On Monday, August 21, Parisians picked up the first editions of Resistance newspapers printed in a single-sheet format. Combat, Libération, Le Front National, L’Humanité, Le Populaire, and Le Parisien Libéré had emerged from clandestine printing factories and were sold by fearless young street vendors. The different editorials exhorted Parisians to “hold the siege and keep attacking the enemy in every possible way.” The words of Combat’s editorial signed by Albert Camus particularly struck readers: “What is an insurrection? It is the people in arms. What is the people? It is those within a Nation who will never kneel.”27 Back in Paris, and now the editor of Combat, Camus was sleeping and writing in his tiny office at 100 rue Réaumur.
On Tuesday, August 22, A. J. Liebling arrived in Montlhéry, a village twenty miles southwest of Paris, with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and Leclerc’s “2nd DayBay,” as he called it. A few hours earlier, Eisenhower and General Bradley, the American field commander, had ordered the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to help Leclerc liberate Paris. Liebling was staring up at the medieval tower of Montlhéry when he heard an American voice say “Good morning!” It was a Signal Corps lieutenant from the East Coast. “Come over here!” The young lieutenant handed a pair of binoculars to the New Yorker reporter. Paris was there, in the same place he had left it four years, two months, and fifteen days before.
For the photographer and escaped prisoner Henri Cartier-Bresson, now was the time to document the insurrection and show it to the world, time to leave the farm in the Loire-et-Cher region where he had been hiding since his encounter with Georges Braque on D-Day. He carefully packed his Leica and took as many rolls of film as he could, along with a shirt or two, and hopped on his bicycle. Using only little country lanes, he reached Paris at night after a nine-and-a-half-hour ride, a 110-mile journey.
On the morning of Wednesday, August 23, after a few hours of sleep on a friend’s sofa, Cartier-Bresson set off to the Resistance’s photographers’ pool on the rue de Richelieu, next to the French National Library. Robert Doisneau, four years his junior, was there too, with his Rolleiflex. Each of the twenty photographers was given a few quartiers to cover. Cartier-Bresson was in charge of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Ménilmontant, and Batignolles.28
Cartier-Bresson left immediately with a group of young FFI toward Sacha Guitry’s grand home near the Eiffel Tower. The playwright, known for being overtly friendly with the Nazi occupants, kept his cool when he saw the young résistants bursting into his imposing and beautiful mansion. Guitry naively thought that his popularity would protect him, but the FFI’s rifles and guns were still warm from firing at German snipers. Collaborators like Sacha Guitry were as important to the Resistance as the German occupants. They were the symbols of French ambiguity and immorality, and deserved to be judged and sentenced accordingly. The young FFI wanted to take Guitry for interrogation to the 7th arrondissement town hall, 116 rue de Grenelle, and no, they would not give him time to dress. Henri Cartier-Bresson immortalized the moment when Guitry, in his yellow-flowered pajamas, jade-green crocodile pumps, and Panama hat, was escorted through the streets. It looked like a parade, one that was meant to awe Parisians and shame the playwright, and it lasted the twenty-five minutes it took them to reach the town hall. The interrogation started in room 117. “Why did you have dinner with Hermann Göring?” asked a young FFI. “Out of curiosity,” replied Sacha Guitry. Wrong answer.
