On 6 June 1944 Allied forces began the long-awaited invasion of northern France. Operation Overlord, codename for the Normandy landings, was the largest seaborne invasion in history, as British, American and Canadian forces landed on a fifty-mile stretch of coast. Fighting was intense, casualties high and progress slower than the Allies had hoped. The town of Caen, a major objective, was not captured until 21 July, and the Allies could not break out beyond Bayeux until 1 August. But, as they advanced towards Paris, many towns saw spontaneous demonstrations of support from the local people, the vast majority of them women, often wearing red, white and blue and kissing every soldier in sight.
The battle for Paris itself began on 15 August. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, commander of the Paris Region FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur), the umbrella network for the military resistance, led the popular uprising in the city as the police went on strike and the Métro closed. Cécile Rol-Tanguy, the young activist married to Henri, knew in advance that this was the moment and remembers frantically typing out propaganda posters calling for insurrection which needed circulating across the city. The patriotic French – ‘all men from 18 to 50 able to carry a weapon’ – were urged to join ‘the struggle against the invader’, promising ‘victory was near’ and ‘chastisement for the traitors’, the Vichy loyalists. The Rol-Tanguys, both committed communists, had managed to survive in occupied Paris for four years leading a dangerous and clandestine existence, taking enormous risks while bringing up a young family. They were fortunate not to be arrested, like so many of their fellow fighters. Although Cécile worked as Henri’s liaison officer, they could not live together as he was a wanted man, far too well known by the Germans.
In 1942 Cécile’s father, François, had been arrested for a second time, this time deported to Auschwitz where he was killed, and the following year Cécile gave birth to a son, Jean. So Cécile and her mother now lived together in a tiny studio with the two children, Hélène, born in May 1941, and baby Jean, struggling to find enough to eat. She remembers being so thin at one point that her culottes fell down. Cécile had to traverse the city for her work, so she sometimes carried Hélène in her arms while hiding weapons in a sack of potatoes which she pushed in the pram. At other times she buried papers underneath the pram bedding, with the baby on top. She had a number of aliases, Jeanne, Yvette and Lucie, and occasionally changed her hairstyle or wore a fashionable turban, but she did little otherwise to disguise herself. Afterwards, she always made light of her activities, claiming she had done nothing special. ‘My strength was always in remaining cool. I think that was my character.’
It required all her strength to stay cool during these exceptionally bloody and chaotic eleven days when almost 1,500 Parisians died in the struggle to chase out 20,000 occupying soldiers as well as collaborationist snipers, many of whom were Vichy miliciens, firing from rooftops wherever they could. Suddenly rosette merchants appeared on the streets, hoping to make a quick franc or two from women determined to declare their allegiance to the nation by sporting a tricolore rosette in their blouse. At last, on 25 August, Dietrich von Choltitz, the German Military Governor of Paris, emerged from his headquarters in the Hôtel Meurice to sign the surrender documents. Henri Rol-Tanguy and General Philippe Leclerc of the 2nd Armoured Division, de Gaulle’s representative, were also signatories. The following day de Gaulle, unmissable thanks to his immense height, made his triumphal walk down the Champs-Elysées with thousands of people shouting ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ As he walked, he raised his long arms towards the sky, turning first left and then right, as if offering thanks, in a gesture that was to become his hallmark but was completely new to Parisians then. ‘For those gathered there,’ remarked Elisabeth Meynard, a teacher in charge of a group of schoolchildren that day, ‘he was the living symbol of resistance to the enemy invader.’ With the odd German or milicien sniper taking murderous pot-shots, he then delivered a rousing speech referring, in an immediate attempt to unite the country, to ‘Paris liberated by her own people … supported by the whole of France’.
But he could not totally deny the contribution made by the brave communist fighters amongst whom Cécile Rol-Tanguy had played an important role, a crucial factor in determining the political future of the country. One of the liveliest post-war arguments, still arousing controversy in the twenty-first century though only a handful of the participants are still alive, has centred on the part played by female resisters – whether women carried weapons or ‘merely’ acted in support. Clearly, in Paris women under the command of Rol-Tanguy did use weapons, as can be seen in contemporary footage of the Liberation which shows young girls such as the twenty-two-year-old Anne Marie Dalmaso handling a gun as she fights in the action to defend the Hôtel de Ville. Dalmaso had joined the teams of young volunteers especially created to help those affected by the bombing, or evacuated from combat zones.* Madeleine Riffaud, a twenty-year-old communist arrested in July for shooting and killing a German officer in daylight on a bridge overlooking the Seine, was interrogated in Fresnes and even had a date set for her execution but was released in a prisoner exchange and returned to fight in the resistance. On the day after the Liberation Frida Wattenberg, only nineteen, a Paris-born resister working for the OSE and other groups, was immediately sent to the Toulouse office for ‘Questions Juives’ to retrieve crucial files that would contain details of any Jewish genocide in France. ‘When the official asked me what authority I had to claim them I replied: “All I have is my gun,” and pointed it at him.’ Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume, cycling around the Normandy coast with explosives at the ready, handled not only weapons but also bomb-making equipment.
However, in the euphoria of liberation, the abiding image is of women throughout France who now suffered summary justice for what was termed collaboration horizontale. Those accused, rightly or wrongly, of having slept with a German, sometimes but not always in exchange for benefits, of having collaborated by providing sensitive information, or merely of having serviced the occupier in the role of housekeeper, seamstress or cook, were all seen as women guilty of infidelity to the nation. They were denounced, hectored, brought to their knees, had their heads shaved; some even had swastikas drawn or branded on their bodies and were made to parade half naked through town to display their shame publicly. No one who watched ever forgot the barbarity, as whole villages turned out to cheer young girls being humiliated perhaps for no greater crime than sleeping with a German in return for some silk stockings or a little bit of money. Lee Miller, the US-born photographer and fashion model who had been accredited as a war reporter with British Vogue, had flown over to France on 2 August and was making her way up to Paris where ‘I won’t be the first woman journalist in Paris … but I’ll be the first dame photographer, I think, unless someone parachutes in.’* Miller was shocked to witness the ‘chastisement’ of two girls who were shaved, spat on and publicly slapped even though their interrogation had merely confirmed that there was enough evidence for a subsequent trial. ‘They were stupid little girls not intelligent enough to feel ashamed,’ Lee wrote to her editor, Audrey Withers.
It was a sickeningly misogynistic response. The women – by some estimates as many as 20,000, known to history as les tondues, or shaven ones – were punished by the men who had failed to defend them. One of them was Lisette, the French secretary whose longstanding affair with Johann, a married German soldier, was known of by many in her circle. Her pro-German parents, concierges who were helping themselves to clothes in the apartment of a deported Jewish couple, may have supported her, but her own cousins refused to speak to her. She was lucky not to have had further humiliation in the form of branding inflicted on her as payment for the luxuries she had received during the war. But at the same time de Gaulle did not punish the male political or commercial elite who had backed Pétain, seeing them as valuable allies in the fight against communism. The controversy has gathered momentum in the intervening years as historians have pointed out how much of the punishment was not only gender-based, but a question of class and ancient score-settling. In the terror of the moment there were tragic mistakes. Max and Madeleine Goa, two young resisters who, having sheltered evading airmen, were celebrating victory on the balcony of their apartment in the Avenue d’Italie when shots were fired. The mob below was convinced they had come from them, so the pair were hauled down to the street below where Max was lynched, then run over by a tank, and Madeleine taken away to a prison, locked up until she went mad, and then murdered.
Of course there were articulate and fierce opponents of the épuration sauvage – the wave of vicious punishments without trial, including executions as well as humiliation, that now swept through France – including men such as Henri Rol-Tanguy and the communist surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, both married to women who had risked their lives to resist. Eluard, in his 1944 poem ‘Comprenne qui voudra’ (Understand if you will), expressed powerfully his disgust at how, in order not to punish the real culprits, the mob had attacked defenceless girls who were trembling with fear as they lay with torn dresses, while the crowd laughed and parents held up children to see better, many of whom simply did not understand what was happening to the girls nor why. Angered by the sight of a beautiful woman’s hair lying on the pavement in front of a barber’s shop in Rue de Grenelle, Eluard pointed out that they had not, in any case, harmed anyone else. ‘They had not sold France and they often had not sold anything at all.’
Janet Teissier du Cros, a clear-eyed observer of what defeat meant to men in France, believed it affected women more tangentially. ‘Theirs was the cumulative humiliation of being little by little degraded to an exclusive preoccupation with material things, the humiliation daily renewed of having to beg even for what they bought … But the actual fact of military defeat is, I think, harder for men to bear than for women and, so long as German troops remained on French soil, the wound was kept open.’
At the same time, there were also educated people who defended the head-shaving. Andrée Doucet, a young art student at Les Arts Décos (sister school to the Beaux-Arts) during the latter part of the Occupation, believed the punishment was ‘a shame, yes, but compared with women who had risked everything for France, understandable. They deserved it. And anyway hair grows back. They soon carried on with their lives.’ Doucet had been brought up in a suburb of Paris where her father owned the local Citroën garage. She was keenly aware of girls who had been overly friendly to the German occupiers, something her family, fiercely proud of its French identity, had instilled in her to avoid. Once, she had seen a friend of hers walking arm in arm with the local Kommandant and yelled out ‘Salle pute!’ (Dirty bitch!) – an action which got her arrested. She talked her way out of that situation by saying that what she meant was that the girl had slept with all the French boys in the village. Happily, she was allowed to go free. But the experience terrified her. ‘If you didn’t live through the Liberation, you can’t describe the atmosphere … Euphoria in the streets, people screaming with joy and enthusiasm. Head-shaving didn’t seem such a huge thing then. It wasn’t physical torture.’
