The potential for class violence after the liberation frightened all but the most bloodthirsty résistants. Resistance groups, anxious to avenge the crimes of Vichy, kept “a bewildering catalogue [listing] prominent collaborators” and promised to punish them once the opportunity presented itself. “There [soon] comes a règlement des comptes,” one French Resistance member told a downed American pilot hiding in Paris, “a settling of accounts. You will see.” The enemies against whom he planned revenge were French, not German. A tired, hungry, and desperate city with a long history of political violence might see another chapter in that history unfold if the liberation turned into a civil war between Frenchmen.18
To head off such a crisis, the Americans developed plans to impose an American Military Government (AMGOT) on France as it had done on parts of Italy. Eisenhower saw AMGOT as a last resort only, preferring instead to transfer authority to a government selected by the French people themselves. The difficulty lay in finding a way for the fractured and divided French polity to agree on a form of government and a leadership to run it. The AMGOT proposal, even as an emergency measure, predictably infuriated de Gaulle, who saw the plan as an American attempt to assert sovereignty over liberated France. Jacques Soustelle, de Gaulle’s chief of intelligence, recalled that he and de Gaulle had decided to reject AMGOT “no matter what the cost.” Soustelle believed that Roosevelt and his cabinet neither understood nor respected France. He also feared that the Americans were planning a special occupation force to grab and hold the reins of power with help from Vichy officials anxious to cut a deal, as they had in North Africa two years earlier.19
When rumors of an AMGOT reached Paris, the leaders of the FFI were as angry as de Gaulle. They assumed, ironically, that AMGOT would serve as a cover for the imposition of an authoritarian regime under de Gaulle. They feared that de Gaulle and the Americans were plotting together to deny them a political voice after the war. Most could accept de Gaulle as a temporary head of a provisional government, pending elections, but none of them wanted de Gaulle imposed from the outside and supported by the presence of American occupation troops. They therefore pledged to increase their efforts to present a liberated Paris to de Gaulle and the Americans as a fait accompli, thus demonstrating to the world the political and military power of a people in arms. Only by fighting, they believed, could they assume a role in determining the political future of France.20
If there was to be an uprising in Paris, it would undoubtedly be led by one of the most powerful and indomitable Resistance leaders in the city, Henri Tanguy, better known by his nom de guerre, Colonel Rol. Then thirty-six years old, Rol’s police file described him as “a dangerous militant communist [and] one of the chiefs of the central terrorist organization.” Rol was a metalworker and labor organizer who saw himself more as an antifascist than as a communist, although he did not shrink from the latter label either. He was a hard-nosed veteran of the antifascist International Brigades, which had fought against Franco’s armies in Spain. Wounded in that war, he came back to France in 1938 as an organizer for France’s largest trade union syndicate, the Confédération Générale du Travail (General Trade Union). Fired from both the Citroën and Renault companies for his labor agitation, Rol never abandoned his beliefs in leftist politics or in the potential of working-class France to serve as a model for Europe. Mobilized in 1939 to serve as an antitank gunner (training that later served him and his fighters well during the liberation), he refused to accept France’s defeat without a fight.21
Rol’s connections in the trade unions and his experiences in Spain made him a natural leader for the emerging Resistance inside Paris. He did not speak much, but when he did it was with an intensity and determination that inspired fanatical devotion from his followers. As early as October 1940 he had begun to organize Resistance cells inside French labor unions. In 1942, he was a founding member of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, who derived their name from the guerrilla fighters who had opposed the Prussians in 1870 and 1871. Under Rol’s guidance, they grew to become one of the most powerful left-leaning Resistance groups based in Paris, dedicating themselves to stopping the deportations and arrests of political prisoners as well as helping men evade the German labor drafts. In September 1943, following the arrest of its commander, the FFI nominated Rol to assume command of its operations in Paris and its immediate suburbs. Rol now had leadership positions in the city’s two most powerful Resistance groups. He quickly put his stamp on both, merging them under his authority and the collective designation of the FFI. The day before the landings in Normandy, Rol assumed command of all FFI forces in the Île de France, the larger region encompassing Paris, its suburbs, and the four surrounding departments.