While Guitry was transferred to Fresnes Prison, General von Choltitz was taking a phone call from Berlin at the Hôtel Meurice. Holding the receiver as far away from his ear as he possibly could, he heard the voice distinctively enough. It was screaming. It was Adolf Hitler. The Führer was furious and ordering him to blow up Paris’s bridges and burn the city to the ground. Von Choltitz knew about destroying cities; he had supervised the ruthless destruction of Rotterdam in May 1940. This time, however, he knew the situation was hopeless and that saving Paris would later play in his favor.29
Loosely affiliated with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, Ernest Hemingway was twenty miles south of Paris with his own little liberating army. He called it the “Hem division.” Made up of regular and less regular French and American fighters, the group consisted of sixteen men traveling in a convoy of four jeeps. Hemingway, on an assignment for Collier’s magazine, had collected his very own band of brothers on the road from Brittany. When they reached the top of a hill and had a good, clear view, Hemingway asked the driver to stop the jeep. He grabbed a pair of binoculars and adjusted the focus. He scanned the horizon, then stopped moving. “I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was the city I loved best in all the world.”30
“THIS IS THE DAY THE WAR SHOULD END”
The U.S. 4th Infantry Division let Leclerc enter Paris first. A small vanguard of Leclerc’s tanks reached the square of the Hôtel de Ville at 9:20 p.m. on August 24, 1944. The Radiodiffusion de la Nation Française, which had radio operators nearby, called on the priests of Paris to ring all the church bells. At 11:22 p.m. the 258-year-old lowest-pitch bourdon of Notre Dame Cathedral, the thirteen-ton bell known as Emmanuel, Notre Dame’s largest, rang out in F sharp so loudly that it could be heard at least five miles away.31 Every church in Paris relayed the news to Parisians.
The writer and art critic Léon Werth, to whom Saint-Exupéry dedicated his children’s novel Le petit prince, recalled the moment in his diary: “I did not know that History existed. I did not believe in History. And suddenly, History was hitting me in the face.”32 The thirty-year-old Gaullist and résistant Yves Cazaux noted: “The incredibly grave sounds belching out from Notre Dame stunned us. With Notre Dame’s bells rose a more profound voice, which seemed to be saying ‘reflect, pay your respects, the moment is superb but it is also terrible.’”33
Then came Friday, August 25. At dawn, the young composer Maurice Jarre, then nineteen, suddenly woke up in the two-room flat he shared with his aunt on the avenue d’Orléans, the large artery linking the south gate of Paris to Notre Dame. He could feel tremors. The whole building was shaking. “We thought it was the German Armoured Division sent by Hitler to help von Choltitz squash the Paris insurrection. We thought we were finished. We were petrified. The roaring sound became greater and greater. I opened the window and crawled onto the balcony. I looked. When I realized what it was, it took my breath away. Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division was entering Paris. There were no words to describe what we felt at that instant in time.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, leaving his room at the Hôtel La Louisiane on the rue de Seine in haste, ran toward the boulevard Saint-Michel. The philosopher was one among hundreds of thousands of Parisians now crowding the pavements to get a glimpse of their liberators. The Free French and the Spanish Republicans enlisted with Leclerc’s 2nd DB started pouring into the boulevards, coming from the south gate of Paris. American, British, and Canadian soldiers from the U.S. 4th Infantry Division were entering the city from the east gate of Paris, from the Porte d’Italie to the northeast. Sartre watched Leclerc’s Free French on their tanks rolling down toward the Seine: “They looked, screamed, smiled. They waved at us with their fingers forming the V of Victory and we could all feel our hearts beating as one. There were no civilians, there were no soldiers, there was one free people.”34
It was the details that moved people most. Every tank of Leclerc’s 2nd DB bore the name of a Paris street, a quartier, or a Napoleonic victory such as Austerlitz, Jena, or Wagram. One tank, baptized simply PARIS, had a live snow-white rabbit proudly resting next to the driver’s hatch and enjoying the attention. On another was a portrait of Hitler with the word merde written across it. Another had a banner reading DEATH TO THE ARSEHOLES!35 As for the Spanish Republicans, they had named their tank GUERNICA.
While a convoy of Paris firemen climbed up on top of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe to raise the French flag, von Choltitz was still at the Hôtel Meurice, negotiating the terms of his surrender with the Fren
ch Resistance commanders. Escorted to the Police Préfecture and then to Leclerc’s headquarters, set up at Montparnasse train station, von Choltitz signed his surrender at 4:15 p.m., along with more than twenty cease-fire orders. Paris was still fighting the hard core of SS units who had sworn to kill German “traitors” such as von Choltitz and continue the carnage among civilians.36 Charles de Gaulle arrived fifteen minutes later. On seeing the signature of the Communist Rol-Tanguy, head of the FFI, next to that of von Choltitz and Leclerc on the official rendition paper, de Gaulle gave Leclerc a stern look. The Communists seemed to be stealing the show.
Ernest Hemingway and his Hem division had arrived, too, driving straight from the Porte d’Orléans to the rue de l’Odéon. Stopping at number 12, facing number 7, he yelled “Sylvia! Adrienne!” Sylvia was the first to respond. “I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people in the street and in the windows cheered.”37 Adrienne watched the scene from above. “I saw little Sylvia down below, leaping into and lifted up by two Michelangelesque arms, her legs beating the air. Ah, yes, it was Hemingway, more a giant than ever, a caveman with a shrewd and studious look.” “What can I do for you ladies?” asked Hemingway. Could he and his men go and check the rooftops, please? There had been rumors of hidden German snipers nearby; Sylvia and Adrienne had heard shots and saw from their windows passersby shot like rabbits. The Hem division hurried up, guns in hand, and came back twenty minutes later. “All clear, ladies.” “A drink?” replied Sylvia,38 but when she turned her head toward the door the American novelist had vanished. She leaned over the window; he was jumping into his jeep, waving good-bye. “Au revoir!” On his way to the Hôtel Scribe, where war reporters embedded with Leclerc’s 2nd DB and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division were all meeting, the Hem division stopped once more, this time in front of 7 rue des Grands Augustins. Picasso was not in—he was still with Maya and Marie-Thérèse. The concierge asked Hemingway if he wanted to leave something with his note. Without a pause, Hemingway went straight to his jeep and came back with a wooden case full of hand grenades on which he wrote “To Picasso from Hemingway” and handed it to the concierge.39
At 6:30 p.m. the Palais du Luxembourg finally fell to the Resistance. Earlier in the afternoon, they had taken the German headquarters, the much-hated Kommandantur, on the place de l’Opéra.
The century’s most talented photographers and film operators found themselves in Paris on August 25 and 26, 1944. Their pictures and their films would travel the world, making the liberation of Paris one of the most iconic events of the Second World War. Strategically and militarily, the liberation of Paris was only a footnote in the war’s history; however, it carried a sense of poignancy, which photography deeply enhanced. French photographers had help from American war photographers and film operators in immortalizing the street battles of that day. Robert Capa, on assignment for Life, and Lee Miller for Vogue had just arrived. So had David Seymour, also known as Chim, and the playwright Irwin Shaw. Those heroic hours not only marked forever all those who were privileged to live them; they would also profoundly affect everyone who lived them by proxy, through reading war reporters’ articles, looking at the pictures and newsreels. The photographers’, film operators’, and reporters’ work was incredibly difficult and dangerous, and the people who saw and read their work could not believe the risks Parisians were taking. Civilians were swarming the streets while fighting was still going on. One moment a young soldier was kissed by a pretty Parisienne, the next he was shot in the chest by a sniper’s bullet.
Thirty-one-year-old Irwin Shaw, a radio playwright born in the Bronx, a handsome man, built like a bull but with the eyes of a deer, saw Paris for the first time on that afternoon of August 25. His small Signal Corps camera unit was made up of two cameramen, a driver, and himself, all of them PFCs, Private First Class soldiers, the third-lowest army rank. Their jeep, decked with flowers and gifts from the people in the little towns on the road to Paris, carried a small store of tomatoes and apples and bottles of wine that had been tossed to them as they slowly made their way through the crowds.40
Shaw and his unit were on their way to the Opéra, where they had been ordered to report back and leave their rolls of films at the Allied headquarters, when they heard the sound of artillery fire. Tanks from the 2nd French Division were attacking the headquarters of the German Naval Forces on the place de la Concorde. On the horizon, four huge columns of smoke swirled into the sky. Shaw’s unit stopped to capture the scene, but where to film it from? They needed to get on a rooftop. A man, an actor, who had overheard their conversation, took them to a theater nearby, the Comédie-Française, the hall of which had been transformed into a crude hospital. Shaw and his cameraman climbed up the grand staircase toward the roof, passing the busts of the great actors and actresses of France adorning each landing. “On the roof, we were sniped at once as Drell was finishing taking his pictures with the fussy, lens-adjusting deliberation that is so exasperating at moments like this. The bullet made a nasty, sudden whistle between us.”
Back in the theater hall, Irwin Shaw could not help but be transfixed by the scene playing out in front of him. “The nurses were all actresses, most of them from the Comédie-Française company. They were very pretty and dressed in light, soft dresses; the effect, with the sharp contrasts of the light and shadow, the white gleam of the wounded bodies, was that of a painting by Goya for whom the models had been picked by Hollywood’s Samuel Goldwyn.” Shaw walked to one of the dead men lying on the marble floor. A very young blond French boy had been shot through the temple. “He had a thin, handsome, sunburned, healthy-looking face. He had a streak of rouge lipstick on his cheek, like all the soldiers in Paris that day, and there was a dark wine stain down the front of his khaki wool shirt.”41
Irwin Shaw did not know that Jean-Paul Sartre was at this same instant sitting in the stalls inside the theater. The French philosopher had been asked by the Comité National des Écrivains to go and guard the Comédie-Française with his life (but without a gun). Had Irwin Shaw waited a little he would have bumped into Albert Camus, on a visit to Sartre. Later in the afternoon, Camus found Sartre dozing off on his red velvet seat and woke him up: “Hey, Jean-Paul, you’re finally in sync with the events!” The tone was amicable, but the irony was not lost on either man. Camus had been an active résistant while Sartre had been an armchair one.
Shaw and his unit had to report to the Hôtel Scribe and hand over their rolls of film for developing. On the rue de Rivoli, where the firing had stopped, Shaw and his unit walked down the middle of the street. On seeing these GIs going unharmed and taking it as a signal of victory, thousands of people flocked out from the side streets, applauding, cheering, kissing them, men and women alike, indiscriminately. “The smell of perfume from the crowd was overpoweringly strong, and the variety of rich, sweet odors, as kiss followed kiss, was dazzling and unreal to a soldier who had been living in the field, in mud and dust, for two months.”42
Simone de Beauvoir and her little family of former and current lovers and students had agreed to spend the evening together in the room that le petit Bost and Olga shared at the Hôtel Chaplain, just behind the Luxembourg Gardens. As usual, each brought the little food they had managed to save and shared it. That night, dinner was mostly potatoes, which they cooked on an improvised stove without butter or salt.43 They were comparing their memories of the momentous day. Beauvoir was still reeling from the death of a young Leclerc soldier, shot in the chest by a German sniper right in front of her door at the Hôtel La Louisiane. Then somebody thought of switching on the radio, already tuned to Radiodiffusion de la Nation Française. The speaker was at the Hôtel de Ville and he was trying to make himself heard over the very noisy crowd. Charles de Gaulle was about to address the nation. Beauvoir and her young friends looked at each other and listened. De Gaulle spoke to a crowd that had never seen him in the flesh: “There are minutes which go beyond our poor lives. Paris! An
outraged Paris! A broken Paris! A martyred Paris! But, a liberated Paris!… Since the enemy that held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to her home. She returns bloodstained, but resolute. She returns enlightened by immense lessons, but more certain than ever of her duties and of her rights.”
In his bedroom at the Hôtel Scribe, Irwin Shaw was listening to the voices of the crowd down below, an endless swelling mixture of cheers, song, and high, feminine laughter. As he fell asleep, he remembered what he had heard a GI say earlier that afternoon: “This is the day the war should end.”
ONLY THE PEOPLE CAN CROWN A MAN
On Saturday, August 26, word that de Gaulle would be marching down the Champs-Élysées with Leclerc’s 2nd DB spread fast. De Gaulle knew that in France, only the people can crown a man. He wanted to be that man. The U.S. Army agreed to fly a few planes to protect Paris and the march from the Luftwaffe.
The French general urgently needed to assert his control over the Resistance’s different factions and especially over the Communists, whom he distrusted. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to be certain not only that de Gaulle had the people with him but also that he had a strong grip on the Communist résistants. They would recognize his government only if and when they were convinced he had achieved both. While the French were busy gorging on their recently recovered freedom and celebrating with their liberators, de Gaulle had already started a silent war against the French Communists. However, because they represented half of the Resistance, having proved both their valor and their organizational skills during the war, Communists were highly regarded in the country. De Gaulle would need to navigate carefully.
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