Until this moment, the lanky man in khaki had been just a voice on the radio, beamed in from London. Now the 6ft 5in figure was the embodiment of victorious France as he towered over his compatriots in the sweaty, ecstatic throng packed into the Hôtel de Ville on the banks of the Seine.
General Charles de Gaulle rarely showed emotion, but he swallowed hard on that day of wild celebrations, Friday, August 25, 1944, before he described the ordeal from which the City of Light had just emerged.
Paris had been ‘outraged… broken… martyred’. But now, he continued triumphantly, it was ‘liberated. Liberated by itself! Liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help and assistance of the whole of France, of that France which fights, of the only France, the true France, the eternal France!’.
General Charles de Gaulle and his entourage set off from the Arc de Triomphe following Paris’s liberation in August 1944
Ecstatic crowds fill the Champs Elysees to celebrate the liberation of the French capital
German officers taken prisoner during the liberation of Paris after four years of occupation
This passionate declaration bore little resemblance to the sober facts. The uprising of the previous days had been dramatic and picturesque, but hardly a full-blooded revolt. The ‘armies of France’ amounted to one armoured division, equipped by the Americans and backed by US infantry.
The ‘whole of France’ had played no direct part in events. And the reputation of the ‘France which fights’ was heavily tarnished by the debacle of 1940 when the army abandoned the capital to the Germans without firing a shot.
De Gaulle’s version was what today we would call ‘his truth’. It was a necessary invention if the nation was ever to recover its self-esteem and come together after decades of venomous division that at times threatened to bring it to the edge of civil war.
In crafting this rosy story he had some great imagery to work with. The moment when the Allied armies, fresh from victory in Normandy, joined forces with the dashing ‘Fifis’ – shorthand for the French Forces of the Interior – who had taken to the streets of Paris to do battle with the Germans, was the most filmed event in history to date.
The pictures captured that day rekindled humanity’s love affair with the city. The fall of Paris had been a cause for near universal mourning. Now it was restored to the world’s imagination in all its clichéd but reassuring familiarity.
The liberators were overwhelmed with bottles and embraces. The jeep of American war reporter Ernie Pyle was ‘simply swamped in human traffic… we were swarmed over and hugged and kissed and torn at. Everybody, even beautiful girls, insisted on kissing you on both cheeks. The fact that I hadn’t shaved for days and was gray-bearded as well as bald-headed made no difference’.
It was, many felt, ‘the day the war should have ended’. The myth created on the joy-filled streets was one of the props that supported post-war France as it tried to come to terms with the immediate past. It helped Parisians and the rest of the country forget the painful realities of their conduct during the four-year occupation.
In my new book, Paris ‘44: The Shame And The Glory, I look behind the cinematic façade of the liberation to examine the fascinating contradictions woven into the story. Researching it was a labour of love. I first went to Paris in my late teens, hitchhiking with a pal, camping in the Bois de Boulogne and surviving on bread, cheese and red wine that came in plastic bottles.
I have lived there off and on throughout my life and remain a huge fan, though not blind to its exasperations and pretensions.
I tell the story through the eyes of the protagonists – collaborators as well as resisters, Germans as well as French. Among the cast of characters are some famous names like Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso as well as some intriguing unknowns.
My goal was to celebrate one of the great moments in world history while laying bare the conflicts and contradictions bubbling beneath the surface – the shame as well as the glory.
Crowds line the Champs Elysees to watch Allied tanks and trucks pass through the Arc de Triomphe
A young French woman makes eyes at an RAF officer after the liberation of Paris
Certainly, in the first years of the occupation there was a lot more of the former than the latter. No one knows how Londoners would have behaved if the Germans had managed to cross the Channel, and it was not my intention to make any lofty judgments.
But, put politely, Parisians, and in particular the upper classes, adapted quickly to the new realities. Reactions varied from surly acceptance, to worldly appreciation of the new opportunities the invaders brought with them, to outright enthusiasm.
The cafés, cabarets and theatres did not stay shut for long and were soon filled with customers in field-gray uniforms watching many of the acts that delighted pre-war audiences – the likes of Maurice Chevalier, Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf.
