Paris '44: The City of Light Redeemed

by Mortimer Moore, William

  De Gaulle found Mers el Kebir deeply depressing and even considered resigning his new role and emigrating to Quebec. Instead he put his dourly brave face on the situation, even though Free French recruitment slowed to a trickle. For two years Great Britain had to fight Petain’s France concurrently with fighting Hitler. Being sponsored by Great Britain, de Gaulle was forced to fight his fellow countrymen, turning Britain’s last war with France into a French civil war as well. While Leclerc uncompromisingly regarded the French Navy and the garrison of French North Africa as “playing Germany’s game”, many Frenchmen took a more complex, embittered view.

  BELIEVING THAT THE FACE OF EUROPE would be German-dominated for the foreseeable future, Marshal Pétain wanted to demonstrate that, despite their military defeat, the French were men of parts. He insisted that Paris return to normal; shops and places of entertainment were to be re-opened. But the city’s senior boulevardier, playwright and impresario, Sacha Guitry, was skulking in the southwest and considering exile in Spain. The expatriate community disintegrated. Hemingway was in America. Literary lesbians Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas hibernated in la France profonde. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Co., was one of very few who remained to uphold the city’s expat intellectual tradition.

  “Rentrez à Paris et collaborez”—”Return to Paris and collaborate” Petain yelled down the telephone to Sacha Guitry in his Dax hotel. Guitry obliged, but maintained his faith in an ultimate Allied victory by keeping his reserves of sterling.30 Meanwhile the exchange rate of twenty francs to the Reichsmark so favoured the Germans that the world-class shops and emporiums of central Paris were soon empty. France’s economy was so paralysed by ever-tightening German demands that restocking became impossible.

  Paris still had to be governed. Aged fifty-three, Mayor Pierre Taittinger, in customary French practice, held several elected offices: he represented Paris in the Chamber of Deputies alongside being President of the Municipal Council at the Hôtel de Ville, where he represented the exclusive Quartier Vendôme. Amid personal grief at losing a son at the height of the fighting, Taittinger returned to his office. While Taittinger was undoubtedly a key Parisian collaborator, the Occupation turned his family’s politics many shades of grey. His surviving sons served de Gaulle.31

  The incoming German authorities had little option but to use hotels as offices. Except for German servicemen on leave, tourism ceased throughout the Occupation. The Hôtels Majestic and Raphael on Avenue Kléber were taken over. So too were central hotels like the Crillon and the Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli and others around the Place Vendôme and Avenue de Marigny. Although the costs of the Occupation were charged to the French treasury, the Germans paid for those hotels, whose owners rarely lost out. Meanwhile many ministerial and embassy buildings were mothballed.

  The Wehrmacht quickly recognised the city’s potential for pomp and pageantry, draping their dramatic swastika flags wherever possible. Every day a company of German infantry marched down the Champs Elysées to the sound of a band complete with glockenspiels; an immense wound to Gallic pride.

  Inevitably Wehrmacht personnel had liaisons with French women. Today thousands of French citizens are descended from these relationships. Many women, actress Arletty explained afterwards, are “colour blind” when it comes to uniforms.32 The couturier and designer Coco Chanel also romanced a German officer during the Occupation. Neither Arletty nor Chanel were young women in 1940.

  The French still believed themselves culturally more advanced than the Germans. However, Parisian high society, culture and economic life could not have survived the Occupation without significant collaboration. Friendships between Parisians and their German occupiers had the same inevitability that affected social choices before the war: wealth, social class, political and moral values. The German staff officer Ernst Junger, already an established writer, entered salon society with little difficulty. Hans von Luck, an energetic Panzer officer, found friends of an equivalent upper-class background.

  As stocks dwindled in the shops, the Occupation’s grey sullenness began to bite, often regarded as an illness to be endured. The Germans were often simply ignored, many French preferring attentisme—to wait and see.

