Walking along the nearby Champs Élysées, in a neighborhood well-known for its collaboration and fascist sympathy, would bring a traveler to the Place de l’Étoile, home to the Arc de Triomphe, where the daily German changing of the guard ceremony took place. Although some Parisians feared that the Germans might destroy the monument, built by Napoleon to celebrate his victories, including those over Germans, it remained standing, dominating the wide avenues that radiated away from it. The Germans did, however, extinguish the flame of the tomb of the unknown soldier of World War I and conduct a daily victory march that enraged city residents. The Germans also banned the traditional flying of a French flag at the Arc. A march to the Étoile by French students in protest of Nazi policies on November 11, 1940, provided early inspiration to the nascent French Resistance. Although the Germans dispersed the march with minimal effort, it represented the first collective act of resistance by Parisians against the occupation.21
One of the wide avenues that radiates from the Étoile is the Avenue Foch, named for Ferdinand Foch, the marshal who led the coalition that defeated the Germans in 1918. Home to some of Paris’s most graceful mansions, it had long been one of the streets of choice for Paris’s most wealthy and conservative citizens; among those people were many of the industrialists and businessmen who profited handsomely from their collaboration with the new regime. After 1940, the Avenue Foch became an important axis of German and collaborationist power in the city. Along with the Boulevard de l’Amiral Bruix and the Avenue de Malakoff, the Avenue Foch formed the so-called Nazi Triangle, which housed most of the German leadership as well as the Gestapo headquarters. The headquarters were in a particularly stylish building on the Avenue Foch near the Bois de Boulogne, the enormous park on the city’s western edge. Few Parisians could have had any doubts about the building’s purpose, especially after the events of March 22, 1944. On that day, the journalist and Resistance leader Pierre Brossolette threw himself out of a fifth-floor window following three days of unimaginable torture so that he would not crack under the pressure and give his interrogators the names of his comrades.22
The neighborhood thus had two very different identities in wartime Paris. Saying that someone was “on the Avenue Foch” was wartime slang with two possible meanings: It could mean either that the person in question was attending an elegant dinner party in the home of a wealthy collaborationist, or that he was being tortured by the Gestapo. But despite their proximity to some of the regime’s worst atrocities, the neighborhood’s privileged residents experienced a different war from that endured by the rest of the city. Here Germans and wealthy collaborators dined on the best of the best, kept their servants, and led a life that sharply contrasted with the misery of the city’s other residents. Adapting a disparaging French nickname for Germans, Parisians soon renamed the Avenue Foch the “Avenue Boche” to express their disdain not just for the Germans but for the rich lifestyle that some Parisians were enjoying while most Parisians went hungry. The stylish partygoers on the Avenue Foch were often among the first to be singled out after the liberation for retribution. In the eyes of the Resistance, it was a misdemeanor to work with the Germans out of dire necessity to feed one’s starving family, but living the high life through the Germans while the rest of Paris starved was a clear felony that called out for punishment. As the day of the liberation approached, residents along the Avenue Foch received death warrants written in red ink and small coffins in their mailboxes—none too subtle warnings that a day of judgment for the collaborators of Paris was coming.23
A Métro or bicycle ride across Paris would put a traveler into an entirely different world. In the eastern neighborhoods around the working-class areas of La Chapelle, the Place de la République, and Belleville, communists and trade-union members dominated. In these neighborhoods the Germans were less visible and had far fewer contacts. Instead of the wide, flowery avenues around the Étoile, these neighborhoods featured small roads and blocks of crowded housing units. The Germans did not regularly patrol these areas, relying instead on informers and the Paris police for surveillance. These working-class districts, as well as the even more crowded areas around the Place St. Michel across the river from Notre Dame, became the centers of anti-German activity in the summer of 1944.
The locus of French power in Paris, such as it was, sat on the Île de la Cité, one of the two islands in the Seine River. In the center of the island stands the imposing Préfecture de Police, the headquarters of the Paris police force. The police represented the daily face of collaboration and, like most urban police forces, had traditionally had a tense relationship with the working-class residents of the city. While helping the occupiers keep the peace in working-class neighborhoods, they also made the regime’s roundups of Jews and political foes possible. Without the police, the Germans could not possibly have hoped to hold Paris under anything but the most severe martial law. As a result, “À bas les flics!” (Down with the cops!) was a frequent phrase on posters and graffiti throughout Paris both before and during the war years.
Although they worked for the German occupiers, the police also had four separate clandestine groups that sympathized with the Free French under Charles de Gaulle in London or with the French Resistance inside Paris. They therefore held a crucial position. Despised for their role in helping the occupiers exploit Parisians, some of them were readying themselves to become a force for change inside the capital. In 1943 and 1944, they became less reliable to the Germans and to Vichy, even if most Parisians failed to see the difference in their own neighborhoods. Although few Parisians could have foreseen it, the eyes, ears, and feet of the Paris policemen held the keys to the insurrection that began in Paris in 1944. Their decisions in mid-August determined much of what followed.
Opposite the prefecture on the Île de la Cité stands one of Paris’s most recognized and most famous buildings, the Cathédrale Notre Dame. For most of the occupation, Notre Dame and its cardinal-archbishop, Monsignor Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, symbolized collaboration even more than the police did. Suhard’s cozy relationship with the Germans and his public support of Vichy’s policies alienated him and much of the Catholic Church hierarchy in France from a working class already deeply suspicious of the church and its prerogatives. The day after the liberation, Notre Dame was to undergo a remarkable transformation, with Suhard kept away from celebrations in his own cathedral by an armed guard, while the hero of the hour, Charles de Gaulle, gave new meaning to the site through an astonishing act of theater from a career filled with astonishing theatrical acts.24
To Parisians in early 1944, these dramatic events still lay in the future. In the meantime, the residents of the city had to live their lives as best they could. Even during the height of the occupation Paris maintained a surface appearance of normality. For those not deported or imprisoned, the timeless rituals of Paris continued. Men still cast their fishing lines into the Seine hoping to find something to supplement their dinner, young people still sunbathed on the quays, and grandmothers still took their grandchildren for walks in the city’s magnificent parks. Until the Allies landed in France, Paris could do little but suffer in silence—and wait.
1
THE END OF THIS NIGHTMARE
ON JUNE 6, 1944, AT 8:00 A.M., JACQUES BARDOUX’S telephone rang in his apartment near the Arc de Triomphe in the upscale sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. It had been a long night for Bardoux and his fellow Parisians. There had been six different air-raid alerts in the northwest section of the city, each marked by a piercing siren announcing the arrival of Allied bombers. The planes were attacking a wide variety of targets, but were especially focused on factories and transportation nodes like railroad stations, canals, and highway intersections in and around the city. For more than a year, such air raids had been a regular feature of life, sending Parisians scurrying into wine cellars and basements—but not into the Métro, which the Germans reserved for themselves, refusing to open it to city residents despite the safety its underground
passageways and stations would have afforded.1
Bardoux, who had been a member of the French Senate in 1940, found the Allied bombings incomprehensible. Although the Allies, especially the Americans, touted the sophisticated technology of their aircraft, most bombs missed their targets because of bad weather, poor visibility, air crew error, or any one of a thousand other reasons. The bombs were thus just as likely to fall on residential areas with no military importance at all as they were to hit a target of value to the Germans. The attacks had nevertheless become routine in an already tortured occupied Paris, except for those blessed nights when heavy cloud cover or rain kept the Allied planes away and allowed the residents to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Bardoux wore a black necktie all through the occupation in a silent act of protest as he kept a careful eye on events. He guessed that the increasing number of air raids probably meant that an Allied landing in France was imminent. A young adolescent in the city named Gilles Perrault also thought that “the ever-increasing number of bombers in the Paris sky” indicated that something big was afoot. “We were spending at least half the school day down in the shelters,” he noted with decidedly mixed emotions, the danger of the bombs contrasting with the excitement at the thought of the Allies coming to France at long last. Bardoux was better informed than Perrault, a friend with military training in amphibious operations having told him that June 4 to 10 presented the Allies with the optimal moon phases and tides for a landing on the French coast. Still, Paris had had many nights with six (or more) air raids before. Bardoux’s sleepless night, and Perrault’s days in the school shelter, might not necessarily mean that anything unusual was going to happen soon.2
The phone call changed Bardoux’s thinking in an instant. The man on the other end of the line said, “My mother in law has arrived,” then, after a few words of meaningless chatter, hung up. The message was part of a prearranged code informing Bardoux that the Allies had landed in Normandy. Although he was not part of the Resistance, Bardoux had been working behind the scenes to organize the members of the French Senate of 1940 in the hopes that they could return to their seats as soon as the city was once again free. In his eyes, the Vichy government had wrongly and illegally robbed the French people of their freely elected representatives. Despite his hope that the Allies might attempt a landing that week, Bardoux could hardly believe what he heard. Nor did he fully understand what the long-anticipated landings meant for France or, more immediately, for Paris. He spent much of the day wandering the streets of his neighborhood trying to gauge the reactions of Parisians as rumors of the landings slowly spread across the city. He found his neighbors’ faces hard to read and wondered why they were not showing more emotion. Had these men and women developed a habit of suppressing their feelings after four arduous years of occupation? Were they afraid to show any happiness in public out of fear of attracting unwanted attention from the Germans? Or did they think that the landings would simply mean more deadly air raids and greater German repression?3
Parisians, whom the novelist Marguerite Duras thought were simply dumbfounded by the momentous news of the landing, might also have been waiting for some reliable information to confirm the rumors, which were flying fast and furious that day. Duras noted that few of her friends believed the initial reports of a landing, although both she and the Parisian journalist Jean Galtier-Boissière noted a “sweet joy” in the subtle smiles that Parisians cautiously exchanged on the streets and in the cafés that day. The increasingly agitated behavior of the Germans in Paris indicated that there was some truth to the rumors, although the possibility of reprisals from anxious German soldiers tempered the enthusiasm of most of the city’s residents.4
At 1:00 p.m., those Parisians with clandestine radios heard the voice of Winston Churchill himself on BBC radio, confirming that the Allies had landed. The British prime minister told the world that a landing “on a scale far larger than anything there has been so far in the world” was proceeding “in a thoroughly satisfactory manner.” To Pierre Bourget, one of those Parisians huddled around a radio playing at low volume, Churchill’s voice meant that the war had entered a new phase, possibly its last. Jacqueline Gaussen-Salmon, a young painter, noted the fear of the unknown that the news provoked in many of her acquaintances, although she hoped desperately that the news meant “the end of this nightmare.” To the memoirist Charles Braibant, the voice of the British leader meant that “it really is the Landing, with a capital L,” and was thus a cause for cautious excitement. “People are hopeful,” he wrote in his journal, “but they are afraid of getting carried away.” Yves Cazaux, a professor who had kept a detailed journal since 1940, too, was hopeful—he even started a new journal to mark “this historic day.” Still, Braibant was right to be cautious and to guard his optimism. The beaches of Normandy were a long way from Paris.5
Early reports were contradictory. Although the German and collaborationist radio stations said nothing at first about the landings, they soon had no choice but to confirm the news being broadcast into Paris by the BBC and the recently established pro-Allied Radio Rome. The Germans had initially announced that the invasion had failed and that “the protective forces of the German Army annihilated the invaders in a matter of a few hours.” Through its newspaper Le Franciste, the regime tried to turn the city’s residents against the landing, calling the Allies “the valets of Stalin” and warning Parisians that the Allies were acting as the tools of world Jewry and communists, bringing with them only death and Soviet tyranny. The Germans warned the city’s residents against doing anything that might interfere with German military activity as units moved through Paris to the fighting fronts. They also put posters up around the city warning that anyone suspected of resistance activity would be shot on sight .6
Ernst Jünger, the famous author of the World War I memoir Storm of Steel, was then based in Paris and assigned to the German cultural ministry. He noted that most German generals in the city, although expecting a landing at some point, were nevertheless surprised that it had actually occurred. “Why that place? Why this time?” he recalled them thinking. Still, he reported no sense of fear or panic inside Paris headquarters and wrote in his diary for June 7 that the city was calm, displaying its usual “serenity and melancholy.” On June 8, he noted that the Paris stock market was rising and the city was operating as normal. The D-Day landings, seen today as such a dramatic turning point in the war, did not cause any major changes to daily life in Paris under occupation.7
The Vichy government tried to depict the landings as only another phase in the victimization of a France that did not seek a direct role in the battle between Germany and the Allies. Vichy’s formulation took on the view of the Germans: The British and Americans were the unwitting dupes of a Jewish-Soviet worldwide conspiracy. “We are not in this war,” declared the Vichy prime minister, the increasingly detested Pierre Laval, who urged his countrymen not to choose sides and not to interfere with German military movements. Pétain, the head of the Vichy state, urged his countrymen to remain neutral, warning them “not to aggravate our misfortune by deeds that risk bringing upon you tragic acts of reprisal. It will be the innocent people of France who will suffer the consequences.”8
The Allies were aware of the potential power that the French Resistance held. An uprising by the many groups that constituted the French Resistance formed a key element of the planning of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff for the operations in Normandy and beyond. Churchill, too, placed great faith in the French Resistance. One of his pet projects, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), had established a network of agents inside France and had parachuted weapons, radios, and other supplies to them. The SOE flew daring agents in and out of France on extremely risky missions. These brave agents distributed code books to allow members of the Resistance to understand messages dropped by parachute or broadcast over the BBC. The SOE also worked with the rural Resistance group known as the maquis to recover downed Allied air crew
men, dozens of whom secretly passed through Paris during the war.
As the day for the landings approached, the SOE and the American Office of Strategic Services increased their activities inside France to prepare the Resistance to play an active supporting role. Through their networks, British and American agents notified their contacts throughout France to listen carefully to the BBC for three lines from Paul Verlaine’s nineteenth-century poem “Chanson d’Automne.” The lines, “Blessent mon coeur / D’une longuer / Monotone,” were the signal for the members of the Resistance to go into action. They were to blow up rail lines, cut telephone and telegraph communications, and do anything else they could to confuse and disorient the Germans, thus giving the landings their best chance at success. Unfortunately, these lines were also the signal for the Germans to go on high alert, as their agents had already broken the code through torture and interrogation of captured French Resistance fighters. German Supreme Command West, the army headquarters responsible for the defense of France, went on high alert just thirty minutes after the broadcast. Many important German commanders and intelligence operatives nevertheless refused to believe that the broadcast was truly the signal that an invasion was imminent, especially given the poor weather conditions in Normandy that night.9
Soon after the poem went out over the BBC airwaves, another message went out, this one from General Marie-Pierre Koenig, the London-based leader of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). Koenig urged the members of the FFI, known inside France by their nickname the “Fifis,” and at least nominally under the control of the French government-in-exile in London, to rise up. These men and women were among the best organized members of the French Resistance, even if for reasons of necessity and security they were diffuse and hard to command. Koenig’s message urged them to begin a guerrilla uprising in support of the landings and to act as a fifth column for the Allies. Members of the FFI anxiously and eagerly joined the fight that they hoped would lead to the liberation of their homeland. Despite the Germans having cracked the code, the FFI succeeded in carrying out many acts of sabotage. Besides dynamiting railroads and cutting telegraph lines, in isolated instances FFI agents targeted German officials for assassination.
The Blood of Free Men Page 3