The great restaurants did not miss a beat, and Albert Blaser, the maitre d’ at Maxim’s, ushered Nazi generals to the best tables with the same smooth deference he had shown to peacetime celebrities. The high-class brothels, too, did a roaring trade, as well as the humble street walkers in which Paris abounded.
When the city’s equally numerous band of writers and artists examined their consciences they reacted in very different ways. Some like Albert Camus ended up in the resistance. Others, like Picasso, refused to let the inconvenience of war disturb his working and romantic arrangements and stayed in his adopted home, spurning an American offer to take him in, keeping his head down and waiting for events to pass.
But there was also a hard core of Right-wing intellectuals who embraced the Nazi masters. Among the most notorious was Robert Brasillach, editor of the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere).
He and his ilk saw France’s defeat as a punishment for the decadence of the pre-war Third Republic, and lauded the Nazis as the architects of a new Europe that would defend Western civilisation from the Bolshevik hordes of the Soviet Union.
Collaboration was official policy, promoted and overseen by the new authoritarian French state ruled by former war hero Marshal Philippe Pétain from his toytown capital in the spa resort of Vichy, more than 200 miles south of Paris.
Pétain presented himself as a shield who would protect his people from the worst excesses of the occupiers. In fact he proved incapable of stopping the Germans from robbing the country blind of its resources and manpower. French policemen and officials ended up actively participating in some of the most ghastly Nazi crimes, rounding up France’s Jews and sending them off to the death camps.
The French gradually grew disillusioned with Pétain’s empty promises. Meanwhile, the prestige of his former protégé Charles de Gaulle, virtually unknown before he departed to carry on the fight from London, grew steadily, built by a series of inspirational speeches broadcast by the BBC.
Nonetheless, it was 14 months before a Frenchman gunned down a German. Pierre Georges – aka ‘Colonel Fabien’ – shot dead a young naval officer in the Paris Métro, thereby sparking a cycle of attack and reprisal that would culminate in the August 1944 uprising. But Georges was a communist who took his orders from Moscow, not London.
The assassination marked a cynical volte face. Until Hitler decided to invade Russia and rupture his non-aggression pact with Stalin, Moscow’s instructions to the French party were to lie low. Indeed, an underground communist newspaper even urged readers who encountered a German soldier in their local bar to buy him a drink, because ‘he is a proletarian like you’.
Now the orders were to shoot him and it was the communists who would do most of the fighting in the countdown to liberation.
The Germans made it clear that any act of defiance was punishable by death. Abetted by Vichy, they shot imprisoned resisters in retaliation for the deeds of their comrades beyond the walls.
There is no disputing the courage and heroism of the ‘resisters of the first hour’ of all political persuasions. Their numbers were small and their military impact very limited – but they kept France’s honour alive and provided a narrow foundation on which to build de Gaulle’s fable of France unbowed.
As 1944 advanced, the numbers began to swell. Everyone knew the Allied invasion was coming and the only question was when.
Across the Channel, market towns that had rarely seen a foreigner filled up with Americans and other exotic nationalities, including the multi-national soldiers of the French Deuxième Blindée – the Second Armoured Division commanded by Philippe Leclerc.
In London, reporters and photographers gathered, eager to have a front-row seat at the liberation of Paris, a city that many of them knew well. Leading the pack was Ernest Hemingway, now at the height of his fame. Success had coarsened him and he had become a booze-sodden parody of himself. Returning to the place where he had made his name would, he hoped, act on him like a dip in the fountain of youth.
What the assembled press corps did not know was that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had no intention of liberating Paris. The Allied plan was to smash the Germans in Normandy and chase the survivors back across the Rhine. Diverting to the capital would only slow the operation down and lumber the Allies with responsibility for feeding and maintaining the very hungry population.
A British soldier stops to kiss a small child before cheering crowds in Paris, 1944
The yellow star used to identify Jews is sewn onto a jacket in German-occupied Paris in 1942
It was only after relentless badgering by de Gaulle that Eisenhower graciously agreed to change strategy – even though it risked friction with President Roosevelt and the State Department, neither of whom had any love for the pathologically touchy Frenchman.