Rol faced the challenge of recruiting men into the FFI while simultaneously protecting it from police and Gestapo informants who might try to infiltrate it. He preferred to rely on men with prewar training in the French Army, and he established a hierarchy and organization in the FFI that mirrored one found in a regular army unit. He thus created bureaus for operations, intelligence, and supply, each of which submitted regular reports of its activity as if it were a fully functioning military unit. Because of the need for secrecy, however, the FFI had to function in the shadows. Not even Rol knew the names of all of the leaders of the various cells in the Paris region. Although still nominally under Koenig and de Gaulle, Rol was not the kind of man to take orders from men hundreds of miles away whom he had never met and whose goals he mistrusted.
Rol claimed that the FFI in and around Paris had more than 42,000 members in April 1944. Of that number, 17,000 were in reserve, with orders not to report for duty until a full insurrection in Paris had begun. Another 25,000 were trained but lacked arms. Undoubtedly the biggest shortcoming of the FFI was a lack of weapons. Rol counted only 155 men in the Paris region as fully armed and trained. Many men were fighting with obsolete weapons and precious little ammunition. Rol repeatedly begged London for arms drops only to be refused time and again on the grounds that air drops were too inaccurate, a logic that must have infuriated Parisian FFI leaders suffering under deadly Allied bombing runs that regularly missed their targets.22
Not one to be easily deterred, Rol responded to the Allied landings in Normandy by ordering the FFI to seize arms from the Germans if the Allies would not air-drop them. In his vision, the FFI would liberate Paris by itself without waiting for the Allies to approach with regular forces. A strong FFI presence in Paris would help the group assert itself politically in the wake of the liberation. It would also help the Allies advance to Paris by preventing the Germans from using the city to move forces forward to the combat zones. An uprising might even force the Allies to increase their efforts to break out of Normandy in order to get to Paris more quickly. In addition to giving his men instructions to capture German arms, Rol ordered FFI agents to seize money from black-market dealers and known collaborators to fund the movement’s operations. His actions made the FFI a respected (or feared, depending on one’s point of view) force in the city; the FFI’s trademark symbol of the Cross of Lorraine soon became synonymous inside Paris with guerrilla activity. By Rol’s own admission, however, the arms his men had seized by mid-July “were hardly Ali Baba’s cave.” Paris’s seventh arrondissement, for example, had 700 active FFI members but just 3 submachine guns, 20 rifles, and a handful of revolvers.23
Through agreements like the one Moulin had negotiated, the FFI owed its ultimate allegiance to General Marie-Pierre Koenig and, through him, de Gaulle, both based in London until they transferred their headquarters to France at the end of June. Rol saw the need to work with and through Koenig, but he suspected, rightly, that the conservative Koenig did not share the political goals of his fighters inside Paris. Rol thus reacted angrily to Koenig’s June 10 order to stop guerrilla activity because of the slow progress of operations in Normandy. Once unleashed, Rol felt, an insurrection was not easy to stop. Many of his men had also come out from hiding and were now dangerously exposed.
Nor were the Germans, who had already declared that the FFI was a group of outlaws, not soldiers (and therefore not protected by the laws of war), likely to ease their pressure. Koenig’s order meant that members of the FFI would be targets but could not fight back.
Both Koenig and de Gaulle saw the FFI not as an insurrectionary force in itself, but as an adjunct of the Free French Army, to be used or not as needed. As a result, they saw the uprising of the FFI as a strictly military issue. Rol and his men, who had lived under the Germans and seen their horrors firsthand, saw the uprising as a moral and political issue. They also felt, even more strongly than de Gaulle, that only by rising up and liberating Paris themselves could Parisians earn the right to govern themselves once the Germans left. Thus did underground newspapers like the communist L’Humanité argue that the liberation of Paris need not depend on the arrival of Allied forces. Rol knew better, but he also suspected that de Gaulle and Koenig did not share his goals or those of most of the men in the FFI.24
In an attempt to impose some measure of control over the FFI, de Gaulle sent Jacques Delmas (code-named Chaban to protect his family from any repercussions that the Germans or Vichy authorities might mete out) into Paris as his military representative. Chaban, who had found his way to de Gaulle in London after leaving Paris in 1940, had quickly become one of de Gaulle’s biggest admirers. Before dispatching him to Paris, de Gaulle promoted Chaban to brigadier general, making him, at just twenty-nine years old, the youngest general in the French Army. The promotion gave the handsome, charismatic former rugby player the gravitas de Gaulle thought he needed to face down Rol, a colonel. Chaban’s mission was to sneak into the capital, bring order and discipline to the FFI, and ensure that its members understood the need to follow instructions from a regular command structure that ended with de Gaulle at its head.25
De Gaulle also wanted Chaban to delay any FFI insurrection until the Allies could support it with regular military operations near Paris. Chaban was to make it clear that Rol was not to begin an insurrection unless and until he got the order from de Gaulle. But Chaban soon found that the star de Gaulle had given him to outrank Rol mattered for precious little inside Paris. While the colonel understood and respected the need for a chain of command, he nevertheless argued that an insurrection should precede an Allied advance on Paris, both to show the power of the people of Paris to liberate themselves and to make it clear that the FFI was more than a military afterthought to the armies of General Eisenhower. Rol did, however, reluctantly agree to obey Koenig’s order to stop overt guerrilla activity.
Chaban was de Gaulle’s military representative in Paris; Alexandre Parodi, who had assumed the post once held by Jean Moulin, was de Gaulle’s political representative in the occupied city. De Gaulle told Parodi that the “various forms of the Resistance are but means” subordinated to the state. This statement reflected de Gaulle’s conviction that, while the Resistance was a branch of the Free French Army, the military itself ultimately answered to the provisional French government, with de Gaulle at its top. Parodi was to “always speak out loudly and clearly in the name of the state” in his dealings with local Resistance leaders. His advocacy for the Free French government had one paramount aim: Parodi, who feared that the FFI might begin a communist revolution during the confusion that would accompany a liberation of Paris, was to try to delay any insurrectionary activity until the Allied and Free French armies could both support it and contain it. Only thus could the FFI serve the needs of the provisional government.26
Parodi and de Gaulle were not the only ones who feared what the FFI might do in the wake of Paris’s liberation. Although they were heroes to some of their fellow Frenchmen, to others the members of the French Resistance resembled outlaws and troublemakers who lacked the requisite skills to govern in the wake of the liberation. Even many of their admirers saw the members of the FFI as men of the streets unfit for roles in a postwar civil government. What they might do if they actually acquired power was an open question, even to their own leaders. Memories of past revolutions and class warfare in the city hung over Paris in June and July 1944, clouding the prospects for a bloodless outcome of any uprising. Few doubted that a power struggle would follow the liberation of the city. Whether or not it turned violent was still an unknown.27
Rol was a military man, and he knew that he had little choice but to operate within the general structure of the provisional government in order to keep everyone’s attention focused on the common enemies at hand. After the tense first few days after the Allied landings in Normandy, therefore, the FFI went reluctantly back underground in accordance with Koenig’s order and the urgings of Chaban and Parodi. The orders from Rol’s headquarters stopped calling for insurrection and called instead for renewed vigilance and intelligence gathering. Rol reluctantly acknowledged that until the military situation in Normandy changed in favor of the Allies, he had no choice but to take Chaban’s advice and halt active operations. Rol nevertheless urged Chaban to endorse the resumption of the insurrection at the earliest possible moment, regardless of the orders coming from London. He also begged Chaban to use his influence in London to arrange for arms drops, without which the FFI could not hope to make a difference inside Paris. Chaban could do little other than tell Rol that his orders came from de Gaulle and de Gaulle alone.
Even as they were debating future strategy, however, the leaders of the Resistance had to come to terms with the reality that their liberation might still be a long time away. The military situation in France remained in Germany’s favor for weeks after the landings. Germans inside Paris regained their confidence in late June as the FFI stopped active resistance, the Allies remained stuck near the beaches, and the Germans unleashed their new V-1 rockets against targets inside Great Britain. Press releases in Paris in mid-June noted that London was on fire from the new weapons that, the Germans claimed, would turn the tide of the war. In June 1944 alone, the Germans launched 2,452 V-1s at Britain, approximately 800 of which hit Greater London. Ernst Jünger, the famous writer assigned to the German cultural ministry in Paris, wrote in his diary that few Parisians seemed bothered by a German propaganda report that the V-1s had destroyed much of London, an indication of the bitterness toward Britain that remained. The Germans boasted that the weapons would bring Britain to its knees and end the war in the west on German terms. The Germans promised even greater levels of destruction when the more sophisticated V-2 and V-3 weapons were ready for operations, assuming that the British and the Americans had not yet surrendered.28
Adding to the frustrations of the Resistance, as late as mid-July the fate of the Allied landings in Normandy remained very much in doubt. Consequently, the Germans in Paris in late June and early July displayed what one German field commander called an “incredibly indifferent serenity” to the events in Normandy. Paris once again became a place where German officers wore their formal dress uniforms for elegant dinners followed by nights at the opera or the theater. Jünger noted that German officers in Paris put their faith in the new weapons, the supposed disunity of the Allies, and the belief that Germany’s “favorable destiny, which had always gotten it out of dead-end situations in the past, would somehow reappear.” Even at this late date, the Germans were reluctant to ruin the relatively comfortable position they had in the city. Paris may have had the atmosphere of a city under occupation, but it did not have the atmosphere of a city on the front lines.29
One incident in the city in late June led to heightened tensions, if only temporarily. On June 28, fifteen FFI agents disguised as members of the Milice assassinated Vichy propagandist Philippe Henriot in his home. A former right-wing deputy from Bordeaux and an early and enthusiastic supporter of Vichy, Henriot’s voice on Radio Paris spewed out some of the regime’s most vituperatively anti-Semitic and anti-leftist propaganda. To many Frenchmen, Henriot was the French equivalent of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. They blamed him for having done more than anyone else to turn Frenchmen against one another
. His assassination, planned by a professional hit man, had long been a goal of the Resistance and showed that even if it was underground, the French Resistance could strike against the most inveterate enemies of France.30
The assassination led to a momentary increase of tensions inside Paris. The Germans responded to Henriot’s death by turning Georges Mandel, a Jewish and anti-Vichy politician whom they had imprisoned at Buchenwald, over to the Milice. While supposedly taking him from one prison to another, the miliciens drove him into the forest of Fontainebleau, where they shot and killed him. The Milice also carried out a series of politically motivated killings in the south, sparking a new round of political violence outside Paris. Inside Paris, however, the tensions following the two assassinations soon faded, leaving the city reasonably calm once again.
The military situation in Normandy slowed so much that many Parisians, especially on the Left, began to follow the results of the massive Russian offensive in Belarus. Indeed, some followed it more closely than they followed events within France itself. On June 22 (the third anniversary of the German invasion of the USSR), the Russians launched the massive Operation Bagration. Dwarfing the D-Day landings, the Soviet operation involved 2.6 million Soviet soldiers supported by 26,000 artillery pieces and more than 5,000 tanks. Bagration crushed an entire German army group, leading to the capture of German soldiers by the tens of thousands and the recovery of lost ground by hundreds of miles a week. Such success stood in stark contrast to the slow and grinding progress of the Allies in Normandy. Communist and other left-leaning underground newspapers sang the praises of the Soviets. One of the largest clandestine newspapers, La Défense de la France, spoke of the Red Army, not the Allies, as the force that would crush German power. It also spoke of the historic Franco-Russian alliance of the pre–World War I years and proposed that a renewal of that partnership would form the basis of a new European order of stability and peace.31
The Blood of Free Men Page 8
