by Matthew Cobb
Even the less worldly Parisian females appreciated the presence of the Allied troops. On 31 August, teenager Micheline Bood wrote in her diary: ‘Oh, I forgot to say that there are Americans in the Rothschild apartment opposite, instead of Germans. There was a bunch of them, sitting on top of a wall like birds. I have just begun to realise that THEY ARE HERE . . . and to feel happy.’32
For Pablo Picasso, the sudden influx of Allied soldiers restored his celebrity status, as intellectuals enlisted in the Allied armies took advantage of their passage through Paris to see one of the great figures of the twentieth century.33 This eventually became wearing – ‘Paris was liberated, but I was under siege,’ Picasso said later.34 His old friend Lee Miller was welcome, however, as she wrote at the time: ‘Picasso and I fell into each other’s arms and between laughter and tears and having my bottom pinched and my hair mussed we exchanged news about friends and their work, incoherently, and looked at new pictures which were dated on all the battle of Paris days . . . Afterward I ate one of the tomatoes from the flower pot vine which was his favourite model. It was a bit mouldy but I liked the idea of eating a work of art.’35
One of Picasso’s first visitors was John Pudney, RAF intelligence officer and poet, who wrote in the pages of the New Statesman: ‘When the firing died down and one wept less often at the singing of the “Marseillaise” and less champagne was forced across one’s altogether willing palate in the name of liberation, I went down to see Pablo Picasso.’36 In Picasso’s apartment, Pudney noted the tomato plant, and looked on as Picasso showed him a selection of French art magazines from the occupation: ‘He has quietly collected the Nazi and collaborationist periodicals in which his work has been attacked. His quick remarkable hands turned over the pages that reproduced his work. Picasso the Jew . . . the decadent Pablo Picasso . . . the obscene pornographer . . . went the captions. “And now, at least, that is at an end,” he said.’37 Except it was not at end, not entirely. In October, at the Palais de Tokyo, Picasso exhibited a selection of the work he had produced during the occupation. Protestors complaining about the art disrupted the opening and the building had to be evacuated by the police; two weeks later, reactionary students demonstrated in front of his studio on the quai des Grands-Augustins, although whether they were complaining about his art or his recent decision to join the Communist Party was not clear.38 Picasso’s art retained its power, strengthened by the convulsive and transformative experience of the liberation.
*
Although it took months for life to return to a semblance of normality, the elation of the liberation was relatively quickly replaced by the mundane problems caused by the continuation of the war. No matter what it must have felt like in Paris and beyond, the liberation of the French capital did not mark the end of the war.39 By mid-September the Métro had re-opened, albeit with a severely reduced service, but all theatres, cinemas and music halls remained closed.40 However, the flourishing Resistance press gave people plenty to read – there were seventeen daily newspapers and twenty-one weeklies in the capital.41 For most people, the biggest problem was getting enough food. On 2 September, Victor Veau noted that his household still could not buy butter or vegetables, but they were happy to get a tin of ‘singe’ (‘monkey’ – slang for corned beef) from the butcher. This was the first time in two weeks they had been able to eat something other than their dwindling larder stock.42 At the beginning of September, Berthe Auroy had to queue for three hours to buy six tomatoes. When some American soldiers gave her a bar of chocolate, she went into raptures: ‘Heavens! What amazing chocolate! Melting, vanilla – scented and delicious!’43 In the continued absence of rail or postal connections to the capital, many Parisians were beginning to find life very difficult; when partial services were restored in mid-October, it was a massive relief.44
