Loudspeaker cars were soon informing the population of the truce. People were told to remain at home and allow the Germans to evacuate Paris. This had little effect: no one really controlled the situation on the ground. Rol-Tanguy refused to accept the truce, and so did his subordinate Colonel Lizé, not a Communist. While loudspeakers were announcing the truce, it was denounced by an FFI poster. On the face of it, the FFI was defying CNR instructions, but the validity of these instructions was open to question. The CNR Bureau which decided on the truce that morning had not been regularly constituted. Bidault therefore called the CNR into full session for the afternoon (20 August). This meeting was acrimonious, but because Parodi could not attend—having fallen into the hands of a German patrol, he was a prisoner until Choltitz released him in the evening—a decision was postponed until the next day.
The situation on 20 August was therefore highly confused. The CNR and the CPL were divided about the truce; the Delegation (Parodi/Chaban-Delmas) was in favour; the leaders of the FFI and FTP were against. COMAC prepared a memorandum opposing the truce to be presented to the CNR on the following day. But what was the status of the truce in the meantime? The Communists argued that the CNR had not backed a truce since the plenary meeting (in the afternoon) had reserved its decision until the next day. The Delegation argued that since a truce had been decided by the Bureau (in the morning), it was operative until a plenary meeting decided otherwise. Meanwhile the street fighting continued, as did the stealthy takeover of ministries by the provisional secretary-generals. Morandat, arriving to take over the Matignon Palace, residence of the French prime minister, not only met with no opposition, but found himself greeted deferentially by the official guard.70
On the next morning (21 August), the CPL, despite Hamon, decided to oppose the truce and call for immediate insurrection. All now depended on the meeting of the CNR in the afternoon. This was to be the stormiest meeting in its history. It took place in a small apartment near the Port d’Orléans with the noise of fighting not far away. The heat was stifling and the participants exhausted. Villon, who called for the CNR to align itself with the CPL, accused Chaban-Delmas of being a traitor for defending the truce. The two men came near to blows. Laniel, one of the more conservative members of the CNR, felt that the atmosphere was worryingly reminiscent of the Commune. In the end, Parodi, feeling he could not hold out any longer, supported a compromise to win more time: he secured an agreement that the end of the truce would not be announced until the following afternoon.71
In fact, this deadline was never respected. From the morning of 22 August, barricades went up around the city. Over 600 barricades were constructed, mainly in the working-class areas of the north and east. Less romantically, while the barricades were going up, Parodi held the first meeting of provisional secretary-generals at the Matignon Palace: in effect, this was the first meeting of the interim Liberation government. For the first time, the Resistance press appeared openly, and Parisians were given learned explanations of the confusing acronyms—CNR, GPRF—which many heard for the first time. Fighting continued during the next two days (23 and 24 August). The Germans set fire to the Grand Palais, and the situation could still have become catastrophic if Eisenhower had not changed his plans.
Up to 23 August, the Americans remained deaf to French entreaties that they should make for Paris. Eisenhower had long agreed that the privilege of entering Paris would fall to French troops—the Second Armoured Division of General Leclerc—but he was unwilling to revise his schedule. An envoy sent by Rol-Tanguy to appeal for help was killed before reaching the American lines. On 20 August, de Gaulle arrived from Algiers to increase the pressure on Eisenhower, even threatening to withdraw Leclerc from American command and send him in alone. On the evening of 22 August, Colonel Cocteau (Gallois), another envoy from Rol-Tanguy, finally succeeded in getting through the German lines. He was summoned to Patton’s headquarters, but told that the plans could not be changed. The next morning he saw Leclerc and some more American officers. At 6 p.m. on 23 August, Leclerc finally received the order to march on Paris.
In the mythology of the Liberation of Paris, Gallois’s arrival is seen as decisive in causing the Americans to change their plans. In fact it seems that they had been about to do so anyway in the light of their own intelligence information.72 At 5 p.m. on 24 August, a message was dropped from a plane, close to the besieged Prefecture, announcing that help was on its way. Later that evening, a small unit of Leclerc’s Armoured Division under Captain Dronne appeared at the Hôtel de Ville. The bulk of Leclerc’s forces arrived on the next day (25 August), accompanied by American troops. In the afternoon von Choltitz signed the German surrender at the Gare Montparnasse where Leclerc had installed his headquarters. De Gaulle arrived there at 4.30 p.m. Having established himself in his old office at the Ministry of Defence, and visited the Prefecture, he went to the Hôtel de Ville to meet representatives of the CPL and the CNR. There he made his first speech since his arrival: ‘Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But now Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, by her own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France.’73
If de Gaulle was able to pronounce these words with any semblance of conviction, it was thanks to the insurrection—which his representatives, faithful to his wishes, had opposed until the last moment. But it would be wrong to see the argument over the insurrection as one dividing the Communists from everyone else. The truce had been opposed by many non-Communists: by de Vogüé on COMAC; by Lizé, a career officer who was in most other respects extremely hostile to the Communists; by Marie-Hélène Lechaufeux, the OCM representative on the CPL. On the other hand, de Gaulle’s representatives were not alone in fearing the consequences of an insurrection without Allied help. It was the Communist Rol-Tanguy who took the initiative of sending an envoy to hurry the Allied advance. Did the truce benefit the Germans or win valuable time for the Resistance? In theory, the full truce (as opposed to the short truce affecting the Prefecture) had lasted for only about forty-eight hours (from midday on 20 August to midday of 22 August), but in practice its impact had been negligible. Even if he had wanted to implement the truce, which he did not, Rol-Tanguy would have been powerless to do so.74
It is true that the Communists were the driving force behind the insurrection, but this does not mean they had a strategy to seize power. It was not the Communists who took the decision to occupy the Prefecture on 19 August or the Hôtel de Ville on the next day; nor did they try to interfere in the takeover of ministries. If there was a strategy for the seizure of power, it came from the Gaullist Delegation. The Communists were more interested in using the insurrection to build up their grass-roots influence—setting up Patriotic Militias in factories and taking over town halls.75 But the insurrection never became the popular uprising the Communists had imagined. The Patriotic Militias were tiny, and there was never an insurrectional general strike. By the middle of August, most workers were no longer at work, but this was because their employers had decided that it would be easiest to send them on holiday. On 14 August, one Communist trade unionist noted of the railway workers, among whom he found little enthusiasm for action: ‘the “strike” is effective because most of the workers are on leave’. The Communist activists had problems involving the workers once they were no longer collected together in the workplace. For many workers, the ‘insurrectional strike’ was a matter of going home for two weeks and trying to get enough food to survive until the radio told them on 27 August that they could return to work. Many workers did participate in the Liberation as individual members of the FFI, but not collectively as a class.76
A sceptical Polish observer of the Liberation of Paris was disgusted at the self-satisfied boasting of the first papers announcing that Paris had liberated herself:
In a week people won’t even mention the Americans and British… All these French co
cks preening themselves in cafes and under porches…waiting for the Americans, jam, and chocolate. But as soon as one of them hears the distant noise of a German motorcycle the street is deserted in seconds, doors close and people fight to look through keyholes.77
Galtier-Boissière was hardly less acerbic: ‘fighting in the streets is less risky and more picturesque than open campaigning; one comes home to lunch carrying one’s rifle; the whole neighbourhood is at the windows to watch and applaud. If only the cameras were clicking, glory would be absolute.’78
It would be wrong, however, to reduce the Paris insurrection to a charade. It is true that many of the barricades served no useful military purpose; it is true also that while the fighting raged there were painters or fishermen on the banks of the Seine, seemingly oblivious to the events around them. But the people who built or manned the barricades had not been forced to do so. And what else could be done by people without weapons? Those who participated in the fighting ran considerable risks: 901 members of the FFI and 582 civilians were killed; another 2,000 were wounded; German casualties numbered 3,200. The insurrection allowed the people of Paris to become participants in, and not merely spectators of, their own deliverance.
