The Seine divides Normandy into eastern and western sections, and after D-Day, Hitler at first prevented his army’s retreat from the western bank. Soon the German troops were under such fierce attack, however, that they had no choice but to cross the river and head east, toward Germany. Since the bridges had been destroyed, they struggled to cram onto ferries. Many soldiers were trapped on the banks and died waiting for ferry boats that never came to their rescue. The Seine thereafter became a barrier to the Allies, blocking them in their push eastward. General Eisenhower decided that all of his forces—American, British, Canadian, and Free French—had to cross. But without its bridges, the Seine was a formidable obstacle.
“A marvelous natural barrier,” Navarro explained as he pointed out photographs of the destruction.
The solution was to build both fixed and floating bridges, sometimes under enemy fire. The most famous were the British Baileys, easy to assemble piece by piece from prefabricated parts. Forty soldiers could build a sixty-foot, single-lane bridge in three to four hours and a three-hundred-foot, two-lane bridge in thirty-six hours. With the German retreat, the Allied forces moved east toward Paris, while Canadian infantry soldiers cleared out the remaining enemy positions around Rouen. Paris was liberated on August 25, Rouen five days later. By the time the fighting ended, Normandy had become the repository of artifacts from the battles.
Navarro began collecting World War II memorabilia as a teenager. Over the years, he amassed thousands of objects: maps, bayonets, binoculars, goggles, gas canisters, and mess kits. Pocket knives, sewing kits, razors, and shaving brushes. Dog tags and faded photographs of wives and sweethearts. Playing cards, empty Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarette packs, coins, and postage stamps. A shortwave radio that a friend’s parents had used to tune in broadcasts of the Free French forces from London. “I still find empty cartridges on the banks of the Seine with my kids,” Navarro said.
Some objects in Navarro’s collection are large, like the wing of a British Lancaster bomber. Some are small, like the clickers Allied paratroopers used to signal each other. He displays metal helmets pierced with bullet holes and uniforms on resin mannequins. One room of the museum concentrates on the Germans, others on the Allies. In one tableau, a German soldier stands, grim-faced, behind an enormous machine gun and belts of ammunition, as if ready to fire. In another, soldiers are smoking. In still another, the body of a dead soldier lies on a stretcher under a camouflage blanket. Outside the museum sits a small French naval boat found at the bottom of the Seine in 2013. It resembles a sculpture of twisted metal.
By the end of the war, much of the Seine Valley, the highway to Paris, would have to be rebuilt. Yet Paris, that city of light divided into two banks by the Seine, was spared.
HITLER ADMIRED PARIS, though he spent very little time there. But that is not the reason his armies left it intact. One of the most famous photographs of the Nazi Occupation shows the dictator at the place du Trocadéro early one Sunday morning in June 1940, the day after France and Germany signed their armistice. A master propagandist, Hitler had brought his personal photographer with him. Hitler’s architect Albert Speer stands to his left; his favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, to his right. They are posed against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, on the other side of the river. Hitler and his aides are center stage, rendered in stark black and white, the background of Paris in pale shades of gray.
In their memoirs years later, Speer and Hermann Giesler, another of Hitler’s architects, told their versions of that two-and-a-half-hour visit to Paris. Hitler sat in the front seat of a six-wheeled Mercedes convertible next to the chauffeur for a predawn tour of the city: past the Opéra and the Madeleine, down the rue Royale and through the place de la Concorde, up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Hitler stood for a long time at Napoléon’s tomb in the Invalides. He inspected the Panthéon and looked out over Paris from the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. “Paris has always fascinated me,” he said at one point during the visit. “Now the gates stand open.”
At that moment in 1940, the world knew little of Hitler’s ultimate ambitions for France. In the plane, before leaving Paris’s airspace, he ordered his pilot to circle the city several times. He and his party looked down on Paris and the steely-gray curve of the Seine arching through it.
Hitler toyed with the idea of destroying Paris, then declared it unnecessary, preferring to redesign and aggrandize Berlin. “When we are finished with Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow,” he said. “So why should we destroy it?”
He would change his mind again.
Near the war’s end, Hitler decided that if the Allies took Paris, it would be a city in ruins. He ordered the destruction of its bridges and monuments, including the Opéra, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre; he hoped to leave tens of thousands of people dead. The British intercepted and decrypted Hitler’s communiqué of August 23, 1944, addressed to General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Greater Paris, which gave the order: “The Seine bridges are to be prepared for blowing up. Never, or at any rate only as a heap of rubble, must Paris fall into the hands of the enemy.”
In his 1951 memoirs, von Choltitz told the story. On the day Paris was liberated, he surrendered—without following Hitler’s orders to destroy the city. He wrote that he saved Paris because of his love of the city and his conviction that Hitler had gone mad. Some of von Choltitz’s writing has been called into question over the years, but Hitler’s plan to destroy Paris makes for great reading. It has been the stuff of novels, movies, and myths.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre spun the story into Is Paris Burning?, their best-selling account of the final days of the Nazi Occupation and the liberation of the city. Then came the film of the same name in 1966, directed by René Clément, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, Francis Ford Coppola, and others. Some critics called it messy in its structure, flat in its storytelling, and thin in its veracity. As far as we know, Hitler did not, as the film claims in its last scene, get on the telephone to von Choltitz and scream over and over, “Brennt Paris?”—“Is Paris burning?”
The movie is shot almost entirely in black and white, seamlessly weaving in documentary footage. The cast reads like a who’s who of American and French cinema: Alain Delon, Leslie Caron, Charles Boyer, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Michael Lonsdale on the French side; Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, Glenn Ford, Kirk Douglas, Robert Stack, and E. G. Marshall on the American.
In 2014 came another version, the French-German film Diplomacy, adapted from a play produced three years before. It tells the story of von Choltitz’s soul-searching and ultimate decision during a night of verbal jousting with a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Nordling. The diplomatic persuasiveness of Nordling sealed von Choltitz’s decision to disobey Hitler. The conversations are fictional, but the general story line is accurate.
The final scene of the film takes viewers along a calm Seine bathed in diamond-white light. The camera passes under the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, the Eiffel Tower visible on the right. The pillars of the Pont Alexandre III gleam golden in the sun. The Seine reigns triumphant.
A modern sculpture on the beach in Le Havre where the Seine meets the sea. The artwork was built in 2017 as part of a temporary installation to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding. ANDREW PLUMP.
TWENTY-SEVEN
No End to the Seine?
Is the destiny of the Seine to water
Paris, or to flow to the sea?
—FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND, journal entry
the day after losing the presidential election to
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974
THE CITIES OF LE HAVRE AND HONFLEUR are worlds apart, but each can claim to be the end of the Seine.
Le Havre, at the northwest tip, is an industrial giant and France’s most important seaport. It boasts that every year, a billion bottles of French wine and spirits move from here to the rest of the world, making Le Havre the bigges
t global port for the transport of wine and spirits. The Seine here functions as a workhorse, moving cargo through its main channel and smaller canals on the southern rim of the city.
In the days when American tourists began crossing the ocean en masse, Le Havre was their point of entry into the Old World. The French Line, which offered luxury cruise service, pampered rich Americans with fancy suites and fine French cuisine on a direct New York–Le Havre route. Conversely, continental Europe once went through Le Havre to reach America. Even though it is on the English Channel, Le Havre, the door that opened to the sea, earned the nickname “Cité Océane”—Ocean City.
In World War II, Allied bombings leveled Le Havre. The city was rebuilt in concrete and derided as ugly. Although it is only 120 miles from Paris, I avoided it for years. It wasn’t until my curiosity for every mile of the Seine took me there in 2017 that I realized I had not understood the city. On the other side of the water is Honfleur, where the river has the quaint, intimate feel of the past. When the French head to the end of the Seine for a vacation, they choose Honfleur, not Le Havre. Honfleur has 10,000 inhabitants but receives 3.5 million tourists annually; Le Havre, with a population of 180,000 attracts only 50,000.
Travel guides often refer to Honfleur as one of the prettiest towns in France. Spared in the war, the city looks much as it did when it seduced the Impressionists with its winding cobbled lanes, its half-timbered townhouses, and an inner harbor for pleasure boats. Even the untrained amateur is inspired to pick up a paintbrush. It’s also an offbeat gastronomic mecca. Local specialties include bulots (chewy sea snails) and tête de veau (calf’s head). Sea breezes blow into the estuary and change the atmosphere throughout the day, making Honfleur a city of painted skies. I woke one morning to find the sky blazing a strong orange. I drank in the clear light during the day. At nine that evening, the sky was striped with yellows and grays. An hour later it softened to deep rose, the horizon black.
Alas, Honfleur’s picture perfection can be a nightmare to maneuver, especially in the historic center of town in summer. Tourists spill out from the sidewalks onto the streets, blocking cars from passing. Vendors peddling ice cream and waffles clog the inner harbor. But then, if you walk away from the center to the end of the estuary, where the river meets the sea, and turn a corner, you find yourself at a sandy public beach that stretches for four miles. Families swim and play in the water; it’s the English Channel, not really the Seine, but it’s awfully close.
Pleasure boats at the inner harbor of Honfleur at the tip of the estuary of the Seine. ANDREW PLUMP.
The best view of the Seine estuary is found atop Mont-Joli, outside Honfleur. To get there, I climbed snaking paths that grew steeper, passing private villas and farms with grazing cows. At the overlook, from a worn wooden bench inscribed with the names of hikers, I could see the river and Le Havre in the distance. The gondolas of the white Ferris wheel in the center of Honfleur gleamed silver in the sun. Church bells and cries of seagulls pierced the silence. A bit farther on was the house where the deposed Louis-Philippe, who had reigned as the “bourgeois king,” and his wife, Marie-Amélie, slept as they secretly fled France en route to England in 1848.
The day I viewed the estuary from Mont-Joli, I was on the way to Lillebonne, a town of 9,000 people twenty-three miles east of Le Havre. Lillebonne—Juliobona in ancient times—had been an important Gallo-Roman port and administrative, military, communications, and commercial center. The Romans took over what are now the regions of Normandy and Brittany in 51 b.c., soon after they occupied Lutetia on the Île de la Cité. The Seine was much wider than it is today, and Juliobona was built as a sophisticated port in a valley on the estuary. Over time, the town declined as Rouen grew into a much more important port. Now that the Seine has narrowed and receded, the town sits three miles from the water.
A small, modern museum contains curiosities from Lillebonne’s Gallo-Roman past, among them inlaid red pottery mass-produced far away in Millau, to the south, a rare blown-glass dolphin found in the tomb of a young man, and practical objects of daily life: glass flacons for oil and perfume, a strigile (a cleansing implement used in the baths to scrape off dead skin), keys, tools, jewelry, safety pins, tear catchers, and a terra-cotta baby’s pacifier. Lillebonne declined in the third century and forever lost its status as a political powerhouse. In modern times, it had trouble hanging on to its most precious archaeological treasures. A well-preserved six-foot bronze statue of Apollo discovered in 1823 near its amphitheater, for example, is considered the largest bronze of a god to have survived from ancient Gaul. It was scooped up by the Louvre.
In the city center, Vincenzo Mutarelli, the Italian-born chief archaeologist in Lillebonne, was waiting to show me around. We climbed to the top of a hill and could see the Seine below in the distance. Then we descended the rue des Bains Romains—the Street of Roman Baths—where in Gallo-Roman times, private establishments had offered cold, lukewarm, and hot baths, fed by spring water that came down the valley via an aqueduct.
At the bottom of the road was a manicured lawn with the vestiges of a Gallo-Roman amphitheater for gladiator combat and animal killings and a smaller adjoining theater for performances of both tragedies and comedies. Built in the first century and later expanded, the amphitheater was a third the size of the Gallo-Roman Arènes de Lutèce in Paris and seated about five thousand spectators.
Discovered in 1764, the amphitheater has been only partially excavated, and the vestiges of the theater have been buried under a paved roadway. Other ruins were destroyed. Mutarelli waged a lonely battle to uncover the secrets of the site, stone by stone. Even though it had begun to rain hard during our walk, he pushed ahead with the determination of a soldier going into battle, leading me among stones that had once been part of the amphitheater’s façade and wall. “Here were the entrances,” he said, pointing to huge boulders piled helter-skelter on the grass. “Here was the wall. I did all this myself.” His dream was to restore the entire site one day. “Archaeologists have stars in their eyes when they think of the possibilities,” he said. He acknowledged that his was a lonely crusade, without the necessary funds, staff, or technical support, but he had vowed to continue. “I am all alone, all alone,” he said that day. “But there are so many more treasures to find.”
When, at the end of 2018, at the age of sixty-five, Mutarelli retired, he criticized the country’s lack of political will to excavate, preserve, and showcase its archaeological sites. “Archaeology counts for nothing in France,” he told an interviewer. “It is a discipline ten times more prestigious in Italy, Spain, or England, even though ancient French heritage is at least as rich.”
He reminded me of Antoine Hoareau, the self-taught historian of the sources of the Seine, who longed to develop the ancient temple site of the goddess Sequana.
GETTING FROM LE HAVRE to Honfleur isn’t easy. You drive east for eight miles. Then a six-mile stretch south takes you on a straight road and over the Pont de Normandie. You head west for two more miles into Honfleur’s city center. All in all, the journey takes slightly more than half an hour. The barrier between Honfleur and Le Havre, however, is more than the physical distance across the mouth of the Seine. No matter that the Pont de Normandie, a butterfly of a bridge completed in 1995, is a feat of engineering and a work of art. With a span more than half a mile long between its two pillars—and a total length exceeding that of the Champs-Élysées—it is one of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, invulnerable to fierce winds and tall enough to allow modern cargo and passenger vessels to pass underneath. All the same, the Honfleurais—inhabitants of Honfleur—are oriented in the other direction, southwest toward Caen or Deauville. For them, there is little of interest across the bridge.
“When you live in Honfleur, you don’t say you are ‘going to Le Havre,’” remarked Frédéric Lefebvre, a curator at the Eugène Boudin Museum in Honfleur. “You say you are ‘going to the other side of the water.’ It’s unknown territory. It feels like an
adventure, like you have to make an effort.”
“Do you go to Le Havre often?” I asked.
“Ah, sincerely, no!” Lefebvre said. “I grew up at a time when it was unimaginable. Before the Pont de Normandie was built, you had to drive east for thirty miles, cross the bridge to Tancarville, and drive west to Le Havre. And Le Havre is perceived as a city without a soul.”
Lefebvre’s critique was unfair, but it is an opinion widely held among Honfleurians. I understood it better when we crossed the Pont de Normandie from Honfleur, then drove over the Grand Canal on the viaduct of Le Havre. Huge cranes stood at attention on one side of us, smokestacks on the other. Even as we headed east through the outskirts of Le Havre, we passed one industrial installation after another.
Le Havre is trying hard to burnish its image. In 2017, the city celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of its founding with an outpouring of scholarly tomes, photo collections, travel guides, and even coloring books about the city. There were months of festivities. It was a moment to join in the celebrations.
I knew that Le Havre was a city on the sea, but I assumed it was a river city as well. I expected to find riverfront cafés and restaurants, houseboats, barges, and tourist boats, maybe even a tree-lined path for bicyclists and joggers. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and learned that you can’t see the Seine from the center of Le Havre. Instead of cutting through the city, as it does in Paris and Rouen, the Seine—a wide estuary here, rather than a narrow river—touches only a small part of Le Havre’s southern flank, almost missing the city completely.
ALONG WITH OTHER JOURNALISTS, I was invited to interview Vincent Ganivet, an artist who had painted thirty-six shipping containers in bright colors and built them into a hundred-foot construction of two arches. It looked like a Lego project for giants. “Were you inspired by the Seine?” I asked him.
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