Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  Until the beginning of June, Pierre Lefaucheux, a staunch Gaullist, had been the Paris regional leader of the Resistance fighters – now known collectively as the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), or more popularly as ‘les Fifis’.12 Although the FFI were now considered to be part of the Free French Army, under the nominal leadership of General Koenig, their chain of command was entirely entwined with the structures of the Resistance inside France. In many ways, the FFI was the armed wing of the Resistance, or rather of the Resistance groups: each underground organisation retained control over its armed fighters while at the same time accepting the orders of the FFI command.

  A shift in the balance of power within the FFI leadership of the Paris region occurred when Lefaucheux was arrested in June and was replaced by 36-year-old Henri Tanguy (code name ‘Rol’), a communist who had fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.13 Given that the communists claimed to have about 20,000 fighters in the Paris region, this might have indicated that the Communist Party had a tight grip on all Resistance armed actions in the area.14 However, none of the four local leaders of the Paris FFI was a communist, nor were any of the key members of Rol’s staff.15 Furthermore, 10,000 fighters in the region were linked to de Vogüé’s group, Ceux de la Résistance (‘The Men of the Resistance’), and constituted a counterweight to any potential communist coup.16 In fact, the communists were never going to try to seize power – eight years earlier, in June 1936, the French communist had accepted that the massive strike wave that rocked the country would not lead to revolution, and by meekly following the twists and turns of the USSR as it made an alliance with Hitler in 1939, the party leadership has shown that it had no independence. Whatever rank and file members of the Communist Party might have believed or hoped, the party high-ups would not sanction a revolutionary movement or an attempt to seize power unless they had the approval of Moscow. When Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at the Tehran conference of 1943, the Soviet leader had agreed that France would remain under Western control after the war, and his followers in France were wedded to Moscow’s view of the world. Nevertheless, the existence of so many different political and military forces within the Paris Resistance meant that the Free French had a hard time trying to control events on the ground.

  *

  Shortly before dawn on 28 June, over a dozen armed Resistance fighters crept towards the Ministry of Information on the rue de Solférino at the western end of the boulevard Saint-Germain.17 They disarmed the two police guards outside the ministry and cut the telephone wires to the building. Their target was the Vichy Minister of Information, Philippe Henriot, and their orders were to kidnap him. If that proved impossible, they were to kill him. Twenty-two-year-old Charles Gonard (‘Morlot’) and two comrades tricked their way into Henriot’s first-floor apartment. But Henriot made a grab for their guns and was immediately shot; severely wounded, he fell to the floor and another burst of machine-gun fire killed him. With that the three men left; downstairs, their comrades asked, ‘What happened?’ ‘He resisted, so I shot him,’ said Morlot. The whole operation had taken thirteen minutes.18

  Henriot’s assassination – the first armed action in Paris for months – was a major coup for the Resistance. From the beginning of the year, Henriot had appeared twice a day on Radio Paris, spewing his anti-Semitic bile and attracting large audiences.19 The Free French were so concerned about Henriot’s influence that in their broadcasts on the BBC they had openly called for him to be killed. As the Free French comedian Pierre Dac put it in one programme: ‘Monsieur Henriot, when you are dead you will perhaps have an inscription on your gravestone, and it will read: “Philippe Henriot, he died for Germany, killed by French bullets”. And now, sleep well Monsieur Henriot . . . if you can.’20

  The news of Henriot’s death shocked the country, unnerving leading collaborators.21 Fascist journalist Lucien Rebatet, who had been carrying a gun for protection, now supplemented his arsenal with a large Army revolver and a grenade: ‘I won’t let myself be gunned down empty-handed like poor old Henriot,’ he wrote.22 Although a section of the population was disturbed by the brutality of the assassination, many rejoiced.23 Hidden in his attic room, Albert Grunberg wrote: ‘Nothing but good news today. First of all, that scab Philippe Henriot was executed this morning by patriots . . . We’ll never again hear Hitler’s lackey spew his venom several times a day on all the Hun radios of Occupied France . . . To pay for his crimes against France, that bastard ought to have been roasted over a slow fire, but he can’t complain as he was rubbed out in a second.’24

  Vichy generated as much propaganda as they could from the assassination, plastering Paris with Henriot’s portrait and the slogan: ‘He told the truth – they killed him!’ Even after his death, Henriot’s broadcasts continued, as Radio Paris took to repeating his programmes ad nauseam – ‘The traitor Henriot might be dead, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to give us earache,’ grumbled Grunberg in his diary.25 The French state paid for Henriot’s funeral, which took place at Notre Dame and was celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard, in the presence of all the leading figures of occupation and collaboration except Pétain.26

  Following Henriot’s assassination, Vichy’s fascist paramilitary organisation, the Milice, launched a frenzied wave of reprisals, murdering people associated with the Resistance all over the country.27 Probably the most notable victim was Georges Mandel, who had been the Minister of the Interior in June 1940, and as a Jewish politician was a Milice hate figure. At the beginning of July 1944, Mandel was transferred from a German prison to the Santé prison in the south of the French capital. A mere three hours after he entered the Santé, Mandel was taken away by Milice leader Max Knipping and a group of henchmen, who killed him in the Fontainebleau forest, south of Paris.28 Mandel had no illusions about his fate, as shown by his parting words to the Santé prison governor: ‘Dying is nothing. But it is sad to die before seeing the country liberated.’29

  In the past, the Resistance had refused to be intimidated by the Germans’ vicious campaign of reprisals, such as the murder of French hostages following the assassination of German soldiers, even when hundreds of Frenchmen were killed.30 Similarly, the murder of Georges Mandel did not alter the Resistance campaign against leading collaborators. Three days after the death of Mandel, on a slightly chilly Monday morning, four young men left Paris in a car, headed for the western suburb of Puteaux. They were members of a Communist Party hit-squad, and their target was the collaborationist Mayor of Puteaux, Georges Barthélemy, although they were not certain what their man looked like. André Calvès recalled what happened when he went up to his target:

  ‘Are you Monsieur Barthélemy?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied. He was pale. My thoughts raced. Of course he’d say ‘No’. ‘Show me your papers,’ I said. At the same time, I thought to myself, ‘Idiot – now you’ve given him the chance to draw a gun. Watch out!’ He put his hand inside his jacket then looked as though he was about to run off. His whole body seemed to tremble. It was only now that I could fire. Without realising it, I emptied the whole magazine into him before he fell to the ground. Théo got up from the bench nearby and fired, too, from eight to ten metres. From the car, thirty metres away, our mates, who were covering us, also opened fire . . . Théo and I ran to the car. I loaded another magazine and gave everyone a cigarette to calm their nerves. Outside we could see people’s noses pressed up against nearby windows. In the newspaper the next day they said that ‘one of the killers calmly handed out cigarettes after the murder’. I was anything but calm!31

  The assassination of Barthélemy was followed by another attack: on 13 July, in the southern suburb of Thiais, Resistance fighters shot two German soldiers, injuring one and killing the other.32 This resurgence of Resistance activity in Paris alarmed the Germans – it seemed that the Allied bridgehead in Normandy was giving the Resistance renewed confidence. Walter Dreizner, a rank-and-file German soldier based in the French capi
tal, wrote glumly in his diary: ‘Hundreds of fetching Parisian women zip though the city on their smart bicycles. Their flimsy clothes float behind them like flags. The cafés are full, the theatres are full. Paris is alive . . . But Paris is increasingly becoming a trap for the Germans. There are more and more assassinations. Soldiers in uniform are in constant danger. The enemy is invisible. He is waiting in ambush.’33

  *

  Before the war, 14 July had been the day of national celebration, marking the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789 with dancing and fireworks. From 1940 the festival had been banned by the Germans, along with the French flag and the singing of the ‘Marseillaise’. Now Bastille Day was to be a public holiday again, although the motivation was to save money on salaries, and all public celebrations remained illegal.34 Not that there was much to celebrate: the massive commercial dislocation caused by the war in Normandy and the incessant bombing raids on the railways were beginning to affect food supplies. Berthe Auroy wrote in her diary, mixing infuriation and good humour: ‘Out of 10 grocery shops, nine are closed, and the tenth is more or less empty. NOTHING TO SELL! Except, here and there, on a small shelf, a bunch of parsley or fresh mint . . . We have been officially warned: Parisians will experience days of famine. Without the railways, we can no longer expect to receive the tons of vegetables they need to feed the capital . . . And then there’s the cruellest of all the hardships that could be inflicted on the French: wine – there’s no more wine getting through!’35

  In response to such complaints, the Comité Parisien de la Libération (Parisian Liberation Committee – CPL), which grouped together all Resistance groups in the region and endeavoured to lead them, decided to organise demonstrations on 14 July to protest against the occupation. They even called for ‘major acts of sabotage and executions of traitors and Huns’ in and around Bastille Day.36 This had the support of the national leadership of the Resistance, the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR – National Resistance Council), although not all its component parts supported the idea. On 7 July, Daniel Mayer of the Socialist Party made a bold prediction: ‘the CNR will come out of this severely weakened: either the call will not be followed and the CNR will look foolish . . . or it will be heeded and the tragic and pointless reprisals and massacres that result will hit the best fighters.’37

  In fact, the 14 July protests were a huge success for the Paris Resistance and a pleasant surprise for those like Mayer who continually warned of the dangers of reprisals whenever action was proposed. Hundreds of people demonstrated in the suburbs of Nanterre, Clichy, Puteaux and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, while forbidden tricolour flags were hoisted in most towns – in the northern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois around forty people marched to the war memorial, carrying flags and singing the ‘Marseillaise’, before the German police fired shots and arrested two people. All over the capital people wore red, white and blue, showing their opposition to the occupation and their hope for the future. They marched from Belleville up the steep hill to the Pyrenées Métro station, they marched at the Place de l’Etoile, they marched around the Latin Quarter.38 Tens of thousands of people took part, far surpassing anything seen in the capital since the beginning of the occupation.39 Something important was happening.

  The Latin Quarter demonstration made a strong impression on one man even though he could not participate. Albert Grunberg wrote in his diary:

  I was pacing up and down in my kitchen when I heard the sounds of the ‘Marseillaise’ being sung by hundreds and hundreds of people. Then I head the chant ‘Bread! Bread!’ It had to be a patriotic demonstration. Around 17:00, M. Chabanaud [a neighbour] came and brought me one of the tens of thousands of leaflets that had been thrown in the air by the demonstrators . . . Mme Oudard [the concierge] came to see me, draped with a huge tricolour flag, like most of the passers-by. She told me it had been magnificent and that there had been demonstrations all over Paris. Policemen followed the demonstrators and warned them when the Milice threatened to get too close.40

  The sympathetic attitude of the Parisian police was also noted by the Resistance.41 When the police turned up at the Belleville demonstration, protestors started chanting ‘Police, join us!’ and, at a rally at the picturesque place de la Contrescarpe in the 5th arrondissement, the police sang the ‘Marseillaise’.42 Even though the demonstrations were illegal, very few people were arrested. This was an important development, showing that the police, who for four years had been loyal servants of the occupation, were starting to waver.43 However, not all sections of the police were so benign. Shortly before the Belleville demonstration began, members of the Brigades Spéciales, the police anti-Resistance squad, shot dead the trade union leader Yves Toudic and severely wounded one of his comrades.44

  One the most significant demonstrations took place in Choisy-le-Roi, part of the string of working-class suburbs that stretch south-east of Paris along the Seine and the railway lines. Demonstrators from these towns – Ivry, Vitry, Choisy-le-Roi, Thiais and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, many of them railway workers – converged on the statue of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the ‘Marseillaise’, in Choisy. In a daring move, the local Resistance group led the demonstration, driving a car carrying a captured German heavy machine gun. As the march approached the statue, German troops opened fire and arrested a number of demonstrators, including several railway workers.45 The demonstration dissolved into chaos, as marchers scattered and ran through nearby gardens.46 Over the next week, as it became clear that many railway workers had been arrested during the demonstration, unrest spread through the railway depots, culminating in strikes at the Ivry and Vitry railway workshops on Wednesday 19 July.47 Workers at both sites returned to work only when management promised to get the men released. But despite further strikes and meetings addressed by armed speakers from the Resistance, the men remained in prison.

  On 23 July there was a seven-hour strike at the Villeneuve-Saint-Georges depot as railway workers demanded the release of the prisoners. When a delegation of seven strikers went to see management to discuss the issue, they were all arrested by the Gestapo, increasing tension throughout the Paris railway network. Four days later, on 27 July, at the Noisy-le-Sec depot in the north-eastern suburbs, the local Resistance took over the canteen and held a 500-strong meeting, protected by thirteen armed men, which led to an afternoon strike in support of the immediate needs of the railway workers (food, clothing and housing). This series of strikes and disputes that rolled around the railways in the Paris region was yet another sign of an imminent shift in power. For the previous four years, the Germans and their French collaborators had been able to dominate every aspect of life. That was beginning to change, but there was a long way to go: the men from Vitry and from Villeneuve, along with thirty-six other railway workers, were still in prison nearly a month later.48

  Prison could be a very dangerous place. On the evening of 14 July, a riot broke out at the Santé prison. The reasons behind the disturbance are still unclear, but no Resistance prisoners were involved. The men of the paramilitary Milice quelled the rebellion with their usual bloody and vindictive enthusiasm. The next day, after rudimentary and profoundly unjust ‘trials’, they executed twenty-eight prisoners.49 The fascist Milice were growing daily more confident, more independent of state control, and more vicious.

  *

  As the 14 July demonstrations took place in Paris and the suburbs, the century’s greatest artist was at work in his attic studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, in the heart of the capital. Pablo Picasso positioned a jug, a glass and a lemon on a table, and examined them in the light that came through the window. Over the next twelve days, the 62-year-old Picasso painted eight versions of exactly the same composition, although mid-way through the series he sliced the lemon in half. The paintings were all in his cubist style, breaking the forms up into their fundamental lines, showing shadows and textures as huge angular blocks of colour. Then, on 27 July, Picasso abruptly turned his attention to a tomato plant tha
t was growing in the studio, and produced two exquisite drawings in blue crayon, the first delicate and naturalistic, the second exploring the shapes of the leaves, revealing abstract forms.

  This was the studio in which Picasso had painted his anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, in 1937. He lived in the French capital throughout the occupation, untroubled by the Germans despite his left-wing views, quietly producing around two thousand works, none of which was explicitly about the war, suggesting that he was not engaged by events.50 Although Picasso did not paint the occupation in any literal form, as he said shortly afterwards: ‘I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.’51 As July wore into August, his work began to change as the situation in Paris crept into his art.

  *

  On Thursday 20 July, deep in the forest of north-east Poland, Adolf Hitler was discussing the state of the war with some of his closest military advisors, including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and General Walter Warlimont. Shortly before 13:00, von Stauffenberg left the room; Warlimont described what happened next: ‘In a flash the map room became a scene of stampede and destruction. At one moment was to be seen a set of men and things which together formed a focal point of world events; at the next there was nothing but wounded men groaning, the acrid smell of burning, and charred fragments of maps and papers fluttering in the wind.’52

  Seeing the pall of smoke rising from the shattered building, the man who had planted the bomb, von Stauffenberg, assumed that Operation Valkyrie had succeeded and that Hitler was dead. He sped to Berlin, where the next phase of the coup was to take place involving important sections of the German army.53 In fact Hitler had been only slightly wounded and as that news came through, the coup in Berlin collapsed.54 But although the putsch failed – Hitler survived, the war continued and most of the conspirators were executed – in one place, for a few brief hours, the coup succeeded.