The greatest irony of the Paris insurrection was that the Communists had willed it, but it profited de Gaulle. In his Memoirs, de Gaulle commented that the news of the truce had made a ‘disagreeable impression’ on him. This was because by the time the news of the truce reached him, he knew that Leclerc had been authorized to advance, and in these circumstances a popular insurrection, carried out in the name of the GPRF and strictly limited in time, could help consolidate his legitimacy as France’s leader. To underline this point, on 26 August, the day after his arrival in Paris, de Gaulle organized a triumphal procession down the Champs-Élysées where massive crowds turned out to cheer him.
Vichy-Sigmaringen: From One Spa to Another
While de Gaulle was enjoying his apotheosis on 26 August, the Vichy State was on its final journey into exile.79 The site chosen by the Germans for Vichy to act out its denouement was the small German town of Sigmaringen. Its castle, overlooking the Danube, became the seat of the government. In fact technically there was no longer a government because Pétain and Laval, in protest against their forcible abduction, both refused to carry out their duties. But the Germans were reluctant to abandon the semblance of legality since an aura still surrounded Pétain’s name, especially for the prisoners of war on German soil. The impasse created by Pétain’s refusal to name a government was overcome by persuading him to allow Fernand de Brinon, who had been Vichy’s official Delegate in the Occupied Zone, to continue to exercise this authority on behalf of the French citizens on German soil (POWs and workers). With this legal cover, Brinon became head of the ‘French Governmental Delegation’ at Sigmaringen. Brinon’s ‘government’ consisted of a handful of ultra-collaborationists: Darnand was head of police; Déat responsible for looking after the interests of French workers in Germany; Luchaire in charge of propaganda. Doriot, still harbouring ambitions of his own, remained aloof.
If Vichy itself had often seemed like the parody of a government, its reincarnation at Sigmaringen was a parody of a parody. Pétain inhabited the top floor of the castle, still accompanied by the faithful Ménétrel. Regretting his agreement to delegate authority to de Brinon, Pétain started to send him notes, via Ménétrel, claiming that he had no right to act in his name. Brinon retaliated by having Ménétrel arrested, thus depriving Pétain of his main comfort and support. The floor below Pétain was occupied by Laval and those members of his government who had followed him to Sigmaringen. Since they were no longer carrying out their duties, they wandered round the castle like ghosts while Abel Bonnard, the court jester, kept up his endless stream of bons mots and malicious stories. Laval worked into the small hours preparing his post-war defence. Céline, who was the doctor at Sigmaringen, visited him regularly to treat his ulcer, and was the recipient of endless self-justificatory monologues. These proved more useful to him as copy for the book he eventually published on his experiences at Sigmaringen than they did for Laval when he appeared before the High Court in 1945.
The third floor of the castle was the seat of Brinon’s Delegation. Luchaire ran a newspaper called France and a radio station called Ici la France. Since the Delegation had nothing to govern and no foreign policy to conduct—it enjoyed diplomatic relations with Mussolini’s rump ‘Republic of Salò’—its members spent much time squabbling. They lived in the desperate hope of a sudden reversal of the Allied advance. The brief success of the German offensive through the Ardennes in the winter of 1944 aroused a flurry of optimism. After this they fell back on the fantasy that Hitler was about to unleash a secret weapon capable of destroying London at a stroke. In another parody of the situation prevailing at Vichy, Doriot set himself up away from Sigmaringen at the town of Neustadtan-der-Weinstrasse. He created a Committee for the Liberation of France—this time the parody was of de Gaulle—with its own radio station, Radio-Patrie, and its own newspaper, Le Petit Parisien. Doriot’s intention was that his Committee would eventually supplant Brinon’s Delegation. In this ambition he enjoyed the support of the Germans who believed that he was the most capable French leader. But before Doriot could prevail, he was killed by Allied aircraft fire on 22 February 1945. Déat now created his own ‘liberation’ committee to undermine de Brinon.
While the Brinon Delegation pursued its futile existence, a small band of Frenchmen found themselves fighting alongside the German armies in the newly formed Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS. A French division of the SS had first been set up in 1943. Now it was reconstituted to include about a third of the miliciens who had come to Germany, and the remnants of the LVF. In February 1945, the Charlemagne Division, which totalled about 10,000 men, was sent into action against the Red Army in Pomerania. By March it had been destroyed. About 100 survivors ended up defending the Reich Chancellery in the final battle for Berlin.
As this handful of fanatics, adventurers, criminals, and lost souls met its fate in the rubble of Berlin, the French in Sigmaringen prepared their escapes. Déat, who published his last article in the newspaper France on 15 April, made his way across the Dolomites with his wife, and sought refuge in a monastery. Céline managed to make his way to Denmark, Bonnard to Spain; Châteaubriant took refuge in the Austrian Tyrol. Pétain, however, wanted to render his account to the people of France. His last letter to Hitler, on 5 April 1945, was to ask if he could be allowed to go to Paris to defend himself before the High Court. There was no answer.
24
A New France?
It was the sea. A huge crowd was jammed together on either side of the street. Perhaps two million people. The roofs too were black with many more. Small groups were clustered at every window, with flags all around…. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but this living tide of humanity, in the sunshine, beneath the tricolour…I went on, touched and yet tranquil, amid the inexpressible exultation of the crowd, under the storm of voices echoing my name… This moment was one of those miracles of the national consciousness, one of those gestures which sometimes through the centuries illuminate the history of France. In this community, with only a single thought, a single enthusiasm, a single cry, all differences vanished, all individuals disappeared.1
This was how de Gaulle described his triumphal procession down the Champs-Élysées on 26 August 1944. Watching the newsreels of this even a few days later, the young Stanley Hoffmann, free at last from the threat of arrest and deportation, did not dissent. He felt that the ‘euphoria of a national general will was palpable—fleetingly’.2
De Gaulle’s moment of apotheosis, however, was not the ‘Liberation of France’. It occurred halfway through a process which had begun in Corsica in September 1943 and was finally complete only in April 1945 when the last German pockets in Saint-Nazaire and Lorient were liberated. Each locality had its own moment of liberation. Some, like Tulle or Guéret, had more th
an one. The Liberation, therefore, was an intense experience of national communion at a moment when French national territory had never been more fragmented.3 The Liberation was a rite of passage between the old regime and the new, an unreal moment suspended between past and future. But it was also a moment dense with historical symbolism: in Paris the barricades were a conscious re-enactment of 1848 and 1871. Léon Werth, in Paris on 24 August, wrote: ‘I didn’t believe in history. And now everything is resonant with history. My chest is swelling with history.’4 Each liberation was a compression into one day of all the 14 July fêtes which had not been celebrated under the Occupation.5 Flags were omnipresent, especially in the former Occupied Zone, because they were the simplest way in which communities could take back their streets, reclaim a public space which had been confiscated for four years. In one village in the Aisne, women were feverishly sewing flags out of any available material in the days before the Liberation. One commented: ‘I was keeping these shirts for the return of my POW husband but I’m happy to make them into a flag.’6
As in 1848 when the priests blessed liberty trees, the Church was not absent from the celebration. In each liberated community church bells rang out. One witness in Paris wrote: ‘On the evening of 24 August, as the night fell, the bells, all the bells of Paris, began to ring. With an almost religious emotion and tears, real tears, I went to the balcony with my family: what grandeur, what fullness, what gravity, what joy in this formidable concert of over a hundred church bells in the dark warmth of this immense city.’7 Throughout France Te Deums were sung, often by bishops who had remained Pétainist almost until the end.8 But the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Suhard, who had unwisely been present at Henriot’s funeral two months earlier, was excluded from the thanksgiving ceremony attended by de Gaulle in Notre-Dame on 26 August.
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