De Gaulle’s arguments were reinforced by emissaries who sneaked through the enemy lines from Paris and painted a lurid picture of a city on the verge of disaster. On August 19, the uprising had started in earnest. Unless the Allies rushed to the rescue, the Germans would put it down with appalling savagery and perhaps reduce the place to rubble – just as they were doing at that very moment in Warsaw.
Ike’s order to Leclerc’s men on August 23 to march at full speed to Paris – backed up by the US 4th Infantry Division in case of mishaps – allowed de Gaulle to claim a French victory and handed him the keys to power.
The race for Paris and the jubilation that followed is one of the most dramatic and uplifting stories of the war. Robert Capa, the dashing Hungarian-born war photographer, returned to the city where he’d ‘learned to eat, drink and love’ and felt the viewfinder in his camera blur with tears as he snapped brilliant shots of ‘the most unforgettable day in the world’.
Also present was Sergeant Jerry Salinger, later famous as JD Salinger for his novel The Catcher In The Rye. He arrived with the 4th Infantry and wrote to a friend: ‘There was still shooting on the streets but nobody seemed to care. All the girls looked elegant [in] their best August dresses.’
He felt that ‘if we had stood on the hood of the jeep and taken a leak, Paris would have said: “Ah the darling Americans! What a charming custom!”’
Love was in the air, as evidenced by the soaring birth rate nine months later. In 15th arrondissement it was double what it had been the year before, a living, breathing legacy of what had been the party of the century.
Female companionship was freely available for the liberators, both soldier and civilian that night. Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Massu left his unit camped out near the Arc de Triomphe after being summoned by General Leclerc to a victory dinner at Les Invalides.
When he returned to camp the revels were in full swing. ‘I would prefer to draw a veil over what happened between my men and the women of Paris around the Place de l’Étoile that night,’ he recalled.
Reporter Ernie Pyle joked: ‘Anybody who does not sleep with a woman tonight is just an exhibitionist!’
But underneath the joy and relief ran an ugly current of vengeance. The celebrations were accompanied by a carnival of retribution.
The first to suffer were women accused of sleeping with the enemy – ‘collaboration horizontale’ as it was called. Some were prostitutes, some guilty only of falling in love with a German and some entirely innocent. The pictures of these poor creatures, heads shaven, daubed with swastikas and surrounded by jeering men are a stain on the memory of the liberation.
Rough justice was meted out in an orgy of violence against collaborators real and imagined. Shortly after the liberation, a corpse tied to a paving stone was pulled from the Seine. Its hands were tied and it had a bullet hole in the back of the head. In the next days 27 more were recovered from the river in the same condition.
The bodies were traced back to a former dental clinic on the Left Bank which had been taken over by communist resisters and turned into a revolutionary court where suspected collaborators were tortured and killed.
Some of the victims later turned out to have sheltered Jews and Allied airmen. No one knows for sure how many were killed in this ‘savage cleansing’, but a post-war investigation put the number at a minimum of 10,000.
De Gaulle soon imposed order. He recognised the need for to punish the most egregious Vichy figures. Pétain went on trial in Paris in 1945 and was given the death penalty, a sentence that was immediately commuted to comfortable imprisonment on an island off the Atlantic coast. The Nazi fanboy journalist Brasillach was not so lucky and was executed by firing squad.
But de Gaulle wanted to move on. The reckoning was short and followed by a long stretch of official amnesia with many who had served Vichy and the Germans faithfully going on to high positions in post-war France.
The cabarets and music halls re-opened with – after a brief period of mild disgrace – the same old stars treading the boards again. Among them was Maurice Chevalier, whose song Paris Sera Toujours Paris proclaimed that whatever happens, Paris will always be Paris.
History has proved him right. The Olympics have reinforced the special place that the city holds in the hearts of the world. Eighty years after the liberation, it is right to remember the darkness that fell over the City Of Light. Beneath the charm and joie de vivre lie historical crosscurrents of anger, resentment and potential violence that are visible in the France of today.
But we should also never forget the heroism of those marvellous days. Look closely and you can still see reminders of it in the discreet marble plaques set into the walls, marking the spot where French men and women fell to German bullets, giving their lives to restore the honour of their capital.
- Paris ‘44: The Shame And The Glory, by Patrick Bishop (published by Viking at £25), is out now
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