Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  Despite her heavy heart, Jacqueline still had to look after her daughter Sylvie. The girl was going crazy stuck inside the apartment, so the pair went for a walk. But as they neared Pigalle, German troop carriers screeched to a halt and soldiers blocked off the roads, brandishing their machine guns. Terrified, Jacqueline and Sylvie managed to wriggle to safety and ran down a side-road. That evening Jacqueline sat with her mother in the stifling heat, sewing FFI armbands for the Resistance and listening to the sporadic chatter of machine-gun fire from the place de Clichy.60

  Although the Germans had fled Drancy, the inmates were still not able to depart. There were gendarmes at the gates and only those with papers in order were allowed to leave. This was a combination of a bureaucratic reflex by the gendarmes and a recognition that ration books and identity papers were needed in the outside world. Furthermore, although Alois Brünner and his vile crew had left the prison camp, German troops were still very much present in Drancy itself and in the rest of the Paris region. There were still trigger-happy patrols and no French person was safe – especially a Jew. In a curious twist of circumstance, Drancy inmate Janine Auscher was allowed to leave the camp with her papers in order, but when she discovered that curfew was about to begin, she decided to return to Drancy to spend a final night in relative safety.61

  The Pantin train had been trundling slowly through eastern France ever since it had left the Nanteuil-Saâcy station. As it moved, it leaked prisoners. Some escaped through a hole in the floor of one of the wagons, others managed to open a wagon door and dropped, running, onto the side of the track. At Mézy-Moulins, not far from Rheims, local inhabitants took in a number of escaped prisoners, gave them fresh clothes and even dyed their hair to disguise them. At a stop on the route between Rheims and Nancy, a teenage boy rested his hands on the barbed wire that covered one of the windows; the German guard outside shot him through the hand – the bullet ricocheted up into the ceiling of the wagon but miraculously did not injure anyone else. The guard said that the young man had been trying to rip down the barbed wire, and demanded that he come out and get his wound treated. Reluctantly, the boy got out of the wagon, and was then taken away and shot. The Germans demanded that two volunteers go and bury him; two men were given spades and were taken off to a nearby field. Eventually there was the sound of more machine-gun fire as they were also killed. In total, seven prisoners were murdered, equalling the number that had escaped, and the train continued inexorably on its way to Germany.62 For three days, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux had been following the train as best she could, from village to village. But it was not at all clear that she would be able to help her husband, Pierre, and she was needed back in Paris. Reluctantly, she gave up her bold mission and made her way back to the capital, but she never forgot her husband’s plight for an instant, stuck inside a stifling wagon, rattling his way to hell.

  Madeleine Riffaud, who had been saved from the train at the last minute, and had then been rescued from Fresnes by Nordling, was made a surprising offer by her fellow escapee, Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie invited Madeleine to join her in her work for British intelligence – much better than working with ‘communists’, she said. But Madeleine wanted to be with her comrades, so she turned down the invitation. When she found her fellow FFI fighters, they were appalled by her physical state – six weeks in prison had weakened her substantially, and she was sent away to convalesce at Cochin hospital, until the call of the insurrection became too strong.63

  *

  The Resistance began to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the Germans. Colonel Rol’s FFI staff moved their headquarters yet again, this time into the city, to the offices of the water company on the rue de Meaux in the 19th arrondissement, where they had space and easy access to telephones. In the 17th arrondissement posters called for the population to make barricades, to chop down trees to block the main thoroughfares, and to obstruct narrow streets with chicanes. Meanwhile, all over the city the white German road signs written in Gothic script that had littered the capital for four years were taken down by Parisians who were happy to be taking action.64 More seriously, the twenty men and women of the ‘Victoire’ armed group, which was affiliated to Ceux de la Résistance, settled into its new barracks – a private school on a wealthy street near the Ecole Militaire (the school’s headmaster was Commander Dufresne of the Seine FFI staff). These were not hard-nosed soldiers but ordinary young men and women who wanted to fight to free their country: they had already carried out seventeen sabotage operations and seven attacks on German garages and had sheltered twenty-eight Allied airmen. The group included Fred in his espadrilles, Michel with his heavy boots that hurt his feet, handsome ‘Canard’ in a pair of shorts that were really short, Edmond with his floppy black hair that he kept flicking out of his eyes, Marianne who was twenty-eight but looked eighteen and had been tortured by the Gestapo, ‘Dogue’ who wore a thick turtle-neck jumper despite the heat, and the elegant ‘Minet’ who ostentatiously wore a red, white and blue tie. But although they had determination and style, they did not have many weapons – three Bren machine guns, four Sten guns, five rifles, a few battered old revolvers and about sixty grenades, not even enough to arm each member of the group. Over the next few days, their group would be in the thick of the fighting on the Left Bank. Some of them did not have long to live.65

