The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  *

  Early in the morning of 23 August the 2nd DB – 16,000 men, 4,200 vehicles and 200 tanks – set off for Paris. All along the route, they kept Henri Rol-Tanguy and the insurgents informed of their progress.819 By the afternoon of 24 August the French were fighting in the southern suburbs of Paris, alongside American troops. To keep up morale in the capital, a small Piper plane was sent swooping low over the Préfecture, where it dropped a message to the insurgents: ‘General Leclerc says: Hold on, we are coming.’ Two hours later Leclerc ordered Captain Dronne, at the head of a small scout group composed of three tanks and eleven halftracks, to enter the capital. The final phase of the liberation of Paris had begun.820

  Shortly after 9 p.m., having met no opposition, Dronne’s column arrived in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville to be greeted by Georges Bidault, the head of the CNR, and André Tollet, the leader of the Comité Parisien de Libération. Not long afterwards, a similar but more official meeting took place at the Préfecture, where de Gaulle’s representatives, Parodi and Chaban-Delmas, greeted Captain Dronne. All through the evening, the Resistance radio announced the imminent arrival of the Free French column. Now they were in the centre of the capital. Speaking to the radio listeners, Parodi said: ‘I have in front of me a French captain who is the first to arrive in Paris. His face is red, he is grubby and he needs a shave, and yet I want to embrace him.’821 All over the city, the church bells rang out.

  In Rol-Tanguy’s underground bunker, there was an outbreak of joy which did not amuse the stern Colonel Henri. His wife, Cécile, who acted as his secretary, later recalled:

  When we heard that Dronne had arrived, all the women went a bit mad and had a pillow fight to celebrate. It just happened, and we had a great time. It didn’t last long – maybe ten minutes. But the next day, when Henri heard about it, when people said, ‘Ah! If only you’d seen Madame Rol!’, he had a real go at me! ‘A colonel’s wife does not have pillow fights . . .’ I didn’t think it was that bad . . .822

  The next morning, 25 August, the rest of the Leclerc division arrived in the capital, together with General Barton’s US infantry division. This time they were met by stiff resistance from the German troops. Around Invalides there was a series of firefights that saw French tanks destroyed and French soldiers killed – Second Lieutenant Bureau died an hour after telephoning his father to say he would soon be home.823 Fierce fighting at the École Militaire left fifty German soldiers dead before the group finally surrendered. As the fighting stopped, at the other end of the Champs-de-Mars a tricolour flag flew from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  While the 2nd DB was on the move, the Swedish consul, Raoul Nordling, tried to broker a peaceful settlement. The German commander, von Choltitz, had received orders from Hitler to leave the city a pile of burning ruins but was apparently unwilling to do so – from the outset, he could have smashed the occupation of the Préfecture by sending in tanks and blasting the building to rubble, but he had not. Although von Choltitz was an unrepentant Nazi, he may have been thinking about what would happen after the war was over – better to be remembered as the man who allowed Paris to survive than as the person who oversaw its destruction. By 25 August it was obvious that the Germans were beaten, and von Choltitz was mainly concerned about not being captured by the Resistance, fearing mistreatment. After much fighting in the streets, the German commander finally left his headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice and was taken to the Montparnasse railway station, where General Leclerc had set up his headquarters.

  The surrender was signed at around 3 p.m., in a railway-staff billiard room in the presence of the commanders of the 2nd DB, as well as Chaban-Delmas and two Resistance leaders – Rol-Tanguy for the FFI and Kriegel-Valmiront for COMAC. After Leclerc and von Choltitz signed the surrender, Kriegel-Valmiront, supported by Chaban-Delmas, pointed out that the Resistance should also sign the surrender document, given their role in the insurrection. Leclerc – who had not heard of Rol-Tanguy until that morning – dictated a second version, putting the name of the FFI leader before his own.824 The Occupation of Paris was over.

  Two hours later de Gaulle entered the capital. After seeing General Leclerc at Montparnasse and complaining that he had allowed Rol-Tanguy to sign the surrender document, de Gaulle made his way to the War Ministry, which he had left four years earlier.825 After a brief battle of wills, in which de Gaulle insisted that the Resistance should come to meet him, he eventually bowed to political reality and made his way to the Hôtel de Ville, where he was greeted by Georges Bidault, head of the CNR, in front of an excited crowd of insurgents. While Bidault spoke movingly of the Resistance, paying homage to his predecessor, ‘Max’ (Jean Moulin) – ‘On this day of triumph I remember him with pride and tenderness’ – there were no words of recognition from de Gaulle. In his speech, de Gaulle did not mention the CNR or the Resistance, nor did he thank them for their decisive role in the insurrection. Instead, the Free French leader emphasized the need for national unity, brushing aside the catastrophe of collaboration as the work of a ‘few unhappy traitors who gave themselves over to the enemy and who are tasting or will taste the rigour of the law’. He did make a rare recognition of the importance of popular action, but it was swamped by his mystical invocation of ‘France’:

  Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But now Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, by her own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France.826

  As de Gaulle was about to step on to a window sill of the Hotel de Ville and appear in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd, Bidault invited him to declare the Republic – just as in previous Parisian insurrections.827 De Gaulle knew his history, and had no intention of unleashing forces he might not be able to control:

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘the Republic has never ceased to exist. In their turn the Free French, the Fighting French, the French Committee of National Liberation have incorporated it. Vichy was always, and remains, null and void. I am President of the government of the Republic. Why should I proclaim it?’828

  In the heat and noise of the Hôtel de Ville, buzzing with the excitement of insurrection, de Gaulle had outlined the basis of his power, and how he saw the future.

  Other things were happening that evening. All along their route, the 2nd DB had been the happy recipients of the usual gifts of a grateful female population – kisses, hugs, phone numbers. That night, as they camped in the Jardin des Plantes in the centre of Paris, the soldiers of the 2nd DB received some extra attention. According to woman soldier Suzanne Massu:

  That first night, everything was quiet in the Jardin des Plantes . . . or at least, almost quiet . . . from all around there were stifled sighs and ticklish giggles. Many Parisian women were too charitable to let our lads spend their first night in the capital alone.829

  The next day saw a triumphal, chaotic march down the Champs-Elysées, as de Gaulle, accompanied by members of the Free French army, marched to the acclaim of hundreds of thousands of Parisians. Resistance leaders were also present, but de Gaulle was careful to claim the limelight – when Bidault seemed to be getting too close to the front, the General allegedly turned and said: ‘Monsieur – step back a bit, please.’830 People climbed on to lampposts and on to roofs to get a better look at the man whose voice they had heard through four years of Occupation. There were banners, flags and placards, and, stretching right across the broad avenue, a huge banner in Spanish Republican colours, a welcome sight for the Spanish members of the 2nd DB. At first de Gaulle was furious at the chaos and irritated by the fact that the FFI fighters were not neatly lined up in best military formation, but he relaxed slightly as he realized the size of the crowd and the warmth of the reception. He later recalled his impression of the immense wave of humanity that surrounded him: ‘It’s the sea,’ he wrote.831

  Photos of the beginning of the demonstration show a young black man, his ar
m in a sling, breaking through the crowd and coming up to de Gaulle and Bidault. This was twenty-two-year-old Georges Dukson, who had been wounded when fighting with the FFI in the seventeenth arrondissement, earning the nickname ‘the lion of the seventeenth’. Now a minor celebrity, he had bet his friends he would be with de Gaulle on the march, and by a combination of fame and cheek he had won.832 At one point, when the crowd yet again stopped the cortège from moving forward, de Gaulle noticed a young résistant, one of the thousands who had risked their lives in the fighting. The young man wore an FFI armband, had a cigarette hanging from his lips and was mad with joy. De Gaulle beckoned him over and spoke a few words into his ear; the résistant returned to the edge of the crowd. ‘What did he say to you?’ he was eagerly asked. ‘Don’t smoke on the procession’ was the reply.833 There were other unscripted moments – at various points along the route to Notre-Dame, where a celebratory Mass was held, shots rang out, causing the crowd to scatter, even in the cathedral itself. Whether these were the acts of desperate members of the Milice firing from the rooftops or of trigger-happy members of the Resistance, as de Gaulle suggested, will never be certain. The film images of the march capture the striking combination of joy and panic as the crowd dashed for cover at the sound of gunfire.

  Around 2,000 Parisians died in the struggle to liberate Paris, along with perhaps 800 résistants (FFI and police) and over 100 Free French and American soldiers.834 Like the dead, the credit for the Liberation was shared – the Allied advance had shaken the German garrison and made the insurrection possible; the Parisian résistants had rightly sensed that the time was ripe to free the city and wound the Nazis by defeating their soldiers; while the Free French army had provided the weight to put an end to the fighting. For de Gaulle, the outcome could not have been better. Acutely aware of the power of symbols, de Gaulle had been able to enter Paris as a hero, surfing on the wave of a popular uprising, but firmly based on the traditional power of the army. In the heroic days of August a new French myth had been forged; at its heart was the tall man in a uniform, the man who had consistently belittled, ignored or undermined the Resistance, yet had finally ridden it to power.

  *

  In the evening of 25 August, after the Nazi surrender was signed, there was fierce fighting as dozens of Resistance groups tried to take the SS barracks in the Place de la République. Twenty-two-year-old Michel Tagrine, the young violinist who had foolishly taken his instrument with him on the 11 November demonstration in 1940, was a member of the St-Just FTP brigade, along with Madeleine Riffaud and André Calvès. Tagrine insisted on joining the operation, even though he was wounded. He was shot dead at the very end of the attack, one of the last Resistance victims of the Parisian insurrection.835

  Madeleine Riffaud later recalled the events, still inflamed by the feeling of liberation after sixty years:

  They were firing proper shells at us on the Place de la République. We were fighting floor by floor, dropping grenades through the windows. It lasted all day and I lost one of my best men, Michel Tagrine, to a bullet fired after the surrender. But you cannot understand how wonderful it was to fight finally as free men and women, to battle in the daylight, under our own names, with our real identities, with everyone out there, all of Paris, to support us, happy, joyful and united. There was never a time like it.836

  11

  Aftermath

  Paris is not France, and, despite the scenes in the capital, France was not liberated. On the same day that Parisians were overcome with joy as the Nazis surrendered, the inhabitants of Maillé, a small town forty kilometres south of Tours, were screaming in terror. A group of German soldiers – still not identified, over sixty years later – killed eighty adults and forty-four children and destroyed or damaged eighty per cent of the town’s buildings.837 Even Paris was not completely secure – the Germans attempted to retake the city a few days after the surrender was signed, mounting a vicious counter-offensive from the east that was beaten back by the Allies. All over the country the Nazis carried out massacres and arbitrary shootings as they withdrew. Thirty prisoners were executed as hostages in Rodez, nineteen résistants were assassinated in Carcassonne, while over a hundred prisoners were taken out of Montluc prison and shot, their bodies then burned.

  This last massacre led to a terrible twist in the roles of the Resistance and the Nazis. Fearing that the remaining 1,200 résistants in Montluc jail would also be shot, the regional Resistance leaders wrote to the German commander of Lyons. They pointed out that they held 752 German prisoners who would suffer ‘very serious consequences’ if there were further atrocities; in the meantime, eighty German prisoners would be executed as a reprisal for the killings of the Montluc prisoners. Two days later the eighty Germans were duly shot.838 The next day, 24 August, with the American army only thirty kilometres away, the left wing of the Lyons Resistance launched a general strike and insurrection in the working-class suburb of Villeurbanne. But Allied progress was slower than they hoped, and after two days of fighting the insurgents were forced to accept a ceasefire – the Nazis stopped their reprisals in return for the dismantling of the barricades. Although fighting continued in nearby Oullins, the Resistance was threatened by a disastrous internal power struggle as the Free French loyalists sought to calm the determination of the FFI résistants and contradictory orders were issued, confusing the fighters on the ground.839 The city was finally saved through one of the few actions where US and FFI forces fought side by side in a textbook battle. On 1 September, in boiling late-summer heat, several hundred US troops and résistants held off the 11th Panzer Division at Meximieux, twenty kilometres to the north-east of Lyons, opening the road for the main US force to advance.840

  As the Americans closed in on the city the German garrison withdrew, dynamiting the bridges over the Rhône and the Saône behind them. Although the US troops were not supposed to enter Lyons – their objective was to chase the German army back to Berlin – on 3 September some Special Operations units made their way through the pouring rain to the centre of the city. Their commander, Major Alfred Cox, recalled:

  Somehow or other we got out in front of the attacking Maquis who were still forming up, and had to fight our way through the wildly cheering crowds to get where we wanted. We reached the Cathedral overlooking the city just about as the first Maquis and French Army unit arrived at the river bank below us, and for half an hour enjoyed the spectacle . . .841

  Journalist Andrée Viollis reported the event in a local newspaper:

  I can tell you, the FFI looked proud when you compare them to the green-uniformed cowards who fled. And then, the shouting got even louder – there were some firemen carrying two men on their shoulders, men wearing khaki uniforms, their faces red, smiling white-toothed smiles. They were Americans. The first we’d ever seen! This time, nothing could stop the crowd – they grabbed the men, kissed them all over. And there they were, covered in lipstick. And when some policemen came to save them, they got kissed too. We were all a bit mad. And all the time it was bucketing down. If it had been sunny, who knows what would have happened! And they say that the people of Lyons are cold!842

  As the Allied armies drove the Nazis back, the same scenes of joy were repeated in town after town in the northern and eastern parts of France.843 But in the other half of the country, where there were no Allied soldiers, the Resistance was left to its own devices and events sometimes took an unexpected turn. In Toulouse, everything went more or less according to plan – at first. On 19 August, while the Resistance called for an insurrection, the Nazi garrison began to withdraw, burning buildings and destroying the telephone exchange as they left. Attacked by Resistance groups, the Nazis fought back, killing thirty-five résistants and gravely wounding Jean Cassou, one of the founders of the Musée de l’Homme group, who was now Commissaire de la République in Toulouse.844 On the night of 20 August Resistance reinforcements arrived, and by the next day the Germans had fled. In celebration, there was a demonstration of around 30,000
people on the Place du Capitole, in front of the Hôtel de Ville.

  But that was only the beginning. While delirious crowds crammed into the centre of the city, the workers in the SNCASE aviation plant hastily repainted a D.520 fighter that was due to be delivered to the Luftwaffe and sent the plane, now sporting Free French markings, roaring into the sky in a sign of victory. Because the managers of SNCASE had collaborated with the Nazis, the workers had no confidence in their bosses’ commitment to producing aircraft for the Allied war effort. So they simply took control of the factory. On 23 August they broadcast a blood-curdling declaration, announcing their intention of increasing production of aircraft and armaments, and warning that there would be no slacking in the fight to ensure that the Nazi armies were destroyed: