As Paris was being liberated, Pétain was being held by German Feldgendarmerie at Château Morvillars near Belfort. A stone and red-brick renaissance style affair, Château Morvillars was owned by Louis Vieillard who, like many patrician members of the Resistance, had fled the country, in his case to Switzerland, leaving his intrepid wife to hold the fort. But with Paris liberated, Madame Vieillard saw little danger in admitting to Pétain that not only was her husband a résistant but herself as well. “You?” said Pétain, astonished that a chatelaine could be Gaulliste. “It isn’t possible.”
“Why, Monsieur le Maréchal, do you think there are only terrorists in the Resistance?”
“I haven’t heard anything,” insisted Pétain before inviting his host to dine with him.
Madame Vieillard replied that she could dine with him provided no Vichy ministers were present. Petain agreed.
On 25 August Pétain finally recognised that his position as French head of state no longer existed. He paid off his personal staff with whatever monies were available and refused any more deference than was due to a retired marshal. He became visibly uncooperative towards the Germans, forcing them to deal instead with Fernand de Brinon. Acknowledging the success of his former subaltern, Pétain told a friend, “I thought the French nation incapable of serious effort; these hundreds of thousands of men who have risked their lives for the liberation have given proof of a heroism in which I no longer dared to believe. I knew that de Gaulle was intelligent, but I never thought he could succeed in so splendid an undertaking.”55
26 August 1944
MOST OF THE 2e DB SPENT THAT NIGHT in central Paris, either bivouacked, bringing in what eventually amounted to twelve thousand German prisoners, or fighting around Vincennes and La Villette. Nevertheless, de Gaulle stood by his decision to hold a celebratory march down the Champs Élysées, capped with a special Mass in Notre Dame. However, it was a decision fraught with difficulties. First it was inconceivable to run such an event without the guardianship of Leclerc’s troops. But General Gerow held the equally understandable viewpoint that the 2e DB should be engaging enemy forces north and east of Paris.
In the second place the use of France’s premier cathedral necessarily involved the clergy, especially the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard. While undoubtedly a decent man, the fact that Suhard apparently permitted, though Heaven knows how he could have prevented it, Henriot’s state funeral remained an enormous point against him in Resistance eyes. Against this, Suhard’s humanitarian efforts during the Occupation counted for little.
Leclerc recognised early on that more than Boissieu’s HQ protection squadron was necessary to guarantee de Gaulle’s safety. If trouble erupted on the Champs Élysées the Spahis’ M8 armoured cars would have to take and hold the Seine bridges. Infantry would have to protect de Gaulle himself, and his most experienced street fighters were Raymond Dronne’s Spaniards. At midday Joseph Putz ordered Dronne to present la Nueve and their half-tracks immediately at the Étoile. Even though Dronne’s men were largely Atheists, de Gaulle knew how to make his pleasure felt.56
Through the morning the disagreement between Leclerc and General Gerow rumbled on. Something of this nature had been inevitable ever since de Gaulle appointed Leclerc interim military governor of Paris nine months before. On 24 August, as US V Corps commander, General Gerow ordered the 2e DB to pursue the Germans out of the city. Even though Paris was mostly back in Allied hands, Gerow expected this order to be carried out. On discovering that Leclerc was obeying his political master rather than himself, at around 10am Gerow sent a liaison officer to La Tour-Maubourg barracks to remind Leclerc that the 2e DB should be engaging the enemy northeast of Paris. Predictably Leclerc pointed out that, since General de Gaulle was now France’s head of state, he had to obey de Gaulle’s orders. Hearing this, Gerow put his order in writing and sent it to Leclerc’s adjutant, Commandant Weil. Knowing neither Leclerc nor de Gaulle would change their plans for anyone, Weil left the note in his pocket, but the matter did not rest there.57
CARDINAL SUHARD’S HUMILIATION BEGAN EARLY. At 9.30am Bishop Lancrenon, a longstanding member of the Resistance who owed his freedom to Suhard’s intervention in 1942, arrived at 30 Rue Barbet de Jouy to inform Suhard of the Conseil National de la Résistance’s decision regarding the service in Notre Dame that afternoon. “Given their attitude under the Vichy government, neither Monsignor Beaussart nor the Cardinal should be present in Notre Dame.” De Gaulle knew how to make his displeasure felt.58
Seeing Suhard’s despair at such disrespectful treatment, Père Le Sourd telephoned the Préfecture for confirmation.
“We apologise for not keeping you informed,” said one of Luizet’s staff. “There has been a lot to organise. Yes, there will be a Te Deum at Notre Dame. It has been fixed for 4.30pm.”
The fact that Notre Dame fell under the authority of the Archbishop of Paris was utterly disregarded. With disrespect engulfing Suhard, Notre Dame’s Deacon, Monsignor Brot, tried to soothe him.
“There you are, Eminence! They’ve fixed the time for the Te Deum and I haven’t even been told. Please Sir, don’t be too concerned with protocol. They haven’t had time to address matters of etiquette. Don’t expect too much.”
Once again Cardinal Suhard believed he had a right to officiate in his own church.59
But when Parodi’s staff explained the situation, de Gaulle simply said, “If the Cardinal’s safety is in danger then he must not come.”
Next, after confering with Père Bruckberger, the priest who, with Suhard’s blessing, offered himself as chaplain to the Préfecture when the Insurrection began, Francis-Louis Closon and Monsieur Segala came to inform Suhard of de Gaulle’s decision.
“By what right,” retorted Suhard, “does the government deny me access to my own Cathedral?”
“The government can not guarantee your safety. Paris has largely liberated itself through insurrection. There are still outbreaks of violence.”
“I can not accept that reason,” replied Suhard. “I have every intention of presiding over the prayers for the liberation of Paris. In any case, who has sent you on this errand?”
“The Government of the Republic,” said Segala.
“You mean General de Gaulle?”
“The General has approved the decision of the provisional government,” said Segala.
“Well that’s dreadful for me,” said Suhard, visibly moved. “Infinitely sad! But if that is what General de Gaulle really wants then I will have to go along with it, but not without protesting.”
As Parodi’s emissaries left, Closon turned around to say, “Eminence, I am sure you would be glad to know that the General’s first visit to Paris is to Notre Dame.”60
DE GAULLE WAS LUNCHING WITH LECLERC and other 2e DB officers at Chez Chauland, a popular restaurant in the military quarter, when Gerow’s liaison officer made his second attempt to cancel the parade. General Juin later remarked, “That Gerow certainly had no equal when it came to meddling inappropriately in French affairs.”61 Fuming, Gerow drafted another order:
“Since you are operating under my direct command you are not to take orders coming from any other sources. I am told you have been instructed by General de Gaulle to cause your troops to take part in a parade this afternoon at 2pm. You will pay no attention to this order. The troops under your command will not take part in the parade either this afternoon or any other time except on orders signed by me personally.”
As veteran French correspondent Jean Lacouture wrote, “Of course, both de Gaulle and Leclerc would have had to be shot to make them give up a plan whose symbolic significance seemed to them wholly irreplaceable. Gerow gained nothing but humiliation.”62
Gerow’s emissary asked Leclerc if he was refusing a direct order, warning him that, if he was, the US Army would regard it as a court martial offence. Leclerc is believed to have replied, “Precisely because these orders were given by idiots means I don’t have to carry them out!”63
Leclerc directed the American to de Gaulle, who was observing their exchange with interest from his table.
“I lent you General Leclerc,” de Gaulle declared firmly. “Surely I can borrow him back for a little while.”64
The American departed but, shortly before the parade, he reappeared at La Tour Maubourg barracks, collared Commandant Weil and demanded that Leclerc report immediately to Gerow at Les Invalides. Considering the dangers, Gerow’s concerns were justified. De Gaulle’s planned parade involved over a million people with only one regiment of the US 4th Infantry Division and Roumiantzoff’s small battle group between Paris and the German front line. Small bands of Wehrmacht soldiers and disgruntled Miliciens remained at large. But it was too late to cancel the parade. Jean Guignebert and Pierre Crénesse at Radio Paris, and other liberated radio stations, had announced it for over twelve hours. Tricolores adorned with the Cross of Lorraine were already fluttering from windows and lampposts. Printing presses had worked all night producing posters proclaiming “Vive de Gaulle! ” Thousands of Parisians were massed all the way from the Étoile, down the Champs Élysées and along all routes to Notre Dame.
AT 30 RUE BARBET-DE-JOUY, lunch passed quickly, though Cardinal Suhard could barely eat. Two policemen now guarded his residence; he was under house arrest. When the front door was opened to Monsignor Courbe, gunfire was audible nearby.
“We should be available to everybody,” insisted Suhard.
“Eminence,” said Courbe, “this won’t last. If the General returns to Notre Dame without you he risks the fate of Heliodorus.”
“Père Bruckberger has just telephoned me,” said Brot. “He told me in an unrepeatable tone ‘General de Gaulle is coming to Notre Dame. He will be accompanied by Père Houchet, Chaplain of the Leclerc division and myself. Cardinal Suhard should not be there. It is you who will receive the General and me who will speak!’ The tone was dry and military.”
“We’ve been thinking of a protest,” said Père Le Sourd. “Here is a statement of the Cardinal’s position.”
Brot read quickly.
“Held under house arrest in my residence by order of the Prefect of Police and the President of the Council, I can only accept their decision. But I must protest against any measure that prevents the Archbishop of Paris from entering his Cathedral. I would be grateful if you would make my protest known to General de Gaulle. And I pray that you pass on, dear Archdeacon, the expression of my pain in the midst of such national rejoicing and my deep affection.”
“Tell his Eminence that I will do this,” Monsignor Brot told Le Sourd.
Later Alexandre Parodi told Père Bruckberger, “I’ve had a protest from the Archbishop, but I have not replied.”65
PASCALE MOISSON AND HER FRIEND MARCELLE intended to watch the parade from the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, but the crowd coming from Montmartre swept them towards the Place de la Concorde. On the way, Pascale saw two young women climb aboard a US 4th ID M8 armoured car to be hugged and kissed. Pascale stretched out her arms to an American sergeant who embraced her gently. Reaching the Place de la Concorde around which several RBFM Tank-Destroyers were parked, Pascale realised she would be unable to see de Gaulle unless she climbed onto a Tank-Destroyer, but a smart Gardien de la Paix with white gloves shouted abruptly, “Civilians are not allowed to climb on tanks! Your safety!” Then the Gardien led Pascale towards the front of the crowd, between the police cordon and the Tank-Destroyer, whose commander was scanning the Champs Élysées with binoculars. “When something starts happening, I will tell you,” he said, smiling down at Pascale. “There’s an enormous Tricolore unfurled inside the Arc de Triomphe.”66
At the Étoile the Stuart tanks of Boissieu’s protection squadron were ready to lead the parade; their names redolent of la France profonde—Lauraguais, Limagne, Limousin, and Verdelon. Then came la Nueve’s half-tracks, Brunete, Ebro and Don Quichotte. Paris’ Spanish refugee community turned out to cheer them, carrying a twenty-metre-long red, yellow and purple Spanish Republican flag. But it was France’s day and la Nueve‘s supporters were quietly asked to roll up their flag, though each half-track bore a discreet Spanish Republican pennant.67
Roger Gallois caught up with Leclerc at the Arc de Triomphe. “Well, that wasn’t too bad!” said Leclerc cheerily.68
Photographs of Leclerc taken before the parade show him looking exhausted but serene as he spoke with Louis Dio, Paul de Langlade and Jacques de Guillebon, his comrades of the previous four years. At 3.10pm, de Gaulle arrived. An honour guard of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad presented arms. He rekindled the eternal flame and laid a Cross of Lorraine-shaped wreath of gladioli on the tomb of the Soldat Inconnu while Leclerc, Koenig, Juin and officers of the 2e DB saluted. Their dream had come true.69
Just then a throng of around three hundred men and women broke onto the Champs Élysées dressed in 1830s costume, some women bare-breasted, dressed in Tricolores and Phrygian bonnets, re-enacting Delacroix’s painting, La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty guiding the people). Langlade wrote that no one was impressed and their caper fell flat.70
Turning away from the Arc de Triomphe, de Gaulle looked down the eighteen hundred metres of the Champs Élysées, where the crowd grew every second. His entourage, senior officers and members of the Paris Resistance were waiting for the march to begin. Also prominent from his black skin and white shirt was Georges Dukson, the Lion of the 17th Arrondissement, who appointed himself to de Gaulle’s entourage following a bet.71 Claude Guy was shorter than de Gaulle but still pretty tall, making the Gabonais Dukson appear diminutive.* Seeing a young man smoking, de Gaulle told him to extinguish his cigarette. Then he told COMAC leaders Jean de Vogüé and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont to keep in line. “This made little sense and was of no importance, but the naval officer [de Vogüé] was deeply affected,” wrote Kriegel-Valrimont.72
But that afternoon was about more than a few thousand Insurrectionists. Hundreds of thousands of Parisians were making a spontaneous display of popular emotion. They came to see the most popular man in France, Charles de Gaulle; to put a face to the strong, deep voice that had upheld their sense of patriotism since 1940.
“It was a sea!” de Gaulle wrote. “An immense crowd was massed from one side to the other of the great avenue. Perhaps there were two million souls. The rooftops were also covered with people. In every window groups mingled with curtains. Others were clustered around signposts and street lamps. As far as the eye could see, it was a living mass, under sunshine, under the Tricolore.”73
As a loudspeaker van declared, “Le général de Gaulle confie sa sécurité au peuple de Paris!”—“General de Gaulle entrusts his safety to the people of Paris!”—Raymond Dronne’s half-track Guadalajara began rolling steadily along the avenue’s south side. Wearing his battered képi, arms folded against the gun-rail, Dronne marvelled at the “ocean of heads” acclaiming de Gaulle. “To undertake a march like that was utterly crazy,” he wrote. “It only needed a fanatic or someone unbalanced out of that immense crowd, where so many ordinary people had guns” for de Gaulle to be endangered.74
On this day de Gaulle trusted Fortune to watch over him. Emotional yet calm, he looked straight ahead as he marched “through the midst of the indecipherable exultation of the crowd, under a tempest of voices proclaiming my name”. The crowd swirled and eddied, making a gap for his entourage while they waved and shouted, “Vive de Gaulle! ” and “Vive la France! ” “It was happening at that very moment,” de Gaulle wrote, “one of those miracles of the national conscience, one of those gestures from France, which, from time to time, throughout the centuries, arrive to brighten our history.” Only someone fiercely patriotic with a romanticised idea of his nation’s character could write such a thing. “In such a community,” he continued, “there was but one thought, one spirit, one cry; differences faded, individuals disappeared.” From the Étoile down to the Rond-Point and thence to the Place de la Concorde children shrieked freely, women made dowdy by the Occupation
’s shortages cried with forgotten joy, men cried with happiness and rediscovered pride in their country. “Merci, merci,” they said as de Gaulle passed. With a restrained smile, he acknowledged their gratitude. It had been his proudest duty to be the instrument of France’s destiny.75 Marching behind de Gaulle, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont turned round to see Jean de Vogüé with tears streaming down his cheeks. “C’était une spectacle splendide”—“It was a splendid sight” Kriegel-Valrimont wrote many years later.76
Paris was liberated but much of France remained under German control; more than at the height of the First World War. More men would die before German boots left French soil. With each pace de Gaulle remembered how the 1919 victory parade trod that same macadam. Passing the statue of Georges Clemenceau, who guided France through that great conflict, de Gaulle turned to salute. Here his memoirs include a cinematic flight of fancy, imagining Clemenceau climbing down from his plinth to walk alongside them.
“What a triumph, Mon Général! ” exclaimed Georges Bidault.
“Yes, but what a crowd!” de Gaulle replied.
Looking up, he savoured the great chestnut trees with their enormous green leaves, remembering how Napoleon’s son, the hapless Aiglon, dreamt of them while imprisoned in Austria. Ahead of him, beyond the Obelisk, lay the Tuileries gardens and the great north and south wings of the Louvre. On his right, beyond the Seine bridges, he could see Les Invalides, whose church housed the tombs of France’s greatest soldiers. A thousand years of French history flooded through his mind.77
At last, from the Place de la Concorde, Pascale Moisson saw de Gaulle. “He was there, so close to us, surrounded by glory; very tall, thin and dignified, marching at quite a fast pace. I could not keep my eyes off him. His face was energetic yet immobile, letting no smile respond to the vivats of this multitude which had gathered to applaud him, but also honest, inspiring trust and sympathy. It was the face of a hero,” she wrote. Then, slightly behind, followed Leclerc, the soldier who had kept de Gaulle in the game. Next came the FFIs, then white-clad nurses and nuns who had tended the Insurrection’s wounded and dying, and public workers whose strikes helped make the Germans’ grip on the city untenable.78
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