  In the late afternoon, the CPL met at Vanves, on the southern border of the capital. Once again the central question was when the insurrection should take place. The delegates from the Communist Party, the CGT trade union and the Front National made it clear that if the CPL did not launch an insurrection, they would go it alone. André Carrel said that the Communist Party had already printed posters calling for an insurrection and they were ready to be pasted on the walls of the capital.66 Léo Hamon asked Rol the most important question of all: how many weapons did the FFI have? Rol replied that they had around a thousand firearms, to which Hamon responded that this seemed somewhat insufficient as the basis for an insurrection.67 Rol later explained that the FFI were not looking for a straightforward confrontation with the German Army – ‘In such a battle, we would not have been able to win.’68 Instead, he argued, they wanted to ‘submerge the enemy by a large and profound mobilisation of popular forces’. Stripped of the jargon, this meant one thing: not an urban guerrilla struggle, but mass insurrection. Unable to resolve the issue, the CPL decided to refer the question of the timing of the insurrection to the CNR, due to meet immediately afterwards. However, the unexpected announcement of the 21:00 curfew meant that the Bureau meeting was hurriedly cancelled. The eternal questions of when an insurrection would be launched, and who would lead it, were again left hanging in the air.

  The next day would be decisive. The Communist Party had already prepared its posters calling for insurrection. That evening, two posters were printed by the trade unions and by the FFI, calling on Parisians to take action. The joint poster from the CGT and the CFTC (the Christian union federation) called for a general strike, while the FFI called for the mobilisation of all able-bodied French men and women, instructing them to join their local patriotic militia. It further instructed all units to arm themselves by whatever means, to attack the enemy and to protect public utilities and services against German sabotage.69

  In fact, all the Resistance leaders in Paris now accepted this was the right thing to do. After the CPL meeting, Léo Hamon and his Ceux de la Résistance comrade, Pierre Stibbe, agreed that the moment had come for the insurrection.70 It might have been Rol’s determination that swayed them, but it seems more likely that they realised they were faced with an inevitability, and had the choice of leading or following. Better to be in the driver’s seat than to allow the communists to take the initiative and the credit. Even Parodi was coming round to this point of view. During the day, members of the Free French Delegation sent extended messages to Algiers, describing conditions in the capital and outlining potential perspectives. Roland Pré set the tone by analysing the agreement
between Nordling and the Germans as the expression of a ‘profound demoralisation . . . it is the first capitulation by the Nazis.’71 For Chaban, the situation in Paris was ‘very tense’ with ‘a growing tendency towards a general strike’. ‘All the preparatory conditions for an insurrection are in place,’ he insisted. And yet again he warned of ‘bloody reprisals, upon which the Germans seem to have decided and for which they are prepared’. Chaban repeated the view he had been putting forward over the previous two weeks: ‘If the military situation allows it, you must intervene with the Allies to ask for Paris to be occupied rapidly . . . Make an official warning on the BBC to the population in the clearest possible terms to avoid a new Warsaw.’72

  Parodi had a slightly different approach that, as befitted his post, was more political than military.73 Mixed in with his usual emphasis on the risks involved and his repeated pleas to General Koenig to hasten the arrival of the Free French troops, Parodi showed an important streak of realism as he outlined his plans. His message – which would not arrive in Algiers for another six days – foresaw ‘several days of effervescence’ and revealed both the true balance of power in the capital and a real understanding of why the insurrection was not only inevitable but necessary: ‘Tonight the CNR will discuss the call for insurrection proposed by the Comité Parisien de Libération. The strikes are continuing and are spreading. The Resistance and much of the Parisian population would be humiliated if the German troops were to leave Paris without the Parisian FFI being involved in an armed struggle.’74

  Parodi’s recognition of the need for the population to be involved in the fighting was similar to de Gaulle’s call for workers to strike to help drive out the Germans, or André Gillois’ appeal for factory occupations made on the BBC the night before. What was strikingly different was that Parodi seemed to have ceded leadership of the insurrection to the CPL: ‘We have agreed with Léandre75 the following scenario: the Republic will be proclaimed from the Hôtel de Ville and the Provisional Government and General de Gaulle will be acclaimed. In agreement with the terms decided by the CNR for the whole of the country, the insurrection will be led solely by the Comité Parisien de Libération.’

  Parodi was making the best of a bad job, dealing with the forces on the ground as best he could. But for the Free French, Parodi’s position was infuriating. He had accepted there would be an insurrection, and had even allowed it to be seen as part of the dangerous revolutionary tradition of Paris, in which the Republic would be declared from the Hôtel de Ville, as in 1830, 1848 and 1870. He had agreed that it should be led by the CPL, and by accepting that both the police and the FFI would be involved in seizing the main public buildings, he had gone against the strict instructions that had been sent a few days earlier that had barred the Resistance from this kind of activity.76 Parodi did not know this – the Free French message had never arrived – and it is not clear what he would or could have done differently. In the August heat, all the forces of the Resistance had accepted that no one was in complete control – not the CPL, not Parodi, not the communists. The mismatch of forces between the Resistance and the Germans was worrying, but the insurrection was inevitable because of the growing tension in the city, and the appetite of rank-and-file résistants.

  *

  One indication of the imminent eruption of unrest was that despite the dangers, the evident fracturing of the occupation was emboldening ordinary people. In her diary, Berthe Auroy described the new atmosphere: ‘the occupiers are too busy preparing to leave to spend time harassing us. The time of investigations and raids is over. I can write freely now – they won’t come rummaging in my papers. Freedom is beginning to return.’77 In the afternoon, on the place du Châtelet, a German column of soldiers marched by, three abreast; two young women, pushing their bicycles, paid no attention and simply crossed the road between the front rank of soldiers and the commanding officer, carrying on their conversation. The troops immediately threatened the girls with their machine guns. The officer, not wanting to provoke an incident, signalled the young women to be on their way, and the squad marched over the Seine towards the Latin Quarter.78

  Lieutenant Heinz Bliss of the German 4th Parachute Artillery Regiment, stationed in Enghien-les-Bains, eight kilometres to the north of Paris, was sent into Paris with a group of men and three lorries to get supplies from near the Arc de Triomphe. When Lieutenant Bliss and his men arrived in the Renault garage, the French workers were having a meeting. The workers angrily told the intruders that there were no working vehicles present and they should leave. Despite having been attacked by the Resistance on their way into Paris, with one man dead and several wounded, Bliss’s group did not respond, and once they had found some serviceable equipment they simply went on their way.79

  Nearby, teenager Micheline Bood got into an argument with a Luftwaffe sergeant over a tin of meat that he had thrown away and which she wanted to take for Darak, her dog. After the man threatened her with his rifle, she told him he was behaving like a peasant, which made him all the more furious. He screamed at her: ‘We will never abandon Paris. We would rather reduce the whole place to fire and blood.’ Shortly before curfew, Micheline went back, found the tin and Darak got his supper. Just as she returned safely to her apartment, a German car patrol went by; a young soldier pointed his machine gun in her direction and glared. Unperturbed, she glared back at him.80

  Late in the evening, violent shooting was heard from the Porte des Lilas, and bullets thudded into the walls of the schools around place Anatole France just outside the eastern city boundary. Resistance fighters had seized the Mairie in the suburb of Les Lilas and were now fighting the Germans. Shortly afterwards, the night sky was lit up with immense flames.81 Flora Groult spent the evening in her apartment with neighbours, talking by the light of a candle. At around 01:00, a friend telephoned to announce that the Allies were at the gates of Paris. Flora wrote in her diary that they were all overjoyed: a bottle of champagne was brought out and they basked in a brief moment of optimism before reality dawned. She wrote: ‘We were bursting with emotion and drank in the dark, for the candle went out at this instant. Then we went on hoping for a while and listening, but since nothing happened we went to bed. The last minutes of waiting are always the longest.’82

  8

  Saturday 19 August: Insurrection

  Journalist Claude Roy writes in his diary: ‘The courtyard of the Préfecture is full of men and weapons, always on the move. There are German lorries, cars full of ammunition, vans that have been taken from the enemy. The logistics department finds it hard to get the ammunition the fighters need. One man has a French submachine gun, another has a British weapon, another a light machine gun, while yet another has a German gun. The firefight that is making such a noise outside resounds in the most extraordinary manner around the courtyard, in the corridors and stairwells. Our ears are ringing. In the rare moments of calm, the massive gates open to let ambulances come and go, as the stretcher-bearers wave flags marked with the Red Cross.’1

  As early morning sunlight poured onto the vast square in front of Notre Dame, several hundred policemen stood in front of the Préfecture de Police, directly opposite the smoke-blackened cathedral. The night before, a group of Resistance policemen had met in Montreuil and had agreed on an audacious plan to occupy the Préfecture. During the night they had contacted hundreds of their comrades of all political persuasions, instructing them to gather on the Ile Saint-Louis at first light and await the orders of the Comité Parisien de la Libération.2 But the men were impatient, and there was no news from the CPL, so the police Resistance leaders took matters in their own hands and the men streamed into the courtyard of the Préfecture. Yves Bayet, the main organiser of the occupation, clambered onto a car and cried: ‘In the name of General de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the Republic, I take possession of the Préfecture de Police.’ There was loud applause, and the ‘Marseillaise’ was sung. Unknown to the leaders of the Resistance or to the Free French, the Paris
insurrection had begun.3

  By chance, regional FFI leader Colonel Rol was riding past on his bicycle as the ‘Marseillaise’ rang out, on his way to his new headquarters in the 19th arrondissement. Completely unaware of the plan to occupy the Préfecture and intrigued by the singing, Rol tried to get into the building, but was rebuffed by the guards. Taking his Spanish Civil War colonel’s uniform from his bicycle saddlebag, Rol nipped into a nearby garage, got changed and again knocked at the door. The policemen were disciplined, highly sensitive to hierarchies, so this time he was welcomed with a salute and ushered up the stairs to see the people in charge – the Comité de la Libération de la Police. Rol somewhat superfluously handed them a printed copy of an order calling for the occupation of all public buildings, and after some discussion they agreed that the police would remain in civilian clothes with an FFI armband, showing clearly that they were part of the Resistance.4 With that Rol was whisked off in a car to his headquarters. He never got his bicycle back.5

  Not far from the Préfecture, both the CPL and the Conseil National de la Résistance were meeting to discuss for one final time whether it was the right moment to launch the insurrection.6 Everyone agreed that the moment had come, but the meeting was interrupted by the sound of voices singing the ‘Marseillaise’, followed by gunfire. As the Resistance leaders peered anxiously out of the window, they saw the tricolour flag being raised over the nearby Ministry of Education. The endless backbiting disputes had been overtaken by events. As Léo Hamon noted laconically in his diary: ‘The insurrection did not wait for us.’7

  Following the lead of the Préfecture, the city sprouted flags – on ministries, on town halls, even on Notre Dame itself. For the first time since June 1940, the French flag was flying all over the capital.8 The whole city could see that the Resistance was now out in the open, brazenly declaring its intention to fight. Virtually absent for over four years, the flag immediately became a powerful symbol of liberation.9 At 10:00, five tricolour flags were hoisted on the flagpoles around the roof of the Hôtel de Ville, and the assembled crowd sung a tuneless but moving version of the ‘Marseillaise’. Shortly afterwards, the nearby Assistance Publique building followed suit.10 By the end of the morning, the flagIn his attic refuge, Albert Grunberg realised that the flags implied he would soon be ‘down there’ in the street, freed from his self-imposed was flying over all of the city’s twenty mairies and over all the ministries. With the approval of Algiers, the Resistance had drawn up careful plans for taking over the levers of government in the capital, but this plan soon fell apart in the unfolding chaos as Resistance groups – both FFI and civil servants – jumped the gun, much to Parodi’s annoyance.11 At the Louvre Museum, the director decided against raising the flag, reminding his colleagues that their main duty was to preserve the treasures that the Louvre contained, not to attract the unwelcome attention of German troops.12 Ordinary Parisians were less concerned about their safety: on the rue Saint-Louis-en-Ile Paul Tuffrau saw twenty flags, while the narrow rue des Anglais, off the boulevard Saint-Germain, was completely blocked by a huge flag hung from one side to the other.13 Flora Groult’s heart leapt when she saw the French flag on the mairies of the 6th and 7th arrondissements.14 When the flag was raised in the 6th arrondissement, a Resistance fighter deliriously fired his gun, scaring passers-by who ‘ran into side-streets, looking for doorways to hide in, like leaves blown by a gust of wind’.15 Despite such moments of fear, the city was being painted red, white and blue, to the joy of the Parisians. The poet Camille Vilain described the impact of seeing the flag: