Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  The quai d’Austerlitz is covered with barbed wire roadblocks. A tank is stationed there, its barrel pointing at us. A threatening sentry, machine gun in hand, makes broad gestures to say that no one can pass, not even people who live nearby. I turn round and, suddenly my heart begins beating madly: on the railings around the Jardin des Plantes are two shields marked ‘RF’ [République Française] surrounded by French flags, just as on Bastille Days in the past. The German soldiers seem not to notice.16

  In his attic refuge, Albert Grunberg realised that the flags implied he would soon be ‘down there’ in the street, freed from his self-imposed prison: ‘it won’t be long now; the red, white and blue flag is flying on all the public buildings, proudly flapping in the wind.’17

  The Préfecture was both the starting point and the epicentre of the insurrection. Hundreds of résistants, journalists and ordinary Parisians headed over to join in. Claude Roy charged through the entrance to the Préfecture on his bicycle, pedalling furiously, his head bent over the handlebars ‘like the winner on a stage of the Tour de France’. CPL leader Léo Hamon got there as soon as he could, and made a speech to the assembled policemen saying that the Parisian population, which had often fought with the police in the past, would never forget their patriotic behaviour.18 Hamon was right: the implications of the police’s actions were indeed historic. As a New Yorker correspondent put it two weeks later: ‘For the first time since Etienne Marcel led a street mob against the royal court in about 1350, the police and the people have been on the same side of the barricades.’19 When Hamon stopped speaking he got a shock as the men held up their empty revolvers: they had no ammunition. Shortly afterwards the Front National leader in the Préfecture told Hamon that as long as the Germans did not attack in force, the ammunition would hold out until about 05:00 the next morning.20

  *

  With the insurrection growing apace, various minor Vichy figures came out of the woodwork and tried to muscle in on the situation. First, General Brécard, ‘Grand Chancellor of the Legion d’Honneur’, demanded that the FFI provide him with a guard of honour to enable him to take power until de Gaulle arrived. This ludicrous suggestion – probably made with the support of the remnants of Vichy in an attempt to establish continuity between the collaborationist regime and de Gaulle – was ignored.21 However, as a precaution, Brécard was confined to his hotel room for the duration of the events.22 The chairman of the Paris council, Pierre Taittinger, made a last desperate attempt to stop the insurrection and secure his own position by trying to get a poster printed claiming that Paris was an open city, and that any action against the Germans was futile. But the version that finally appeared was reduced to a simple call for calm and a paternalistic injunction to the population ‘to listen to the voice of those who are charged with looking after you’.23 Events at the Préfecture showed that at least part of the Parisian population had decided it could look after itself.

  When the flags were raised over the Hôtel de Ville, Taittinger furiously summoned FFI second-in-command Dufresne and insisted that they be taken down immediately, claiming he had just had a telephone call from von Choltitz who threatened to bomb the city and unleash 20,000 SS men on the population. Dufresne replied that the CPL had taken control and that the Vichy council was deposed, then he left Taittinger alone in his office.24 The Hôtel de Ville was not occupied for the moment, but that was simply because the Resistance had a more pressing task – dealing with the Germans.

  As soon as it became apparent that the Préfecture had been occupied, the German command in Paris put the garrison on alert, activating the second level of their security plan. Officers were ordered to ‘act without hesitation and to liquidate all important points of resistance’ while at the same time ensuring that their troops did not fire needlessly. Above all, ‘Calm and order must be restored by any means necessary.’25 Shortly after these instructions were issued, von Choltitz ordered his aristocratic aide, Lieutenant Dankwart Graf von Arnim, to scout around the Préfecture. Together with three colleagues, von Arnim clambered into a small open-top car and drove through the eerily deserted streets. When they came to the place Saint-Michel, on the Left Bank, there was a sudden burst of firing. One of von Arnim’s men was wounded in the arm and chest, and the front tyre of the car was punctured. Von Arnim screamed at the chauffeur ‘Drive! Drive! Drive!’ and they screeched off down rue Danton, towards the safety of the German garrison in the Senate building. The wounded man died later that day.26

  Shortly afterwards, a German armoured car fired on the Préfecture from the pont Saint-Michel, accompanied by lorries full of German troops. FFI fighters wearing armbands fired back from the parapets of the quai Saint-Michel, crouched in the entrance to the Métro, or sheltered by the sculpted dragons on either side of the fountain on the place Saint-Michel. One of the résistants was shot and fell to the ground; immediately a group of stretcher-bearers appeared, led by a young woman carrying a Red Cross flag, striding proudly across the place Saint-Michel despite the whistling bullets. The wounded – or dead – résistant was put onto a stretcher and hurried off into a side-street.27 A German lorry drove along quai Henri IV on the Ile Saint-Louis, past the apartment occupied by Pablo Picasso, with a sentry draped over its front mudguard, his rifle at the ready.28 As the lorry tried to cross the place Saint-Michel, the German soldier was shot dead and fell to the ground.29 In the midst of the gunfire and spilt blood, down by the Seine a solitary angler watched his line bobbing up and down in the current, while a couple of well-muscled young men walked by in their swimming costumes, fresh from a dip in the river.30

  The résistants in the Préfecture who were attacking the passing German vehicles were firing from the office of Inspector David, the leader of police anti-Resistance unit the Brigades Spéciales, who was currently on the run.31 Journalist Claude Roy was with them as the firing began: ‘The windows have been smashed. The ordinary office desk, the blotting paper, the ink-stand and the moleskin armchair are littered with broken glass, chargers, ammunition and weapons. The saccadic chatter of the Sten guns, echoing in the offices and the corridors, makes a deafening racket.’32 The men were a mixed bunch: ‘One of the fighters has put a tricolour armband round his hat. He has a submachine gun, two German grenades stuck into his belt, his trousers tucked into red woollen socks, big shoes, and wears a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looks like he has stepped out of an American film.’33

  The occupiers needed food as well as weapons. At lunchtime, they were served corned beef and tomatoes, which left an indelible impression on 9-year-old Michel Barrat, whose father worked for the Prefect of Police: ‘I had never eaten anything so good,’ he remembered.34 In the evening, everyone got something to eat, some coffee, and two packets of cigarettes each.35 Some of the occupiers made their way down to the Prefect’s wine cellar and got so drunk that it was apparently decided it would be safer to destroy the whole wine store.36

  At 15:20 the Préfecture sent out an urgent call for reinforcements to hold off a German attack: a Tiger tank was rumbling around the building. First it fired on the north wing of the Préfecture, causing a minor fire; it then moved round to the eastern side and squatted in front of Notre Dame, its barrel pointing directly at the narrow entrance to the Préfecture. The tank fired two 90 mm shells, shattering the gate and wounding two men.37 Inside the building, in the chaos and dust and noise, men rushed to block the entrance with a police bus and sand-bags. The tank could easily have pressed home its advantage and smashed through the flimsy obstacles, but to take the building would have required hundreds of hardened infantrymen prepared to fight a bloody battle in the corridors. Without the requisite ground support, the tank turned round and rumbled off, to the relief of the occupiers.38 At some point during the fighting, 28-year-old policeman André Perrin, who had come from the 20th arrondissement to help, was shot by the Germans and died shortly afterwards.39 The Hôtel-Dieu hospital, across the road from the Préfecture, was put on a war footing, and a system of t
riage and treatment was set up in the basement, caring for wounded résistants, civilians and soldiers.40 Shortly afterwards, there was a series of explosions in the courtyards of the Préfecture as the Germans fired a mortar and threw grenades at the building.41 A final battle took place at around 19:00 when a convoy of six German lorries moved along the quai du Marché neuf. The résistants attacked the lorries; one of the vehicles caught fire and crashed into the Hôtel Notre Dame on the corner of the street, setting fire to the building and to another lorry. A massive pall of smoke rose into the sky; FFI fighters jumped into the blazing vehicle and managed to move it; then the fire brigade arrived and by the time night fell the fire was extinguished.42

  *

  All over the city, the day was marked by dramatic incidents as the Germans attempted to regain control. In the morning things were generally calm. Paul Tuffrau described the scene on the Left Bank: ‘I walk down the boulevard Saint-Germain towards the pont Sully. Still the usual bustle: pedestrians, cyclists, long queues in front of the bakers’ shops. Here and there, passers-by wear tricolours in their hair, dangling from their ears, around the neck or at the waist. German cars and motorcycles with sidecars whizz by.’43 But the situation soon began to change. In the middle of the afternoon Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw about twenty German soldiers come out of the Senate and march down the rue de Seine towards the boulevard Saint-Germain. On the boulevard they opened fire indiscriminately – the crowd scattered, two women were hit and fell to the floor. An elderly man found himself trapped outside a shut door; he knocked and knocked, but was shot in the back. As soon as the Germans had left, his body was spirited away by stretcher-bearers, a pool of blood marking the spot where he had fallen. Eventually, the concierge opened the door, peered at the stain on the ground, and went away to fetch a pail of water and a brush. When he returned, a crowd had gathered and people began to berate him: ‘You might well want to wash away the blood – you’re the reason it was spilt!’ The concierge, who had refused to open the door to the trapped man, stared back, expressionless.44

  Everywhere it was the same story: sporadic outbreaks of fighting, interspersed with periods of apparent calm followed by growing tension. Dozens of people were killed on each side that day.45 At 11:00 Pastor Marc Boegner was at the Grand Palais exhibition hall when the sound of machine guns and artillery fire came from the place de la Concorde. He scurried to safety as bullets thudded into the building. It is unclear whether this was the Resistance attacking the German Navy headquarters in the Hôtel de Crillon, or jittery German troops firing at passers-by. A German Tiger tank, on its way to the front, broke down near the Arc de Triomphe. Parisians soon surrounded the vehicle, shouting and making threatening gestures; the crew became alarmed and the tank commander ordered the turret to be swivelled round into combat position. The barrel was lowered and swept round menacingly, making the crowd disappear in a flash, like a shoal of fish darting away.46

  In the afternoon, the twenty-strong Victoire armed group was ordered to help the FFI in the 6th arrondissement, and to move its headquarters from the plush private school by the Ecole Militaire to a seedy hotel on the rue de Seine, which runs from the boulevard Saint-Germain down to the river. As they were settling in, a German armoured car that was parked on the boulevard fired towards their building, damaging the outside of the hotel, killing a young woman and severely wounding a young girl.47 In the evening there was another burst of machine-gun fire on the boulevard Saint-Germain and one of the Victoire group, Rémy, burst into the hotel, covered in blood. He was unhurt, but Fred Palacio, the young man in espadrilles, lay dead in the street, a bullet through his head.48

  In the early afternoon, policeman Alexandre Massiani, who had been involved in the occupation of the Préfecture, was near the recently occupied Mairie of the 6th arrondissement when German troops started shooting. Massiani and his comrades threw themselves to the floor, but Alexandre was shot through the neck and died. A couple of hours later, 3-year-old Rose-Marie Massiani was playing at her grandmother’s house when someone came in and told the old woman, ‘Your son-in-law has been killed.’ Rose-Marie can still remember her perplexity – what was a ‘son-in-law’?49 Things were even worse for 5-year-old Daniel Quantin, who was at his home on the first floor of a building on the rue Dauphine. The whole family was looking out of the windows at the events in the street below when a stray bullet hit Daniel’s mother, Virginie, and she fell down dead. She was only twenty-eight. Because of the chaos caused by the fighting, and the strike by workers in the funeral services, her body remained in the apartment for the next five days.50 Bullets were not the only things that could kill: sitting at his first floor window in the 9th arrondissement, Victor Veau saw a young woman knocked off her bicycle by a speeding German car. She died shortly afterwards.51

  The Germans decided to take pre-emptive action against a police force they now realised was completely out of their control. At around 17:00, a group of SS soldiers smashed their way into a police station near the Gare de Lyon, arresting over a dozen policemen to shouts of ‘terrorist police, kaput!’ The men were taken to a nearby building, threatened and beaten with rifle-butts, and then driven off to the fort at Vincennes. They were thrown into a large cell, where a sergeant screamed at them in broken French: ‘You, no courage, why French police kill German soldiers, why you terrorists?’ An officer left them in no doubt as to the fate that awaited them: ‘It’s too late now, but tomorrow morning you will be shot.’52

  At lunchtime, 17-year-old Micheline Bood wrote in her diary about the noise of machine guns, the explosions that made the windows rattle, and the bicycles that littered the road as people scattered when they came under fire. Her view of the significance of the events was somewhat particular: ‘All this is very exciting! I don’t think that mum will let me go to the dentist’s this afternoon.’53 Meanwhile, near the Bastille, Pierre Weil and Michel Tagrine, two young Resistance fighters who were only a couple of years older than Micheline, were arrested by the Vichy Milice. There was a vicious firefight and Weil was killed; Tagrine was wounded but managed to escape and rejoin his FFI comrades. Shortly before 17:00, a German armoured car drove down the boulevard de l’Hôpital towards the Gare d’Austerlitz. It fired into the crowd and into nearby buildings, injuring at least two women. Camille Vilain leant out of his window and shouted: ‘They’re firing on passers-by! Bastards! Bastards!’54

  In the 18th arrondissement, Berthe Auroy and some of her neighbours began sewing flags – all it took was some sheets, some dye, and a needle and thread. Taking a break from her sewing duties, Berthe bumped into a Jewish neighbour, who was overjoyed because he was no longer wearing the hated yellow star. Some passers-by had told him: ‘Tear that thing off straight away, or we’ll tear it off for you!’55 But although some of the worst aspects of the occupation were over, the Germans had still not left. In the afternoon, a German garage on the boulevard des Batignolles, just down the road from Madame Auroy’s apartment, was looted. People ran out carrying champagne, tobacco, silk stockings and leather goods. Shortly afterwards German troops arrived and shots were fired from a nearby building. The soldiers replied with sustained machine-gun fire, and at 18:00 a tank arrived and started firing on the building, causing substantial damage.56 Eighteen-year-old Red Cross volunteer Jean-Claude Touche was sent out to pick up the wounded, but found the battle too intense, as he wrote in his diary: ‘We hurry for shelter. The Germans are firing at anything that moves on the boulevard; they control the streets.’57 After around forty-five minutes of fighting the Germans left, but one of their lorries had broken down on the boulevard. The FFI attacked it, killing two Germans and seizing weapons and fuel.58

  Most FFI fighters in Paris were ordinary men and – less often – women, who wore civilian clothes and were identified only by a makeshift armband. However, Berthe Auroy found the Mairie of the 17th arrondissement guarded by FFI fighters looking smart in khaki uniforms and helmets, wearing armbands stamped with the Free French cross of
Lorraine.59 In the neighbouring 18th arrondissement, Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar described a more typical situation: the fighters there looked ‘rather terrifying, like insurrectionary fighters’. Some wore trousers and vests, others short-sleeved shirts and shorts or old trench-coats; some were bare-chested and blackened with smoke; everyone was wearing different kinds of helmets and armbands.60