Across the Seine, in the Hôtel de Ville where he worked, Jacques Cazaux, too, began to sense that something important and dramatic was happening. Through his window, he wrote, he heard “a discordant Marseillaise more beautiful than any I had ever before heard in my life.” People in and around the ornate Renaissance-style building on the site that had served as Paris’s city hall since the fourteenth century were singing the French national anthem aloud for the first time in four years, but their throats were too choked up with emotion to form the notes properly. Cazaux ran outside to see what had inspired this incredible moment. He saw the same sight Rol saw at almost the same time from the other side of the river. Both men knew that what they were witnessing was about to change the history of Paris forever. Cazaux was so inspired that he ran into the basement of the Hôtel de Ville in search of the French flag that he had helped to hide there in 1940.3
But if Cazaux was inspired by what he was seeing, Rol was more circumspect. Like Cazaux, he knew it meant that the uprising he had desired for so long was now underway. But as he bicycled through the northern edge of the sixth arrondissement, he also worried that he was rapidly losing control of the unfolding events. Even more ominously, he realized that his Gaullist partners and rivals had stolen a step on him. The uprising he had hoped for was beginning, but he may have lost his chance to play a leading role in it.
The symbol that had inspired so much emotion on this Saturday morning was unmistakable and easy for thousands of Parisians to see: A French tricolor flag was flying above the prefecture for the first time since June 1940. At around 6:00 that morning, a courageous policeman had climbed on top of a car in the prefecture’s courtyard and screamed, “In the name of General de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic, I take possession of the Préfecture de Police!” Between 1,500 and 2,000 policemen then rushed into the courtyard to applaud and join him in singing the Marseillaise. It was all part of a carefully crafted and organized plan by the police to make a bold statement of their support for de Gaulle.4
The Paris police had decided to take their strike one level further and occupy the building, in the process arresting the prefect of police, Amédée Bussières, as he was eating his breakfast. Sympathizers and supporters rushed to the building to help prepare its defense, including the prefecture’s female telephone operators, who would ensure communications with the outside world; the Abbé Robert Lepoutre, who rushed across the forecourt from Notre Dame to provide spiritual guidance, if needed; and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist and the son-in-law of Pierre and Marie Curie, who began to assemble Molotov cocktails to help the police defend themselves. He had brought the sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate with him; the champagne bottles were supplied by the police, who had sorrowfully emptied the champagne into drains in the prefecture’s cellar. Another sympathizer was lawyer Emmanuel Blanc, who later that week wrote an account of the event that began, “If you read these lines, know that not all Frenchmen are Pierre Laval.”5
Rol raced his bicycle to the prefecture as quickly as he could. Strapped to its frame was a bag that contained his carefully crafted plans for an uprising. Nowhere in those documents had Rol or anyone else called for the seizure of the prefecture, a massive and imposing structure that would be difficult for the Resistance to hold in the face of a determined German response. As Rol undoubtedly knew, the building’s prominent location in the middle of the Île de la Cité made it a perfect target for German tanks and, if the Germans chose to use them, airplanes. Rol saw in the seizure of the prefecture an important symbol of liberation, but also a dangerous distraction. He worried that the Préfecture de Police could now become the scene of a massacre.6
Rol demanded entrance into the prefecture, but the policemen on guard did not know who he was and turned him away. Furious, he suspected he was being double-crossed (by whom he did not exactly know). He rode his bicycle as quickly as he could to a garage that also served as a Resistance safe house. There he tore off the bag attached to his bicycle and removed from it the Spanish Civil War uniform he had worn when he had fought the fascists as a member of the International Brigades. Perhaps, he thought, the uniform he had worn when defending Barcelona might give him the gravitas he needed to play a role in the liberation of Paris.
Rol was right that someone was trying to take control of the prefecture away from him. That man, wearing a crisp suit and large eyeglasses, was sitting calmly on the terrace of the famous café Les Deux Magots, reading a newspaper. He was doing his best to look like just any other Parisian trying to make the most out of a dreadful cup of ersatz coffee on a beautiful summer morning. His thin, gaunt appearance helped him blend in with malnourished Parisians, although he had not spent much time in the city. At around 11:00 a.m., soon after Rol had put his Spanish uniform on, a black car belonging to the prefecture pulled up at the sidewalk of the Boulevard Saint-Germain in front of the terrace of the Deux Magots, which sat just a fifteen-minute walk from the Île de la Cité. A policeman who had helped to organize the seizure of the prefecture leaped from the car and approached the man reading the newspaper. “Monsieur le Préfet,” he said in a calm, measured voice, “the Préfecture is taken; it is now under your orders. Your car awaits.”7
Charles Luizet, Charles de Gaulle’s former student, who had sneaked back into the city just a few days earlier, put down his newspaper and left the café. He stepped into a second car that had just arrived and drove off to his new job as the prefect of the Paris police. The two cars turned left on the Rue du Dragon, going the wrong way down an empty one-way street, and met a third car that contained an armed escort for Luizet. His plan had worked to perfection. The Gaullists had taken control of the prefecture without firing a shot. They now had access to the weapons and other supplies inside the building as well as the right to claim that they had seized this important symbol of a free Paris. Even before the end of the week, Parisians would be referring to the courtyard of the prefecture as the “Courtyard of August 19.”8
Whether Luizet and his allies could hold the prefecture against the Germans—or Rol—remained to be seen. Mollifying Rol would not be easy. Although stealing a march on him and his FFI was undoubtedly a wonderful side benefit of the police uprising, Luizet had not intentionally sought to shut Rol out or provoke a confrontation with the FFI. Rather, he was following de Gaulle’s orders to ensure the loyalty and dependability of the police. Nevertheless, Luizet’s lightning coup de main had put Rol on the defensive and created an atmosphere of mistrust at a moment when the Resistance would most need unity of effort. Rol steeled himself for the scheduled 1:00 p.m. meeting with the leaders of the Resistance to discuss the uprising that had broken out without any of them having given the order. Now, rather than planning an uprising, they would have to decide how to react to the one in progress.
