liberate Paris—at first in vain. It was not just the destruction of Paris that de Gaulle feared; like Weygand in June 1940 and Adolphe Thiers seventy years previously, he was alarmed at the prospect of the Communists establishing a Red Commune in a destroyed city. His own FFI were outmatched by the Communists, who now numbered the best organised, and often the most courageous troops inside Paris. In the minds of all the French proponents as Liberation approached was the fate of Warsaw, only a matter of weeks before. General Bor-Komorowski’s heroic Poles had risen in anticipation of the arrival of their Russian liberators but halted on the wrong side of the Vistula; the Red Army did not arrive before Warsaw had been viciously and systematically destroyed and 166,000 Poles slaughtered.

On 13 August Parisians heard the first sounds of distant gunfire to the west. Within a matter of days, a spontaneous uprising began in the city—beyond the control of either de Gaulle’s headquarters in London, or the approaching Allies. In command of the Communist forces was a thirty-six-year-old firebrand, “Colonel Rol.” Alarmingly, he declared “Paris is worth 200,000 dead”; a view that was echoed by one of his commanders, Roger Villon, who exclaimed when it seemed Notre-Dame was facing destruction: “So what if Paris is destroyed . . . Better Paris be destroyed like Warsaw than that she live another 1940 . . .”¹³

On the 15th the Communists brought the Paris railway workers out on strike. For the first time during the whole period of German occupation the Métro stopped; electricity and gas failed; the cinemas closed— though, bizarrely, the theatres went on performing to the very last moment, by candlelight. Just as during the Commune in 1871, euphoric young Parisians set to erecting hundreds of barricades—though they would hardly be a match for a Panther tank. Under constant pressure from Hitler in his East Prussian “Wolf’s Lair” (one of the Führer’s last communications being the famous exhortation, “Is Paris burning?”), methodically von Choltitz set about preparing the demolition charges in buildings like the Opéra and the Luxembourg. Trucks carrying naval torpedoes containing tons of explosive set off round the city. Redoubts, backed by twenty anti-tank guns, were set up round key points like the École Militaire, the Palais Bourbon, the Ministry of the Marine and the Quai d’Orsay. Already the Grand Palais had been largely gutted by fire from fighting around it. When Rol’s men trapped four truckloads of German soldiers in the tangle of streets and alleys between the Seine and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, they used Molotov cocktails to turn them into human torches. This killing of men under his command understandably infuriated von Choltitz, who now prepared to blow up the Madeleine and the Opéra “in one stroke.”

On the 19th the police went out on strike, allowing the Préfecture on the Île de la Cité to be taken over by the FFI, who turned it into a fortress. For the first time since 1940, Parisians saw the tricolore float above it. For the next five days the Préfecture held out as a focus of resistance as the Germans attacked it with every arm in their arsenal. From his HQ across the river in the Marais, de Gaulle’s representative, Alexandre Parodi, watched in alarm as Rol unleashed his premature uprising. Urgently he radioed de Gaulle to persuade Eisenhower to send troops. Finally de Gaulle’s entreaties won. With a superb sense of diplomatic imperatives, Eisenhower ordered General Bradley to dispatch the French Second Armoured Division, under his subordinate, General Leclerc, to head full speed for Paris. Bradley was to have a back-up of units from the veteran US Fourth Division following close alongside Leclerc—just in case. De Gaulle had meanwhile arrived at the recently liberated Château de Rambouillet, some 35 miles south-west of Paris. According to an aide, as he awaited Leclerc, he took down from the library bookshelves a copy of Molière to steady his nerves. To Leclerc he gave the order to move—and: “Go fast. We cannot have another Commune.” De Gaulle took leave of Leclerc with some envy, musing to himself, “How lucky you are” and contemplating that, particularly in this very special context, “in war, the luck of generals is the honour of governments.”¹⁴

General Bradley now learned, to his extreme annoyance, that Leclerc was already under way and planning to swing eastwards so as to enter Paris from the south, through the Porte d’Orléans—the same route that Napoleon had followed in 1814 at the beginning of the Hundred Days, but contrary to the line of march laid down by Bradley’s US 12th Army Group HQ. French history books would henceforth be able to relate how Paris had been liberated by French forces, with a little Allied assistance. Nevertheless, the move on Paris was to prove barely in time. Inside the city Raoul Nordling, an inspired Swedish consul, managed to arrange a brief ceasefire with von Choltitz which almost certainly saved the men beleaguered in the Préfecture.

UNDER THE CEASEFIRE the German occupiers began to pull out, accompanied by truckloads of loot; one officer was even seen trying to tear down the curtains at the Majestic and stuff them into his suitcase— to “make a dress later.” On the Rue Lafayette, Galtier-Boissière watched as there sped by “monocled generals, coming from the sumptuous hotels in the quartier of the Étoile inside shining torpedoes, accompanied by elegantly dressed blondes who seemed on their way to some à la mode beach.”¹⁵ With them also left the leading collabos—heading for an uncertain future in Germany. Most of them were unrepentant and filled with illusions born of despair at the realisation of German defeat. From D-Day onwards, Marcel Déat had been assuring his cohorts: “The Normandy enterprise is developing very favourably for the Axis” (17 June) and “The route to Paris has been barred” (7 August). Ten days later he made his own precipitate departure from Paris. (He died in refuge in Italy in 1955.)

“You could feel that everything was at an end,” wrote Robert Brasillach in his journal, almost with a note of elegy:¹⁶

You could measure the catastrophe inch by inch, and yet the weather was marvelous, the women were delicious, and you caught your breath at the most magical sights—the Seine, the Louvre, Notre-Dame—the whole while wondering whatever would become of it all.

In parts of Paris bitter fighting was already under way, but the imperturbable fishermen with their long cannes still fished unprofitably in the Seine, and daily Brasillach continued to take himself off to the Bibliothèque Nationale to work on his Greek anthology. Finally he too went to ground in a Parisian garret, giving himself up when he heard that his mother had been arrested in his stead. Céline, together with his wife and cat, joined others piled into German trucks and evacuated to join Pétain and Laval—scooped up from the luxury of the Matignon—and other grands collabos in semi-house arrest at Sigmaringen on the Danube. There they sat out the remaining eight months of the war miserably, treated with contempt by their Nazi “liberators,” waiting for the Allies and their inevitable fate. With their departure Je Suis Partout was rechristened by Parisian wits: Je Suis Parti.

AS FAST AS THE GERMAN SS under von Choltitz mined buildings, the fifis (nickname of the FFI) cut the wires. At long last on 24 August, just as the defenders were running out of food and ammunition, a plane under heavy fire from German tanks dropped a message on the Préfecture: “Hang on, we are arriving.” Moving from their base around Rambouillet, and sweeping aside desultory resistance, Leclerc’s armour entered Paris. In command of the French spearhead were American Sherman tanks, all bearing the names of famous French victories of 1914–18—Marne, Verdun, Douaumont and Mort-Homme. One American major with the US Fourth Division, recalled: “fifteen solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine.” ¹⁷ The welcome threatened to slow the advance more than the German 88s. No less emotional was the welcome of Resistance prisoners freed from the death cells of Fresnes Prison.

Arriving on the Concorde after a brisk firefight, Douaumont heroically rammed and knocked out a lethal Panther. (Perhaps appropriately it was Verdun that led the capture of the École Militaire.) A short while later, just outside von Choltitz’s HQ, Mort-Hommewas destroyed. Inside, von Choltitz had received one more signal from Wehrmacht GHQ with the imperative question: “Demolitions started?” He calmly finished his lunch, listened to the church bells outside proclaiming the arrival of the Allies, instructed his orderly to pack for prisoner-of-war camp, and surrendered. Despite all he had tried to do to stave off Hitler’s intentions to raze Paris, von Choltitz only narrowly escaped being lynched by Colonel Rol’s soldiers, enjoying better fortune than many Germans taken that day.

By the end of fighting on 27 August, the battle for Paris had cost Leclerc 71 killed and 225 wounded—in addition to approximately 990 FFI killed and some 600 civilians. Nevertheless, that night US war correspondent Ernie Pyle recorded “the loveliest, brightest story of our time.”

ON 2 5 AUGUST, after pacing impatiently up and down the great terrace at Rambouillet, Charles de Gaulle set forth for Paris, “simultaneously gripped by emotion and filled with serenity.” At the Palais Bourbon to accept the German garrison’s surrender, de Gaulle expressed disapproval that Colonel Rol’s name should appear on the surrender document, alongside Leclerc’s. Then he went to “reoccupy” his old office at the Ministry of War in Rue Saint-Dominique, where he found nothing had changed since he and Paul Reynaud had left together on the night of 10 June 1940. Reaching the Hôtel de Ville, on foot, de Gaulle declared he would only receive the various representatives of the Resistance in a government building—although it was Communist cohorts who had in fact done most of the fighting during Liberation week. Nobody in London or Washington had planned to see de Gaulle installed and functioning like this for some time. Yet there he was, digging in, and—as one senior US diplomat recognised—“nothing short of force was going to budge him out.” At the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle told the euphoric members of his entourage austerely: “The enemy is shaken, but he is not beaten . . . more than ever our national unity is a necessity . . . War, unity, grandeur—that is my programme.”

The war was still on; the grandeur was there all right—but was the unity? Georges Bidault, political President of the Conseil National de la Rèsistance (CNR), invited de Gaulle to “step on to the balcony and solemnly proclaim the Republic before the people here assembled.” De Gaulle brusquely refused, declaring unambiguously, “The Republic has never ceased to exist . . . I myself am President of the Government of the Republic. Why should I proclaim it now?” Then he did go to the window and made a brief speech to the throbbing mass of people that now crammed the Place below, but engaging the whole city and nation at his feet:

Paris! Paris outraged! Paris shattered! Paris martyrised! But Paris liberated. Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, in concurrence with the armies of France, with the support and concourse of the whole of France, of fighting France, the only France, the true France, eternal France. ¹⁸

Mention of any Allied involvement in these great events was judiciously withheld, while many outside the Hôtel de Ville that day had doubtless been there only four months previously to acclaim Marshal Pétain. Now the crowd began to chant rhythmically “De Gaulle, de Gaulle, de Gaulle.” As he left, one of the Communists on the CNR was heard to remark, “We’ve been had.” So, for that matter, had the General’s allies; and on that day was sealed the bid for independence and Gaullist pre-eminence that would be the source of Anglo-Saxon headaches in years to come.

26 AUGUST was Charles de Gaulle’s greatest day: the day he had been waiting for since that forlorn date of 18 June 1940—possibly, indeed, the day for which Fate had been preparing him since he fell wounded and a captive at Verdun in February 1916. Arguments about legitimacy, as well aswho liberated Paris, and harsh years of austerity and recuperation might lie ahead; nevertheless, as the authors of Is Paris Burning? suitably remark of that day in August 1944, “rarely in history had it been given to a man to live a moment of triumph as dizzy and exalting.”¹⁹ Wearing as always his uniform and képi of a simple brigadier-general, recognisable above all the crowds, his only decorations the Cross of Lorraine and the red-and-blue badge of the Free French, de Gaulle made his historic and solemn promenade up the Champs-Élysées. It had all the appearance of spontaneity, yet de Gaulle must have conceived it long before. He laid a simple wreath of red gladioli at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Étoile, relit the eternal flame, then began the walk down the avenue which had been laid out by previous French rulers for just such a purpose. All the way down to the Concorde rooftops and windows were crowded with cheering thousands, in a day of perfect sunshine. The lofty, towering, haughty, unsmiling figure dominated all around him; at his side, or rather an appropriate step behind, came the diminutive Bidault—almost skipping to keep up—followed by all the other Gaullist political notables who would resume trading under the flag of the Fourth Republic—and Generals Koenig, Juin and Leclerc, who had led the Free French on the long route march from Africa and defeat. Behind came a mêlée of those who only so recently had been fighting to liberate Paris, intermingled with the less admirablenaphtalines and résistants de la dernière minute. It was an uneven mass; de Gaulle had specifically wanted to avoid anything resembling a formal military parade. Lining the streets between the Étoile stood the battle-worn troops of Leclerc’s division; this in itself was yet another source of antagonism with the American High Command—for Leclerc had been ordered to rejoin the march towards Germany, but de Gaulle had countermanded the order with the cool response: “I loaned you Leclerc . . . I can perfectly well borrow him back for a few moments.” Pointedly, none of the American troops of the US Fourth Division now in Paris were invited to participate; their day would come.

