by Matthew Cobb
In the evening, Parodi sent a four-part message to Algiers, outlining the situation and explaining how he intended to keep control:
At my request, the CNR [Bureau] will meet daily and will be kept updated of any extension of the strike. In this way I hope to be able to control the situation and gain time. There is a serious danger of bloody reprisals by the Germans . . . These events create a tense atmosphere and a worrying situation if liberation is still far off. Unless liberation takes place soon it will be necessary to call for calm and to remind the population that the order for a national uprising which has been given for parts of France is not yet applicable to the Paris region. The population has the duty to remain calm in conditions that are the most difficult it has ever known, and not to undertake any ill-considered action.65
To meet this challenging situation, Parodi’s team was being reinforced, getting ready to take the reins of power. In the evening of 17 August, Charles Luizet arrived from London ready to become de Gaulle’s Prefect of Police once the final vestiges of Vichy had disappeared. With him was Francis-Louis Closon, who was scheduled to be Prefect in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, but was to remain in the capital and help Parodi until the north of the country was liberated. The original idea had been that Luizet and Parodi would arrive with the Leclerc Division, but Parodi’s stream of alarmist messages about the danger of a bloodbath and the strength of the Communist Party had convinced Algiers that he needed help immediately.66 Despite their relative youth – Luizet was forty years old, Closon was only thirty-four – both men were well suited to the situation. In September 1943, Luizet had been the first prefect of a liberated French department when he took control of Corsica, helping ensure that the Communist Party was fully integrated into local government rather than acting independently. Closon was an experienced Parisian operator who had worked with Parodi’s predecessors – including the founder of the CNR, Jean Moulin – and had shown considerable skill at resolving differences between the different Resistance groups.
Hampered by problems with their landing grounds and bad weather, it had taken Luizet and Closon over two weeks to make the journey from London.67 They finally landed near Avignon on 14 August, and then hired a lorry to take them the 800 km to the capital. They were dropped at the place de la Bastille on the evening of 17 August, and Parodi immediately alerted London of their arrival.68
Earlier in the day, in one of its last actions, the Vichy Ministry of Food signed off a report describing the situation in the capital, which was ominous. Supplies of flour coming into the city were at best at 50 per cent of normal; combined with the near-absence of electricity, most bakers were producing far less bread than needed. The flour supplies would run out in four days. The amount of milk arriving in the capital was so low that it was not enough to meet the needs of children less than nine months old. Even worse, the stifling August heat and the collapse of the electricity supply meant that much of the milk was sour. Supplies of concentrated milk were being distributed to children under three years old, but the stocks would be exhausted in a matter of days. If all the German meat stocks were made available, there would be at most nine distributions of the 90g meat ration per person (a rasher of bacon weighs around 45g), while there was only enough pasta in the stores for twelve meals per person.69 For the moment, there was still enough food to feed the population, and many Parisians still benefited from handouts from relatives living in the countryside, despite the fighting in the west. Nevertheless in only a few days the situation would become critical.
Parisians did not see the report, but the empty shelves and long queues told them that fighting of any duration in the region would produce a humanitarian catastrophe. When food could be found – for example a street-seller hawking salads and radishes from market gardens in the suburbs – it quickly sold out.70 In his diary that night, 18-year-old Jean-Claude Touche, a devout Catholic, described the situation as he saw it: ‘Soon there will be no water. Paris will know famine, a siege, if the Americans don’t come on Sunday or Monday . . . Holy Mary, please save France!’71
On a lighter note, although the restaurants were closed and the theatres were dark due to the power cuts, high-society hairdresser Gervais was still in business, thanks to an unusual power source that he used to dry his customers’ hair: cyclists. Less than two weeks later, US photographer Lee Miller described – and photographed – Gervais’ ingenuity: ‘He has rigged his dryers to stove pipes which pass though a furnace heated by wood debris. The air is blown by fans turned by relay teams of boys riding a stationary tandem bicycle in the basement. They cover 320 kilometres a day and dry half as many heads.’72
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From the outside and with hindsight, the final hours of the Vichy regime were played out like scenes in a farce, with people rushing from room to room in a growing panic, making plans and counter-plans, trying to hide from the inevitable consequences of their own behaviour. To those involved, it was anything but amusing: their lives were at stake. The first act began in the morning, as final, desperate plans were made by sections of the Resistance to save Herriot from the Germans. Yves Cazaux received a phone call inviting him to participate in this final madcap scheme. He agreed, and even warned his wife that they would be expecting ‘company’, but within ten minutes Herriot – exhausted and bewildered after the rows of the night before – was whisked off to the German embassy, a prisoner of the Germans once more.
In the afternoon, Laval moved centre stage, presiding over a very formal exchange of letters with Ambassador Abetz. Behind the diplomatic niceties there was a tense stand-off as Laval, like Faust, found that payback time had come. In a first letter to Laval, Abetz stated that because of the growing threat of ‘internal or external events caused by the war’, the French government would be moved to Belfort, not far from the German border. The German government would ‘never invite the French government to leave its national territory’, wrote Abetz, soothingly. After a brief Cabinet meeting, Laval wrote a reply, politely refusing this ‘invitation’. Abetz’s response showed the iron hand: it was an ‘irrevocable decision of the government of the Reich’, he wrote, and if Laval and his ministers refused to leave, ‘means of constraint’ would inevitably have to be applied. In a final letter, written late in the evening, Laval replied that he would bow to the pressure but that he now ceased to be the head of the French government. He left written instructions for the Prefect of Police and the Prefect of the Seine ‘to welcome the Allied military authorities and to represent the French government to them’.73 Laval’s ultimate roll of the dice was that the Allies’ mistrust of de Gaulle might yet lead them to rely upon the final vestiges of Vichy in the capital. After a last meal at Matignon with his family, Laval left Paris at around 23:00, taken like a piece of luggage in a German convoy, guarded by the SS.74 All his ministers except one followed him. And so the curtain fell on four years of delusion and betrayal. The only remnant of the government of collaboration was a confused, vain old man in Vichy. Within three days he, too, would be taken east.
Despite the all-pervading air of collapse and panic, Ambassador Abetz was unbowed, and sneered at Taittinger as he left Paris: ‘Do not rejoice too soon or too hastily. We cannot lose the war. We have created terrifying weapons. Do you hear me? Terrifying. The Führer hesitates to use them, because it would be the beginning of the end of the world . . . Yes, we’ll be back by Christmas at the latest.’75
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As the evening drew in, Jean Galtier-Boissière leant over his balcony on the boulevard Saint-Michel and watched the evacuation of the German depot below:
Once the last lorry had left, the SS sentries, machine guns at the ready, suddenly moved towards the passers-by who, in a panic, scattered in all directions. From our balcony, the scene was like that Russian photograph of people being fired on at the Winter Palace. Suddenly shots rang out, followed by the sound of machine-gun fire. We ran inside. Bullets whistled by, leaving tracer-lines in the air above the place de la Sorbonne, spitting into walls. Then
there were louder explosions. At first I thought these were delayed-action grenades that the Germans had left to cover their retreat, but it must have been a small cannon they used to fire on the Sorbonne chapel. The square is empty. I can’t see any bodies. And so to bed, as Pepys said. The gunfire continued for twenty minutes, in a series of spurts.76
At around the same time, on the other side of the Seine, there was another shooting incident, in which two Parisians were killed when a German patrol car was apparently shot at on the boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. The soldiers returned fire, and threw grenades and fired incendiary shells into a café and a shop on either side of the boulevard. Both buildings caught fire and the fire brigade was called out; meanwhile a policeman and a nurse began to remove the body of a man lying in the middle of rue Aboukir. As they bent over the corpse, more shots rang out, and both of them threw themselves to the ground; one bullet went right through the nurse’s helmet but left her miraculously unscathed. Another body was later found nearby, along with several injured people. Firing continued for some time, with German troops in cars and on foot patrolling the area and firing more or less at random.77
As night fell, the German convoys continued to stream out of Paris, but against all the air-raid protection rules they kept their headlights on, and beams swept across the dark rooms of people living by the side of the main roads. Unnerved by the explosions, the sound of shooting and the eerie lights from the street, Yves Cazaux wrote in his diary: ‘Are they leaving? We dare not believe it is true. We have been waiting for this moment for so long, dreaming of it, that it’s hard to believe it has finally come. But a tightening in the chest, the utter immediacy of the event that is taking place in the night, the awful tension that almost hurts, make it clear that we are indeed living through the longed-for hour.’78
At around 22:30 the electricity came back on unexpectedly. All over the city, lights suddenly blazed out of the unshuttered windows, breaking the darkness. Countless radios blared into life, having been left in the ‘on’ position when the power was cut. On the BBC, Free French spokesman André Gillois was speaking directly to the Parisian population about the importance of strikes as ‘an instrument of war’.79 But instead of encouraging the workers of the Paris region to take action, Gillois forcefully listed all the sectors where workers should not go on strike – public services, hospitals, utilities or any part of the food industry. Workers in other sectors should go on strike ‘wherever the enemy wants to impose work from which it will benefit’. And even if Gillois argued that workers should stop their workplaces from being destroyed by the Germans, there was no indication of how they should do this. They were told to organise ‘protection squads’, but – as usual – there was no mention of weapons.80 To reinforce the message that these strikes were to be extremely limited, Gillois concluded by saying that striking workers should ‘go back to work as soon as possible after the Allies arrive’.81 And that was it – not a word about fighting the Germans. The question that was on everyone’s lips in Paris could not be uttered in London. At a time when much of the public sector was already on strike, when food shortages were threatening the Parisian population, the decisive questions were how people were going to get food and how they were going to get rid of the 20,000 Germans who remained in the city. Whatever the Free French might have wanted, both questions had the same answer: with weapons.
7
Friday 18 August: Waiting
Journalist Pierre Bourdan describes the advance of the Leclerc Division, 200 km from Paris: ‘The problem is to hold these men back – they seem to be untouched by fatigue or by the horrors of war. As they pass, the towns and villages that have been liberated by these Frenchmen are covered in flags . . . There is only one role now for the enemy, their sole strategic preoccupation is to flee, to escape from the trap, to avoid complete destruction . . . In the heart of every Frenchman here there is a name, a goal: Paris, Paris. Will we get there before or after the destruction of the German army? We’ll soon see. But for the enemy, hope is dead.’1
Traces of the previous night’s incidents still littered the Parisian streets. On the boulevard Saint-Michel, the mirrors at the entrance to the Le Latin cinema were starred by bullet-holes; tree branches scattered on the ground showed the violence of the firefight.2 Shortly after 07:00 Jean Galtier-Boissière walked along the rue Racine where a concierge was throwing pails of water on a bloodstain, then brushing it vigorously. ‘One woman was killed here,’ explained the concierge, ‘and another was killed in front of the tobacconist’s.’ Further along the street a building had gone up in flames after being fired on. Rumours of the shooting episodes of the previous night grew and became distorted in the re-telling. Yves Cazaux heard that twenty-five people were killed on the boulevard Saint-Germain, while journalist Edmond Dubois was unable to verify any of the reports: ‘The overwhelming fact is that we can be sure of nothing, be it strategic, diplomatic or governmental. We live in a period of “they said” or “it seems that” . . . The telephone is the only means of getting precise information from trusted friends.’3
Even the Free French Delegation was not sure what was going on – Parodi sent Algiers an exaggerated summary of the night’s events (‘many bloody incidents provoked by excitement of population, nervous German troops, and Gestapo provocations’) that reflected rumour and his habitual fear that the population was about to be massacred.4 Although Francis-Louis Closon, newly arrived from Algiers, decided that the situation was not as grave as the Delegation’s earlier messages suggested, in many parts of the city the tension was very real.5 At around 09:00 Galtier-Boissière heard gunfire: ‘I can see the SS sentries running up the boulevard, machine guns in hand, followed by a sergeant who is shouting gutturally. They go out of sight, then I see them again, dragging an unfortunate boy of around 15 years old. They take turns to slap him about, swearing at him. I don’t see them again.’6 A couple of hours later, Daniel Boisdon wrote in his diary: ‘It is 11 o’clock. As I write these lines the violent explosions I heard earlier this morning are carrying on: they are strong enough to make the windows shake. Aeroplanes fly overhead and the anti-aircraft batteries open up . . . The explosions are beginning again, even louder. Paris is getting closer and closer to the battle.’7 At Pantin, a German armoured train, which had been sitting in a siding at the station for several days, fired on passers-by, wounding a number of them. At the same time, the Germans set fire to railway wagons in the station and the area was covered in thick black smoke.8
Everyone was jumpy. Although most collaborators had left the previous day, some sections of the Milice were still in Paris, living with shredded nerves. For them, the liberation of Paris could spell death. Outside the Lycée Saint-Louis, where members of the Milice had been billeted, a guard tried to arrest two young men simply because they had paused briefly in front of the building. For the nervous collaborator the passers-by were guilty of ‘spying’ on the Milice.9
In the eastern suburbs the Free French nightmare of a communist-led uprising came closer. Early in the morning, the Mairie of Montreuil was seized by a group of FTP fighters. The tricolour flag was raised in front of the building and several hundred people gathered to celebrate. At Saint-Mandé a few kilometres away, the tricolour also flew over the Mairie, even though German vehicles continued to go past the building.10 These victories were purely symbolic – the mairies had no particular military value – but what they symbolised was very important. The town halls represented the pre-war republic, the way things were before the Germans arrived, the way things could be in the future, after they had gone. For many people they embodied the reality of local democracy and were the place where people got married and registered the births of babies and the deaths of loved ones. However, getting rid of the Germans was more complicated than simply occupying a building – the mairies not only had to be occupied, they had to be held. In Montreuil, there was a long battle for the Mairie with the Germans entering the building in the afternoon before finally being driven out agai
n in the evening.11
In the centre of Paris there were also signs of popular unrest. At 10:30 Yves Cazaux heard the ‘Marseillaise’ being sung from the street outside his offices at the Hôtel de Ville. He looked out and saw a group of around 400 Métro workers marching four or five abreast down the rue de Rivoli, coming to a stop in front of the Hôtel de Ville, shouting ‘Bread! Bread!’ They were protesting that they had not been paid for weeks. The strikers, led by Véry, the regional CGT railway union leader who had been at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges a week earlier, were received by Pierre Taittinger, the chairman of the Paris council.12 Taittinger agreed that the workers would receive an extra month’s salary, and after a brief meeting in front of the Hôtel de Ville the demonstration dispersed. In the afternoon, Véry organised another meeting for workers at the quai de la Râpée Métro depot, at the end of which the strikers marched off to the Bourse du Travail, the traditional headquarters of the trade union movement, and took over the office that had been occupied by the tame Vichy transport union for the last four years.13
The departure of the Vichy government during the night plunged Paris into a strange parallel political world. Military power was still in the hands of the Germans, the civil servants were still at their posts, but there was no police force and there were no ministers. To fill this vacuum, two meetings took place at the Hôtel de Ville after the striking Métro workers had left. In the oppressive afternoon heat, Pierre Taittinger convened a meeting of the Paris council, together with the Vichy-appointed mayors from the Paris region. Taittinger privately considered that the council was effectively the government of France, though he wisely made no such claim at the meeting. What he did state, however, was that the Germans had accepted that Paris would not be involved in any fighting. This was completely untrue, but the councillors went away reassured, apparently impressed by Taittinger’s leadership.14