Neither Rol nor any of the other leaders of the Resistance could have missed the obvious point that the seizure of the prefecture had energized the people of Paris. Claude Roy, an FFI leader who spent part of the day in the building, observed that “the metamorphosis of the Paris police, from the hated symbol of authority to the beloved champion of the populace,” was confusing and inspiring at the same time. The Polish exile Andrzej Bobkowski noted the “crazy world” that Paris became on that day as liberation increasingly appeared to Parisians as a real possibility rather than a distant mirage. Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul, noted that, for him, the sight of the tricolor flag over the prefecture had two layers of significance. It meant not only that the situation had grown much more serious but also that a showdown between the Gaullists, whom he knew had now “taken in hand the leadership of the affair,” and the left-leaning FFI was now possible. Sporadic shooting had begun in the morning and increased throughout the day, although it remained hard for people in the city to figure out who was shooting at whom. One resident noted that his neighborhood had “the atmosphere of a city on the front lines” and worried about possible German responses.9
He was right to worry. A little over a mile away, at the luxurious Hôtel Meurice across the Rue de Rivoli from the Tuileries Gardens, Choltitz, already in his office, received reports of the seizure of the prefecture and the sporadic shooting. His officers could easily see the flag flying over the prefecture as they came into work. Tricolor flags soon went up on both towers of Notre Dame as well. Choltitz, according to his own memoirs, saw “no reason at all to worry about the military plan” he had in place to defend the city. Nevertheless, his instinctive professional bias against irregulars and civilians in arms led him to order preventive measures, including the authorization for German units to destroy any building from which a shot was fired at a German soldier. He also approved collective reprisals for any act of violence committed against German soldiers and ordered tanks to prepare to advance on the prefecture.10
Although quickly informed of the events in Paris, Hitler’s headquarters shared Choltitz’s lack of concern. The high command persisted in viewing the city in terms of its importance to German operational plans on the western front, and the seizure of one building seemed unlikely to significantly affect that role. Hitler’s headquarters thus ordered Choltitz to keep the bridges of Paris intact. The city’s transportation network might still be necessary in order to assure the safe withdrawal of German armies. German headquarters promised to dispatch more antiaircraft guns to protect the bridges from Allied air attacks, but the German high command offered little else, an indication that the events in Paris itself had made little impact on the thinking of those at the top decision-making levels. These responses revealed both how little the German headquarters understood about Paris and how low the city was on their order of priorities. Even General Walter Model, the commander in chief of German forces in France, thought that the Seine basin’s river crossings were more important than Paris itself. 11
While the Germans slowly deliberated, the leaders of the Resistance met in an apartment on the Rue de Bellechasse, just a short walk from Les Deux Magots café. They had hurriedly called the meeting to discuss the pros and cons of launching an insurrection, but the sounds of gunfire outside their windows and the revolutionary air in the streets showed conclusively that the people of Paris had already made that decision for them. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s senior representative in the city, accused the communists of having launched an insurrection prematurely in a bid for power, a charge that infuriated the communist representative André Tollet, who shot back that if an insurrection had begun prematurely, it was because of the Gaullist seizure of the prefecture.
The meeting was fraught with tension, recrimination, and fear for the safety of the city and its residents. All representatives present expressed their concern about possible German reprisals against the people of Paris. Rol, Tollet, and others also argued that from a military perspective, the concentration of the police inside the prefecture posed a grave risk. Rather than dispersing their strength through the city and fighting a guerrilla campaign, the police had put themselves in a terrible position. They could neither give up the prefecture, which was now too important a symbol even to consider yielding, nor defend themselves inside the building against German tanks. If the Germans mounted a major assault on the prefecture, where two thousand policemen shared just five hundred weapons, the result would be a bloodbath and a major setback to the Resistance, which was still starved for men and weapons. Somehow, they would have to get help to the prefecture.
Mutual anger and suspicion notwithstanding, cooler heads prevailed, and all sides recognized the need to come together at this critical time. Parodi realized that failing to support an insurrection brought with it the risk of losing all moral and political authority in the city, so widespread was the desire to fight. Parodi thus did what he could, given the obvious fact that the situation threatened to get away from him. Using the authority he had been given by de Gaulle and Koenig, Parodi ordered the mobilization of all Resistance members in the city eighteen to fifty years old. The orders were issued on letterhead that read “République Française” and ended with the words “Vive de Gaulle. Vive la France.” Then, probably to atone for the Gaullist seizure of the prefecture without informing Rol, Parodi offered to place all Resistance forces in the city under the FFI and therefore under Rol’s orders. The decision made tactical sense, because only Rol had the necessary command and control structure in place to manage a battle across the city. It also underscored the willingness of both sides to put their differences aside in the fight to save Paris.12
Parodi concluded that he and Luizet had no choice but to make common cause with the communists and support a general uprising as part of a united Resistance front. In doing so, he knew he was acting against de Gaulle’s express wishes to delay any uprising until the Allies could move regular forces into the city. Nevertheless, even more than he disliked the idea of disobeying de Gaulle, Parodi feared that the communists would take control of the insurrection, which he knew he could no longer prevent in any case. Therefore, despite the many risks he knew he was running for himself and the people of Paris, he threw his entire support behind the insurrection. “If I have made a mistake,” he said, “I shall have a lifetime to regret it in the ruins of Paris.”13
By the time the meeting ended, the Germans were taking their first concrete steps to evict the police from the prefecture. Armored personnel carriers arrived on the Île de la Cité just before 3 p.m. carrying around fifty German soldiers. They moved down the Boulevard du Palais on the prefecture’s west side, turning the street into a shooting gallery as they fired into windows. German soldiers also set up a security perimeter on the forecourt between the prefecture and Notre Dame to cover the arrival of three German tanks, one of which was a powerful 55-ton Tiger I that carried an 88 mm cannon capable of inflicting tremendous damage. It fired two shells at the main entrance, knocking out the left door on the prefecture’s massive double doors and sending up a cloud of smoke. Then, as quickly as they came, the vehicles drove away.14
Exactly why the tanks did not continue to fire on the prefecture until they compelled its surrender remains a mystery. The tankers may have been afraid to leave their slow and plodding machines vulnerable to cross-fires and Molotov cocktails; as events soon showed, they had good reason to fear both. Choltitz himself, a veteran of many urban battles, was reluctant to use tanks in city combat, believing that they were too exposed in closed spaces. The Germans may have been trying to force the police into a negotiation on Choltitz’s terms without sparking a confrontation that could lead to a city-wide battle. Whatever their motivation, the decision to fire into the prefecture did not have its desired effect. Léo Hamon, a socialist Resistance leader inside the prefecture, helped to maintain calm by rallying the police with an appeal to their new role: “The people of Paris have often struggled against you. Today, you are on the same side. They will never forget it. This will become a lasting bond.” His rallying cry helped to calm the nerves of the policemen inside the building and enabled them to focus on how to repulse the next German attack.15
That attack was not long in coming. At 3:30 p.m., three German armored vehicles, including two Panther tanks, tried to move across the Île de la Cité on the other side of the prefecture from Notre Dame, once again along the Boulevard du Palais. The tanks fired more rounds into the iron doors of the building, blowing them off their hinges and sending policemen in the interior courtyard scurrying behind sandbags for cover. But other policemen were ready for the slow-moving tanks and counterattacked from two directions. Using the Molotov cocktails fashioned by Joliot-Curie, they disabled all three vehicles, one of which turned out to be carrying arms; another was carrying gasoline. The arms were badly needed, as the defenders of the prefecture lacked almost all critical supplies, most notably ammunition and medical supplies for their wounded. The gasoline proved critical to replenishing the supplies of Molotov cocktails. The capture of German prisoners, most of whom expected to be shot on sight, gave the police a bargaining chip, but it
also led to fears that the Germans might retaliate by seizing or killing French civilians.
The police seizure of the building may have served as inspiration to the people of the city, but the police were ill-prepared to hold their ground for long. They knew that the lack of supplies and the difficulty of countering German armor could prove fatal. The police did, however, have two crucial advantages. Because the FFI had taken control of much of the city’s telephone network, its agents could warn the police inside the prefecture of German movements; they could also use the now empty passageways of the Métro to supply the prefecture through the nearby Cité station. In addition, there was an underground Métro passageway that directly connected the prefecture with the Left Bank.
The second advantage derived from the near-total control of the St. Michel and Latin Quarter neighborhoods by the FFI. German tanks coming from their bases in the Jardin du Luxembourg region needed to pass through these areas to reach the Île de la Cité. German tankers were reluctant to run an urban gauntlet, especially given the heavy fire and attacks by Molotov cocktails that soon became a feature of the area. Their tanks could not move quickly through the streets and were sitting ducks for the Molotov cocktail attacks from the numerous windows of packed Parisian apartment buildings. Except for the broad Boulevard St. Michel, most of the roads in the neighborhoods near the Île de la Cité were narrow and winding—death traps for cumbersome armored vehicles. German tankers had good reason to fear being burned alive in their own vehicles.
The Blood of Free Men Page 18