At each step down the 2 kilometres of the Champs-Élysées a particular vision of France and her past unfolded itself in de Gaulle’s mind:

It seemed to me that the glories of the past were associated with today’s . . . On his pedestal, Clemenceau, whom I hailed in passing, looked as if he were springing up to march beside us. The chestnut trees in the Champs-Élysées that L’Aiglon, in prison, dreamed about and which had seen for so many, many years the grace and prestige of France displayed beneath them, offered themselves now as joyous grandstands to thousands of spectators. The Tuileries, which framed the majesty of state under two emperors and two monarchs; the Place de la Concorde and the Place du Carrousel, which had observed the frenzies of revolutionary enthusiasm and the reviews of conquering regiments; the streets and the bridges named after battles won; on the other bank of the Seine, Les Invalides, its dome still sparkling with the splendour of Le Roi Soleil, the tombs of Turenne, of Napoleon, of Foch; and the Institute, honoured by so many illustrious minds—these were the benevolent witnesses of the human stream that flowed between them . . .

History, gathered in these stones and in these squares, seemed to be smiling down on us . . . ²⁰

Even though Paris also remembered its terrible days, when—four times within two lifetimes—the Champs-Élysées had had “to submit to the outrage of invaders parading in time to their own odious fanfares.”

For the historian-warrior, there also came warnings that day: “Quite near me,” de Gaulle was reminded, “Henri IV fell victim to fanatical hatred.” His “stroll” down the Champs-Élysées was also an extraordinarily courageous, if not foolhardy undertaking. Between him and von Choltitz’s withdrawing forces were only one US regiment and a combat team of Leclerc’s division. Heavy fighting continued in the northern districts through the 27th; the city had not yet been cleared of enemy snipers, and there were many trigger-happy members of the FFI still at large—as was soon to be witnessed. But this extraordinary man, on this extraordinary day, “believed in the fortune of France”—as he had never ceased to do. As the procession debouched into the Concorde, shots rang out. Many of the crowd threw themselves down for cover, but de Gaulle walked straight on. An American sergeant, who admitted hiding behind his jeep and “felt ashamed,” watched de Gaulle keep on moving, standing “very straight, standing tall for his country.”

Towards 4:30 in the afternoon, the entourage reached Notre-Dame for a solemn Te Deum. Once more mysterious shots rang out, their provenance still a mystery to this day, though de Gaulle firmly blamed the Communists. Among the congregation, which included Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, was Malcolm Muggeridge, then a British Intelligence officer who had reached Paris late the previous night:

The effect was fantastic. The huge congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces . . . There was a single exception; one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, de Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him—towering and alone; the rest, prostrate.²¹

From that day Muggeridge noted how,

Wherever de Gaulle appeared, he was the government, and recognised as such. Witnessing this performance I realised that it was not just his political acumen, and the undoubted charisma of his weird angular disposition, which made him the unquestioned master of the situation. Rather, he had some second sense arising out of his complete confidence in himself and his destiny, which guided his steps.

The shooting confirmed de Gaulle in his intention to disarm and bring under military discipline the FFI as soon as possible; to stand down the CNR, and to assume “the legitimate power” himself.

After 26 August 1944, remarked an American journalist: “de Gaulle had France in the palm of his hand.”²² With a modicum of hindsight a historian today might also say that it was just as well. For all the huffing and puffing in Washington and London at de Gaulle’s self-promotion, his prompt intervention in August 1944 probably saved France from the type of murderous revolution that overtook Greece on liberation later that same year. He forestalled a Communist takeover in Paris which could have seen a repeat of the Commune of 1871; it proved that he knew his French history better than the political advisers of the Allied High Commission, let alone Roosevelt’s in Washington.

That night, as Paris indulged in her reclaimed freedom, Hitler carried out a last act of futile vengeance. The commander of Luftflotte 3, who had earlier offered his services to von Choltitz, launched from Le Bourget a valedictory raid of a 150 planes on the east of the city. It was the heaviest air-raid Paris experienced during the entire war; in the celebrations, not a single anti-aircraft gun responded. Nearly a thousand Parisians were wounded, 214 killed—and the Halles aux Vins largely destroyed. As de Gaulle watched the bombing from his old office in the Ministry of War, almost echoing Clemenceau in 1919, he sighed to an aide: “They think that because Paris is liberated, the war is over. Eh bien, there you see—the war goes on. The hardest days are ahead. Our work has just begun.” ²³