  ACTIVE RESISTANCE MEANT RISKING what bearable normality there was. It was only on 11 November 1940, when Great War remembrance ceremonies became anti-German demonstrations, that the flame of resistance first flickered in Paris. The German authorities reacted quickly. Of one hundred and twenty-three arrests, over a hundred were school-children and students. In London, the Free French cheered this development but little could be made from a spontaneous outbreak of raw patriotism with no recognisable faction behind it.33

  The first Parisian to be executed for anti-German activities was an engineer named Jacques Bonsergent, and his offence was merely to witness a trivial scuffle involving Frenchmen and Wehrmacht personnel. The only one arrested after the incident, tragically Bonsergent pleaded guilty, perhaps believing other pleas were pointless and that the incident was trivial. But he was sentenced to death. Despite appeals, German military governor General Otto von Stulpnagel wanted to make an example; Bonsergent was shot at Vincennes on 23 December 1940. Posters announcing the execution so enraged Parisians that many became shrines decorated with Tricolores and Union Jacks.34

  Now that blood had been spilt, the London French had an incident to build on. The BBC French Service asked Parisians to stay indoors on New Year’s Day between 3pm and 4pm, an act of passive resistance widely heeded in Paris despite German offers to distribute free potatoes during that hour.35 Although a miners’ strike crippled northeastern France, there was little direct anti-German activity in Paris during early 1941. The Germans were, however, watchful and in February uncovered an escape line for Allied servicemen run by ethnologist Boris Vilde from the Musée de l’Homme. Its leaders were shot at Mont Valérien.

  While communists later became the most committed and disciplined résistants, during the Occupation’s first year they were split between those who saw Germany as the Soviet Union’s ally following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and others who thought that position ludicrous. The latter included the FTP’s Henri Rol-Tanguy.* After two years in the International Brigades fighting for a doomed cause in Spain, and involvement in trade union politics, Rol-Tanguy tapped into working-class resentment at French industry being sucked into Germany’s war effort. Knowing to avoid buildings, Rol-Tanguy’s recruitment meetings usually occurred in parks, either the Bois de Vincennes or Bois de Boulogne.36

  A big police rafle (round-up) against left-wing activists during October 1940 forced Rol-Tanguy to live apart from his wife, Cécile, who was pregnant for a second time. During her confinement the following May a health visitor asked where her husband was. “Oh, he comes and he goes,” Cécile replied. After 1945 she learnt that, had the health services known about her circumstances, she could have been helped more. But distrust towards Occupation officialdom was so great that she dared not take the risk.37

  1940–1941

  DURING LATE 1940, FREE FRANCE’S WAR WITH VICHY preoccupied de Gaulle more than fledgling resistance in Metropolitan France. Although the failure at Dakar, where his men were repulsed by Vichy forces, was among the saddest episodes of de Gaulle’s life, Leclerc had meantime established Free France’s stake in Africa by taking the Cameroons and Gabon. Four months after escaping from France, former trainee diplomat Christian Girard arrived in the Cameroons to witness a smart parade by colonial infantry commanded by Leclerc. “Once more I felt we were in France,” wrote Girard.

  Leclerc’s success kept de Gaulle in the game. Whereas at first the Free French appeared lacking in realism—Major General Sir Edward Spear’s wife called de Gaulle’s early followers “sweet, silly boys”—now they had fought and killed their fellow countrymen. They hardened and became uncompromising. Previously Vichy loyalists captured in French Equatorial Africa who refused to join de Gaulle were courteously returned to France. Once home
several of these officers reported Leclerc to Vichy authorities as none other than Philippe de Hauteclocque, former cavalry instructor at Saint-Cyr. But once de Gaulle’s officers were being tried for treason in absentia and death sentences handed down, to be carried out upon their capture, it became necessary to retain captured Vichy personnel as potential hostages. While no more an Anglophile than de Gaulle, Leclerc was shocked by Vichy’s pro-Fascist attitude when he perused captured papers in Gabon.38

  Apart from inflicting a few casualties at Dakar and a weak air-raid against Gibraltar, Vichy usually suffered most in its skirmishes with the British and de Gaulle’s Free French; a pattern that would continue. When, during late October, Vichy diplomat Louis Rougier arrived in London pleading for quarter so that French merchantmen could ply the Mediterranean with foodstuffs from French North Africa without Royal Navy interference, he was met with open ears. After Churchill initially told him that Britain would “bombard” Vichy, an informal agreement was made. The Free French and Vichy would accept the existing status quo in the colonies and de Gaulle would turn his attention elsewhere. Attacks on Pétain in the international media would cease and Vichy would undertake not to hand over any French imperial bases to the Axis. Given the agreement’s informal nature, Churchill could not sign it himself, though he penned some terse remarks in the margin—one directed at General Weygand, exhorting him to bring French North Africa over to the Allies, and another aimed at Laval and Darlan, threatening to bring down Vichy if they made further concessions to the Axis. The Rougier-Strang agreement instilled some restraint into the tense situation between London, the Free French and Vichy until the Syrian affair the following summer. Meanwhile de Gaulle directed Leclerc to carry the war to the Italians.

  Owing to the foresight of Chad’s colonial governor, Felix Éboué, de Gaulle’s Cross of Lorraine soon flew over Fort Lamy, thereby forestalling potential Italian demands for the Sarra Triangle. Shortly after Leclerc arrived in Chad, Major Ralph Bagnold of the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) visited Fort Lamy seeking Free French assistance in attacking Italy’s south Libyan bases Kufra and Murzuk. Leclerc was impressed by LRDG methods and their stripped-down Chevrolet trucks bristling with machine-guns, but he also prefered not to waste the traditions of the Corps Méhariste—the “Camel Corps”—founded by Henri Laperrine. So Leclerc used camels to build up depots on roads not yet robust enough to take mechanised traffic. Next Leclerc souped up the LRDG concept to something resembling the Foreign Legion’s marching columns. For the Murzuk raid Leclerc sent officers Colonna d’Ornano* and Jacques Massu to sample LRDG methods, while for Kufra he furiously gathered intelligence, including aerial photographs, and organised a mechanised column supported by light artillery. Kufra was Free France’s first land victory against the Axis. Inside the Italian colonial fort of El Tag, Leclerc made his men swear never to lay down their arms until the Tricolore flew again over Strasbourg Cathedral. This became known as “the Oath at Kufra”.

  Leclerc’s main strategic aim, however, was to link-up with the British forces fighting the Italians in Libya and Egypt. But the arrival that February of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, who recovered everything lost by the Italians during the winter of 1940–1941, delayed this plan for twenty months. In the meantime Leclerc’s force guarded the Allies’ southern flank in Africa and the valuable air route from Takoradi to Cairo.

  ON 22 JUNE 1941 THE WEHRMACHT INVADED the Soviet Union. That same day in Paris the Germans seized the Soviet Legation along with everyone inside at the time, particularly the reading room, a second home for many French communists. Among these was François Le Bihan, Cécile Tanguy’s father, who later died in Auschwitz.39

  The communist resistance group Francs Tireurs et Partisans—FTP—now took up arms against the common foe, provoking a spate of arrests against communist activists. Henri Rol-Tanguy was forced to hide while Cécile found yet another home for herself and their newborn daughter in an attic apartment at 10 Rue de l’Ouest. Comradeship in working-class Paris ensured that activists like Rol-Tanguy were hidden and fed.

  An FTP speciality was train derailments, such as occurred at Épinay sur Seine on the night of 17–18 July 1941. By August FTP’s activities had graduated to assaults on German personnel; a German soldier was murdered outside a brothel near the Porte d’Orléans. On other occasions German personnel were followed, but the résistants’ nerve failed at the thought of killing and reprisals. On 21 August, however, Spanish Civil War veteran Pierre Georges pumped two pistol shots into German naval lieutenant Alphonse Moser at Barbes-Rocheouart Metro station in Montmartre.

  Next, in an extraordinary, unlinked incident, when Pierre Laval and Marcel Déat attended a Versailles parade ground to wave off the Légion des Volontaires Français to fight alongside the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union, one of the volunteers, Paul Collette, produced a small pistol from inside his new German uniform and fired five shots at Laval and Déat, gravely injuring both of them.40

  When Pierre Georges sent Gilbert Brustlein—his accomplice at Barbes-Rocheouart—to Nantes to assassinate the local Feldkommandant, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hotz, the FTP committed a serious “own goal”. General Otto von Stulpnagel insisted that fifty Nantais hostages should be shot as a reprisal. While in Paris, although the assassination attempt on Laval was a Vichy matter, Stulpnagel insisted that one hundred Frenchmen should be executed in reprisal for Barbes-Rocheouart. The final victims included Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, one of de Gaulle’s early envoys to Paris, who was captured in January, and Dutchman Jan Doormik. After a memorial service for these victims in London’s Westminster Cathedral, de Gaulle announced that he and he alone would give orders for resistance operations.41

  FOR THE FTP, DE GAULLE WAS TOO FAR AWAY to be relevant to their lives. They saw him merely as an officer who wanted to rebuild the French Army as a fighting force. But while they could not accept his advice against killing German personnel and provoking reprisals, they respected his refusal to accept defeat and encouragement in obstructing “the pillage of France”. Since most Parisian workers had families to feed, very few could take part.

  There were also limits to how many fugitives the clandestine networks could protect. Early FTP industrial sabotage missions were organised by Polish emigré Joseph Epstein.

  Having been a weapons expert during his national service, Henri Rol-Tanguy devised time bombs for industrial sabotage. When L’Air Liquide’s depot at Saint-Ouen was targeted, Rol-Tanguy went to instruct workers on planting his devices. Taking Cécile and baby Hélène with him, Rol-Tanguy instructed the saboteurs outside the factory in broad daylight while Cécile played with Hélène on the grass nearby; a typical summer lunchtime scene.42

  To counter the Resistance, the Gestapo and German security police became increasingly efficient, forcing résistants to become more watchful. Compared to the Germans the French police could be blasé, but it depended hugely on who was in charge. FTP members usually avoided venturing out unnecessarily. Metro stations were particularly dangerous if the police had set up a checkpoint thirty metres from the bend of a long connecting corridor between platforms. Usually the police were content to see an old military ID card; perhaps an individual policeman’s patriotism could be appealed to. But over the months the police accumulated considerable intelligence about the Resistance, and some senior police officers were determined to be respected professionally in German eyes.43

  Rol-Tanguy got around by bicycle wearing a civil defence uniform when going to meetings. His contacts among taxi drivers, who often worked as waiters once petrol shortages kicked in, enabled Rol-Tanguy to hide his bicycle at numerous bistros before continuing on foot, using his extensive knowledge of Parisian alleys and rat-runs. On one occasion, hearing unfamiliar footsteps outside the mansard bedsit he was renting away from Cécile, Rol-Tanguy clambered down the lift cable which exited outside his window. It was indeed the police. On another occasion, no sooner had a gypsy read his palm at a streetside café, promising him a long lif
e, than Rol-Tanguy felt a twinge of danger. An unfamiliar man in blue workers’ overalls appeared unusually interested in him. Walking away, Rol-Tanguy realised he was being followed. Again his superior knowledge of backstreet Paris protected him.

  After warning his group that they were fliqués—under surveillance—Rol-Tanguy moved to a bedsit in Malakoff. The police found him there as well, but luckily the concièrge warned him that enquiries were being made and he moved on. Perhaps the police wanted him warned. In any case Rol-Tanguy was determined never to be taken alive and always carried two small pistols in good working order. He quarantined himself for his comrades’ safety, not having any contact with anyone for ten days. By August 1942 Rol-Tanguy was back in contact with Cécile, who was forced to give up her secretarial job with a cosmetics firm once the police seemed suspicious.44