Throughout the autumn, power supplies remained problematic. By the beginning of October, the electricity was on for forty-five minutes per day, with gas available for an hour at lunchtime. As the weather grew cold and the nights drew in, the lack of heat and light made life increasingly oppressive.45 Unemployment continued to bite as the companies that had worked for the Germans ceased functioning. Even the benign presence of Allied troops did not make up for the loss of business with the Nazis – a mere 10,000 labourers in the Paris region were employed by the Allied military.46 Many families who had been ripped apart by war now had no prospect of being reunited in the near future. Paradoxically, the departure of the Germans meant that there would be no more deals between the government and the Germans to bring the prisoners home. The number of men affected was substantial: on 31 October, veteran résistant Henri Frenay, now the Minister for Prisoners of War, announced that 2,355,000 French men and women were still held hostage in Germany; this included around 1 million POWs, 750,000 young people on labour conscription and 600,000 people who had been deported.47 None of these hostages – around 8 per cent of the adult population – would be able to return home before the end of the war. Some would have had no home to return to – hundreds of Parisians were either homeless from the various Allied and German bombing raids, or were too fearful to return to their homes. They slept in the Métro in sordid conditions, in corridors that stank of urine.48
The occupation continued to give up its terrible secrets, even while ordinary life went on. On the morning of 27 August, Paul Tuffrau was walking past the Jardin du Luxembourg when he heard from a guard that nine recently buried bodies had been found in the gardens that morning. The victims – all policemen – had been shot, and they all bore awful marks of torture. Even after four years of occupation and the tumultuous events of the liberation, Tuffrau found it hard to believe the horror.49 Not far away, little girls played at shop in a burnt-out building near the smashed remains of the Halle aux Vins, while boys played at war on a barricade on the nearby rue Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.50
*
An important element of the short-lived power struggle that took place between the Free French and the disparate forces of the Resistance involved what to do with the remnants of the Vichy regime. On 27 August, 70-year-old economist Charles Rist gave an optimistic view in his diary:
What’s most surprising is the way that everything to do with Vichy has simply vanished, totally and without a murmur . . . That mishmash of pietistic cant, of blimpish stupidity and the cynical scheming of ambitious politicians and embittered nobodies, that whole despicable, stinking attempt to wheedle a few baubles of power from the enemy – the power that France had always refused to give to them when it was free; all that has gone, blasted away by a tremendous hurricane of common sense and faith in the future.51
But Vichy had not truly disappeared. There were many former collaborators still in the Paris region, hoping they would be able to avoid the gaze of the victorious Resistance and an enraged population. Long before the liberation of Paris, the Free French government had been preparing l’épuration – the purge.52 In the first few weeks after the liberation, the legal system was not yet functioning – the three new courts that were supposed to deal with crimes committed during the occupation were not established until 4 October – while the police seemed completely uninterested in dealing with the crimes of collaboration.53 Because there was no legal framework to deal with the crimes (real or imaginary) of the accused, the population took matters into their own hands (this period was later known as l’épuration sauvage – ‘the lawless purge’).54 Within days of the liberation, thousands of collaborators – real or suspected – were arrested by the Parisian FFI and were herded into the Vel’ d’Hiv’, where over 4000 Jews had been held before being deported, in 1942.55 Conditions in the massive arena soon deteriorated – according to the FFI Medical Inspector, Dr Duhamel, there were only ten toilets and seven washbasins between more than 2500 inmates; Pierre Taittinger recalled that the queue for the toilets lasted more than two hours.56 After a few days, the prisoners were moved to Drancy prison camp, in the same Paris buses that had transported Resistance prisoners and
Jews during the occupation.
Dr Duhamel was barely more satisfied by the conditions in Drancy – there were clear signs of physical mistreatment of prisoners, vermin-ridden mattresses, poor food, no cutlery or utensils, while the primitive sanitary conditions led to cases of dysentery. Duhamel concluded that the situation ‘lowers us to the same level as that of the occupiers whom we criticised so much’.57 Within a week, conditions improved substantially, although Taittinger was still appalled by the people who were holding him, who he claimed were ‘Spaniards from the International Brigades, communists, or even people who tortured Jews’.58 Opinions about the situation in Drancy differed. For Marc Boegner, the very existence of the camp was a ‘scandal’, whereas for Yves Cazaux, the only thing that was scandalous was that some people were apparently able to buy their way out of prison.59 Whatever the case, the bigger collaborationist fish were imprisoned in Fresnes: nearly 900 ministers, admirals, bankers and journalists.60 By the middle of September, de Gaulle claimed that there had been around 6000 arrests in Paris. There were massive problems with the system for dealing with those accused of collaboration, as the Prefect of the Seine highlighted: ‘On the one hand people have been arrested who should not have been, either because they are innocent or because they are small fry who have committed minor crimes. On the other hand, notorious collaborators and Vichy supporters remain in their jobs or have begun work again without being disturbed in the slightest.’61
It was not only French collaborators who were being hunted. Attempts were made to identify those Germans responsible for the most brutal and savage aspects of the occupation. On 11 October a photograph was discovered of the Gestapo staff at rue des Saussaies – a kind of obscene team photograph. The Resistance press immediately published the photograph and set about putting names to faces, preparing the ground for future trials for war crimes.62
When the legal system eventually laid its hands on some of the individuals who symbolised either collaboration or repression, the guilty sometimes paid a heavy price for their terrible betrayal. At the end of October, Boèro and Néroni, who had been involved in the murder of Georges Mandel four months earlier, were sentenced to death and subsequently executed.63 On 14 September, Brasillach walked to the Préfecture and handed himself in.64 In January 1945 he was tried for treason and found guilty. He was executed on 6 February 1945, despite a petition from a number of well-known writers and résistants calling for clemency.65 Whatever some leading intellectuals thought about the disproportionate nature of the punishment, most of the population was in favour of Brasillach’s execution.66 This feeling was even stronger when it came to Laval and Pétain, both of whom were brought back from Germany and tried in Paris by the newly created court, the Haute Cour, in the second half of 1945. Pétain was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death; de Gaulle commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in recognition of his service during World War I and died in prison in 1951, aged ninety-five. Unsurprisingly, Laval was also found guilty and sentenced to death. On the morning that the sentence was due to be carried out, the Prefect of Police, Charles Luizet, and his advisor, Edgard Pisani, went to Laval’s cell. The prisoner was lying inert, having swallowed a cyanide pill. The prison doctors then intervened, pumping Laval’s stomach to save his life, so that he could then be killed. A few hours later Laval was strapped to a post and executed by a firing squad.67 Despite these two examples, in general the épuration did not lead to a wave of blood-letting among the political leaders of occupied France: of the 108 cases dealt with by the Haute Cour, forty-two cases were dropped, while eight men were sentenced to death, only three of whom were eventually executed.
One of the most contradictory cases dealt with during the épuration was that of the Paris police force. The police had joined the Resistance just in time to save their honour, and now enjoyed an unusually positive relationship with the Parisian population. Nevertheless, it was obvious that some sections of the police had collaborated with gusto, playing an essential role in the deportation of Jews and in the persecution of the Resistance. Within a week of the liberation, 700 policemen out of around 20,000 were suspended. Over the next sixteen months the cases of nearly 4000 men were examined by one of the Commissions d’Epuration that were set up nationally and regionally to deal with collaborators in various professions and businesses.68 Of those 4000 policemen, 400 were tried, twenty were sentenced to death and seven were executed. These cases were not distributed evenly among the different ranks: the vast majority of the senior officers were sacked, while only a minority of the lower ranks were purged.69 Above all, the men of the hated Brigades Spéciales, which had specialised in ‘anti-terrorist’ work, were severely dealt with. The most notorious member of the Brigades, Inspector Fernand David, was arrested on 12 October, condemned to death and executed on 5 May 1945. David’s colleague René Hénocque fled Paris and managed to escape justice; he died in Brussels in 1996.70 Of the 235 policemen working for the Brigades Spéciales, 186 were purged, the vast majority of them sacked without a pension. But within a couple of years, some were quietly allowed back. They had skills the new regime required.71
In the frenzy of liberation, terrible injustices occurred. To modern eyes, some of the worst instances appear to have been the head-shaving of women, although this gradually died out in September as the chaos receded.72 Few people subsequently admitted to feeling positive about these punishments. For example, in late August, Paul Tuffrau was caught up in one incident, when a crowd gathered and howled abuse at two women, who were stripped half naked and had their hair hacked off. Suddenly, a woman burst through the crowd and began slapping the elder of the two women. Tuffrau held the attacker back and the victim pleaded with him to help her. Tuffrau, ill at ease, said he would stop the young woman from being hit, but nothing more. He rode off on his bicycle feeling very uncomfortable.73
In the 18th arrondissement, the fear of rooftop snipers nearly got out of hand. In separate incidents, two teachers were each accused of firing from their windows on the crowd, and were taken away by the FFI. Both men were shocked not only by the accusations – which were clearly false – but also by the youth and indiscipline of the FFIers, in particular by a young woman, Lise, who had ‘bare legs, short shorts, wild hair, and a revolver in her hand’.74 One of the men, Monsieur Weill, was merely manhandled and then prevented from sleeping in his apartment for a few days; the other – a headmaster – was subjected to a crowd baying for his blood (‘We’re taking him to the Mairie’; ‘Don’t bother! Kill him here!’), got thumped in the face by a passer-by and was then held prisoner, before the FFI accepted that there was no evidence against him.75
The two men were lucky; had they been in the south of the city, they might not have survived. At the Institut Dentaire in the 13th arrondissement, where weeks earlier Colonel Fabien had briefly stationed some of his men, there was an unofficial ‘prison’ run by a rogue FFI group.76 The Institut Dentaire was part of a shadowy network of unauthorised prisons scattered around the Paris region.77 One of the first victims was Madame Albertini, the wife of fascist leader Georges Albertini; she had been arrested by FFI fighters on 25 August, separated from her young baby and beaten in order to discover where her husband was.78 After a couple of days, she was transferred to the Institut Dentaire, where over 200 people were held. Some were collaborators, others were deluded or had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of them received anything like a trial. In conditions that were shockingly reminiscent of the German camps, prisoners were beaten, terrorised and sometimes killed, while a piece of doggerel written on a blackboard claimed the prisoners were facing ‘workers’ justice’, and concluded with the lines: ‘For most of those who are here / only death will free them from their fear.’79
Over the next few weeks, dozens of bodies were found around Paris, some tagged with labels identifying them as fascist collaborators, but more – twenty-eight in all – were found in the Seine with bullet wounds to the head. Each corpse was weighted with a
paving stone, attached by rope to the victim’s neck. In total, the gang at the Institut Dentaire murdered thirty-six people, including the Vermandels – the fascist couple whose bodies had been found at Bagneux on 26 August. A court later concluded that had the victims been tried, some of them might have been condemned to death, but at least they would have had a trial; however, thirteen of the victims were clearly not guilty of any crimes linked with the occupation.80 One of those murdered was Madeleine Goa, a member of the communist-influenced Front National, who had been arrested on 25 August when the crowd lynched her résistant husband, Max, who was suspected with no evidence of firing on the 2e DB. During her days at the Institut, Madeleine gradually went mad. A placard was placed on her dumped corpse claiming that she was a traitor. A few days later, the local FTP put a notice on the door of the dead couple’s apartment setting the record straight and claiming that those who had falsely denounced the pair would be punished.81
The police eventually took an interest in the murders after the Institut had been closed down on the orders of FFI leader Lizé and the killing had ceased, in the middle of September.82 Identifying the culprits proved difficult, because many of them were known only by their code names, and although there were trials in 1946 and 1948 none of them ended in a conviction. The main culprit turned out to be a member of the Communist Party, René Sentuc, who had been imprisoned as a résistant during the occupation and masterminded a mass prison escape in 1944. After a long court case in the 1950s, during which Sentuc’s lawyers insisted that he had been following the orders of Colonel Fabien, Sentuc was acquitted on the grounds that there was a ‘reasonable possibility’ that these terrible acts were carried out in order to liberate the country.83
Although the Institut Dentaire was an awful aberration, it showed that in the chaos of the liberation, unscrupulous or deranged people could take advantage of the situation to settle scores. This extended to political disputes, too. Some sections of the Communist Party arrested Trotskyists; communist leader Georges Maranne intervened and ordered that they should be freed.84 Twenty-two-year-old Mathieu Bucholz, a member of a tiny Trotskyist group, had no such luck. On 11 September he was discussing politics with a group of Communist Party youth in the 20th arrondissement, when a group of communist militants burst into the room and took Mathieu away; his body was later found in the Seine, riddled with bullets.85