The épuration sauvage was about catharsis as much as revenge, but it could not erase the traumas of the previous four years. City residents remained jumpy and jittery at the sounds of boots walking behind them or an unexpected ring of their doorbell. Well into the winter following liberation, Parisians still had trouble adjusting to their new freedom. When Simone de Beauvoir heard about the start of a German counteroffensive in December 1944 (known to Americans as the Battle of the Bulge), she found herself fearful of the Germans once again. “In a flash I saw them reentering Paris in triumph,” she recalled. Louis Rehr, an American pilot based in Paris at the time, remarked that Parisian prostitutes “got rid of their English phrasebooks and dusted off their German versions” in preparation for the Wehrmacht’s return. This time the fear was all the greater than it had been in 1940 because Parisians knew much more about Nazi barbarities.14
Paris also remained on the thin edge of survival for months. British war correspondent Catherine Gavin noted that the first Christmas in a peacetime Paris since 1938 was not joyous but “miserable, without food or warmth,” and Janet Flanner, a veteran American journalist, commented that Paris was “living largely on vegetables and mostly without heat.” Without coal, the city was so cold that in January 1945 a recent arrival saw a glass of water on his kitchen table freeze. He also noted that there was so little gas that it took eighteen minutes to boil a cup of water. Some Parisians had taken to riding the Métro all day to avoid the sting of the winter. Others spent the days in museums. One Englishman saw a group of Frenchmen in the Louvre huddled together. Admiring France’s love of art even in such troubled times, he approached to see what piece had so captivated them only to discover that they were huddled around a heat vent.15
Food remained the most elemental and intractable problem. Apples, carrots, and potatoes, available even in the desperate months of spring 1944, had disappeared. The liberation of Paris had helped to ease the food crisis, but not nearly enough. American war correspondents found that black markets with outrageous prices thrived for months after the liberation and that bread lines, blackouts, and a lack of fuel were still commonplace. Even the black market ran out of essentials like butter and sugar. During a spring 1945 visit to Portugal, Simone de Beauvoir was amazed at the opulence of the stores in Lisbon, a city that few Parisians before the war would have associated with luxury. The Portuguese capital seemed to her “part of another age” with its unrationed groceries and markets full of vegetables, meat, and fish. Before returning to Paris, she filled her suitcases with over a hundred pounds of food because of the poverty in Paris to which she knew she was returning. As late as October 1945, by which time the war was over, she still found she never had enough to eat; she was considering leaving Paris for North Africa, where she assumed she could find plentiful food and avoid another winter without coal.16
Knowing that the Allies were diverting supplies to make what everyone hoped would be the final push for victory in Europe tempered the complaints of most Parisians after the liberation, but it did little to quell their stomachs or heat their homes. Parisians, still getting an average of just 1,200 calories a day as late as January 1945, were surviving in large part off the generosity of the Americans, who brought money, coffee, cigarettes, and, most importantly, food. Half of all supplies brought into the city during the first fall and winter after the liberation came directly from U.S. Army stocks.17
Not until the Marshall Plan began to pump money into the French economy after the war did Paris attain normal levels of food and fuel. Until then, the dollars of the Americans on R&R kept Paris afloat. GIs came to Paris, a city they called their “silver foxhole,” ready to spend freely in nightclubs and buy perfume and clothes for their wives, mothers, and girlfriends. Americans found Paris, and its women, to be irresistible. Life magazine noted that “Paris’ greatest revelation was that, in privation, it had produced one of the prettiest crops of girls in the memory of living men.” With an odd cheerfulness, it noted that “for four years they had not eaten too much or loafed. And, above all, they all had been obliged for four years to travel by bicycle. Bicycling in Paris was in fact the greatest leg show in the world.” Photo captions in American magazines showed American MPs “taken into custody by a pair of French girls” in front of the Eiffel Tower and noted that “until this moment [GIs] did not appreciate the [War] Department’s advice” to learn French.18
For most American servicemen who visited Paris during this time, R&R afforded their first exposure to the city’s museums, cabarets, and nightlife. Their money bought them anything they wanted, including first-class guided sightseeing trips to Versailles or around the battle sites of the liberation, meals so sumptuous that they embarrassed men who knew how badly most of the city was suffering, and even personal shoppers who rented themselves out by the day. Most Americans also noted how easy it was to attract hungry Parisian women with only a few words of high-school French. Whether out of gratitude, necessity, or both, Americans were popular. Unlike the Germans, they paid with money not stolen from the French economy. The GIs were also generous with their cigarettes, their chocolate, and their food, helping to smooth over the obvious contrast in wealth and power between liberator and liberated.19
Little wonder, then, that Americans found the city so charming. For them, Life magazine noted, visiting Paris was “like rediscovering the faith that there is a heaven.” American news reports claimed that the city was back to normal six days after the liberation and that Paris was liberated “just in time for the fall [fashion] season,” as if Paris’s biggest problems involved haute couture. This flippant, almost dismissive, American popular depiction of a Paris that had seemingly only suffered to give GIs pretty girls to stare at and sleep with helps to explain why Americans, then and now, have failed to appreciate the true history of Paris in World War II. For the French, of course, such a glib attitude was unimaginable. 20
Even before the Germans left the city, the battle of words had begun over who should receive the credit for liberating it. The Americans and the Gaullists may have disagreed about grand strategy, but they were fully in agreement that they had rescued the people of Paris, who may have been heroic but, according to American war correspondents, “were not quite strong enough to free their city by themselves.” The parade on August 26 and the one by the Americans three days later were in part designed to underscore this version of history and the political implications that came with it. A Paris rescued by de Gaulle and his American allies justified the right of the Gaullists to govern postwar France. It is also true, of course, that the late arrival of Allied forces into the city meant that they did not see with their own eyes all of the bravery that the FFI had displayed in the days, weeks, and months before the liberation. Senior American leaders said the right words in public, but only grudgingly gave the FFI fighters their due. Dwight Eisenhower, in his first visit to the liberated city, praised Paris’s residents, saying, “We shared your joy. Liberty has returned to one of its traditional homes. The glory of having freed the capital belongs to Frenchmen.” Ever the politician, he could equally have been referring to the FFI, de Gaulle, or Leclerc’s Deuxième Division Blindée.21
Although the Americans and Gaullists weren’t willing to fully acknowledge the contributions of the Resistance, the French Left thought it obvious that the FFI had done the work necessary to secure the arrival of the Allies. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, “If you do not proclaim that Paris liberated itself, you risk becoming an enemy of the people.” The two sides of the debate clung tenaciously to their versions of the story. Given the heated political implications of the developing history of the liberation, it is perhaps not surprising to note that precious few people understood that Paris needed both the FFI and the Deuxième Division Blindée, plus some outside help, to throw off the shackles of the Nazi occupation.22
Visiting the city today, it is difficult to imagine in the mind’s eye the dramatic events of the summer of 1944. A few memorials to this history exist, inc
luding a museum to Leclerc and Jean Moulin atop the Gare Montparnasse, bullet holes on the face of the École Militaire, and a large marker on the exterior wall of the Préfecture de Police that faces Notre Dame. All over Paris one can also see plaques and markers to fallen members of the Paris police or the FFI as well as to the deportees killed in German death camps. One can also still see the luxurious Ritz hotel on the Place Vendôme and the mansions of the Avenue Foch, homes to some of the city’s wealthiest collaborators. These landmarks stand together as memorials to a city divided in 1944 along class and political lines.
The story of Paris in 1944 centers around the efforts of those who freed the city from its darkest hours. In 1837, Victor Hugo wrote in one of his poems of love to Paris:City that a storm envelops!
It is her, alas, that night and day,
Awakens the European giant
With her bell and her drum . .
Paris always cries and growls,
No one knows the profound question’s answer
Of what the noise of the world would lose
If ever Paris fell silent.
For four terrible years the world got its answer as Paris did indeed fall silent. When at long last the city regained its voice, the cries of joy, freedom, and revenge echoed across the entire world.23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE 1942 CLASSIC CASABLANCA APPEARED IN AMERICAN theaters even as Paris sat under the boot of Nazi occupation. Not by accident, Ilsa left Rick in Paris (not Amsterdam or Brussels or some other occupied city) to set in motion one of the greatest cinematic love stories of all time. It was also for Paris, not her native Oslo, that Ilsa was saving the blue dress she was wearing on the day she and Rick had last seen each other. Paris had that kind of hold on people in 1942. Its occupation stood for the occupation of free cities everywhere. Its liberation meant the liberation of free people across the globe.
I had studied Paris, its history, its culture, and its language, since my first French classes in sixth grade. But I had never actually seen it until my wife, Barbara, took me there on our honeymoon. Tired from jet lag and annoyed by the difficulties of international travel that I now accept as normal, I did not immediately fall in love with it as I had with other cities I had visited. But, thanks to her, I soon did. We have been back to Paris many times since and have had the good fortune to spend two extended trips there. I thus start by thanking Barbara, without whom I might never have known Paris, let alone written this book.
I must also thank the two people who turned this project into reality. My agent, Geri Thoma, helped me to shape an idea into something coherent, and my editor, Lara Heimert, has been a source of encouragement and support. Ben Jones, himself a scholar of the French Resistance, asked me the question that got me thinking about a book on Paris. John Grenier, Rob Citino, and Bill Astore all read parts of this book and shared their ideas with me. David Zabecki helped me clear up some points on the German side, as Dominique Laurent and Laurent Henninger did for the French, although I hasten to note that any mistakes in this book are mine, not theirs. Jim Helis, David Bennett, Tami Davis Biddle, Craig Nation, Major General Gregg Martin, Chris Keller, Louise Arnold-Friend, Michael Lynch, John Winegardner, and Jessie Faller-Parrett all provided much-needed sounding boards.
For research assistance, nothing surpasses the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In addition to those whom I have thanked above, I must single out Richard Sommers, Steve Bye, Gary Johnson, Jessica Sheets, Carol Funck, and the entire staff of AHEC. There is no place I’d rather work. I must also thank the staffs of the Archives Nationales and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris; the Library of Congress; the British Library; and the Hunt Library at Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks also to Andrzej Nieuvasny for pointing me to some helpful sources.
For their wonderful hospitality in Paris on many visits, I wish to thank our close friends Virginie Peccavy and Jean-Christophe Noël. Coming to Paris is, of course, always a joy, but seeing friends there makes it even better.
NOTES
Introduction
1 Life, September 4, 1944, 26; Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 384; Albert Camus, Actuelles: Chroniques, 1944–1948 (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 19.
2 Time, September 4, 1944, 34, 40.
3 Robert Aron, France Reborn (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), 226–227.
4 Sisley Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 1939–1947. An Eyewitness Account of War, Occupation, and Liberation (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 240. Huddleston was a fiercely anticommunist British journalist who lived in the south of France for much of the war.
5 Positive feelings toward Pétain remained prevalent in France even after the full extent of Vichy’s crimes had become widely known. As late as 1966, more than half of respondents to a national opinion poll said that Pétain “did some good,” while only 17 percent said he “did some harm.” See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 288.
6 Recall the famous scene at the end of Casablanca when Claude Rains throws away a bottle of Vichy water and joins a Free French unit in Morocco.
7 Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 38; Agnès Humbert saw the pamphlet and wondered if the people who wrote it will “ever know what they have done for us, and probably for thousands of others? A glimmer of light in the darkness.” See Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 14.
8 The most controversial events include the trial of Maurice Papon, who had managed to hide his role in the deportations of Bordeaux’s Jews during the war to become both prefect of Paris and a member of the cabinet of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Papon was finally discovered, tried, and found guilty, but not until 1998. Three years earlier, President Jacques Chirac had apologized for the role of the Paris police in rounding up the city’s Jews, and during the election of 1981, the socialist and former résistant François Mitterrand had to answer for his role as a Vichy administrator in the war’s early years. A photograph of Mitterrand and Pétain in Vichy in 1942 proved to be especially embarrassing. See Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, for more.
9 Ironically, he was standing in the shadows of the Musée de l’Homme, whose personnel formed one of the first effective Resistance cells in Paris. See Martin Blumeson, The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance (London: Hale, 1978). See also the opening chapters of Humbert, Résistance. She was a member of that cell. For more on Hitler’s visit to Paris, see Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 247–268.
10 Jean Bruller, writing under the pseudonym Vercors, in Life, November 6, 1944, 55.
11 Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 240.
12 Humbert, Résistance. Chapter 5 contains a chilling account of her time as a prisoner at Fresnes.
13 Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 262; Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 267–268.
14 Quoted in Ousby, Occupation, 77.
15 Cobb, The Resistance, 64. Allied casualty estimates in North Africa vary. American sources say that Vichy forces inflicted 1,469 casualties, including 526 killed in action. British sources claim 2,225 casualties, including 1,100 killed in action. Vichy casualties are estimated at 3,000. See Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Holt, 2003), 159.
16 The head of the forced labor program for Europe, Fritz Sauckel, was tried and found guilty at Nuremberg. He was hanged in 1946.
17 Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Mémoires Rebelles (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1999), 45.
18 Bir Hakeim is commemorated today by a Métro stop near the Eiffel Tower. French participation in Italy is commemorated today in monuments on the Place d’Italie in the southeastern part of Paris.
19 Hamon led a raid on the central STO
files in Paris, using incendiary devices to burn the files and any trace the Germans had of the identity of the men therein. He later sent a basket of food to a young French guard they had to overpower, along with a note that read, “You risked your life—next time, make sure it is for, and not against, France. Get well soon.” Cobb, The Resistance, 197–198; Henri Michel, Paris Résistant (Paris: Albin Michel, 1982), 239.
20 Agnès Humbert left a description of the Rue des Saussaies interrogation chambers in Résistance, 48–53 and 66–67.
21 Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (London: Verso, 2010), 231. On November 11, 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated a memorial tablet to the students under the Arc near the eternal flame of the unknown soldier.
22 Cobb, The Resistance, 231. Near the Avenue Foch, on the Avenue Henri Martin, stood another building the Gestapo used as a torture chamber.
23 “Boche” was a pejorative French term for Germans loosely translated as “Hun” or “Kraut.”
24 To his credit, Suhard did oppose Vichy’s racial laws, the deportations of Jews, and the STO. In recognition of these positions, the French government approved his burial in the Notre Dame crypt after his death in 1949.
Chapter One
1 Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements, each of which has four quartiers. Andrzej Bobkowski counted nine air-raid alerts that night in the Montparnasse section in the south of the city. See his En Guerre et en Paix: Journal, 1940–1944 (Paris: Editions Noir sur Blanc, 1991), 554.
2 Gilles Perrault and Pierre Azéma, Paris Under the Occupation (Paris: Vendôme, 1987), 46.
3 Jacques Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris: Journal d’un Sénateur, Octobre 1943–Octobre 1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1958), 252–254. Paris did, in fact, have four more air raids that night. After the war, the provisional French government temporarily suspended Bardoux’s eligibility to serve in government as a result of his vote in favor of the Vichy regime in 1940. In June 1945, a judicial panel restored his right to run for public office. He was reelected to the Chamber of Deputies and served in that role from 1946 to 1955. His grandson, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, was president of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981.
The Blood of Free Men Page 31