The euphoria of Liberation, as other women soon discovered in 1944, could be highly dangerous. Lucienne Guézennec,* the Paris-born résistante who had given her real identity to a Jewish girl on the run, was now taking part in the celebrations of Liberation in Lyons. She attempted to intervene when she saw two naked girls trying to protect themselves from a group of loud-mouthed women spitting on them, attempting to hit them and shouting insults at other shavenheaded girls. But Lucienne, although deeply shocked by this mob justice, was herself still weak, suffering from a German bullet that had punctured her lung during a raid on her printing press, as well as once having had her arm mangled in the printing press, and could do little to protect herself when a youth, yelling at her for trying to help the ‘sluts’, grabbed her and shoved her into an open truck filled with men and women assumed to have collaborated. Luckily ‘Lucienne’ was soon recognized by people who knew who she really was and she was released. ‘Was it for this’, she asked herself, ‘that so many comrades died? Could this have been the reason for their struggles and sacrifices?’
Hungry for normality, the native population had quickly accustomed itself to freedom once more. On 17 August Drancy and its sub-camps, including the Lévitan and Bassano sorting centres, were liberated. Those returning from prisons or deportation, still only a trickle in 1944, were soon to recognize that Paris was not prepared to welcome them. It was a situation that was to deteriorate dramatically in 1945 when most of the deportees wearily straggled home.
Irène Delmas, codenamed Maryka, was one of those released in 1944 who started visiting the families of other prisoners, trying to reassure them, and she soon realized the enormous need for a welfare organization to help newly released female prisoners, many with multiple illnesses and physical disabilities compounding the emotional. By September 1944 she had an official organization under way which sent out 700 invitations to former resisters. More than 350 women attended the first general assembly on 14 October 1944, unanimously approving the by-laws and electing an administrative council headed by Delmas. As they came to appreciate the uniqueness of their circumstances and to see that their wartime activism had been little understood or accepted, their conviction grew that no one would speak for them if they did not do so for themselves.
Even as de Gaulle was marching down the Champs-Elysées on 26 August to wild cheers, the artistic épuration sauvage was also well under way. That day saw General de Gaulle acclaimed as President of the new provisional government of the French Republic, as agreed by the Allies. De Gaulle would lead a national unity interim government whose most urgent task, until elections could be held, was to continue the war against Germany and deal with the aftermath of four years of Occupation. Almost immediately, in an attempt to halt indiscriminate revenge attacks, it introduced an offence of indignité nationale. Those found guilty were reduced to a class of second-rate citizens, deprived of election rights and banned from government service, trade unions, mass media and executive appointments in semi-public companies, as well as, after 30 September 1944, confiscation of property. Such punishment could last for any period from five years to life, to be decided by each court individually. Those who had done more than simply perform and had flaunted their German friends, lovers and contacts were prime targets, and the opera singer Germaine Lubin, who was preparing to sing Gluck’s Alceste, was one of the first to be arrested. She had frequently sung Wagner, sometimes at special performances for the Wehrmacht, and had a long-time German admirer, Captain Hans Joachim Lange, whom she had used to arrange the release of her only son, a prisoner of war captured in 1940. Now she was held in prison for most of the next two years without formally being brought to trial. Her treatment reveals the fixation with punishing women who had openly consorted with German men, yet her prison diary, which makes for graphic reading, displays an arrogance and a total failure to understand why she was being detained, an attitude which goes some way to explaining why she was a target.
On 8 September she wrote:
Eight days ago I was arrested for the second time. For ten hours I waited on a leather bench with no back surrounded by dirty men with week-old beards, concierges, laundrywomen, prostitutes. In the corners, garbage was mixed with the hair of women who had had their heads shaved the night before. During the course of the day another four were shaved completely bald except for one on whom, for laughs, they had left a tuft in the middle of her head which hung down like the mandarin’s pigtails – so dreadful as to make one shiver. After the fourth woman was shaved I began trembling in uncontrollable fear of being suddenly delivered into the hands of one of these fanatics and ending up bald.
Worse was to follow. Before the year was out she complained of having to share a straw mattress and one blanket with two other women until she was transferred to Drancy, now used for collaborators. Here ‘ugliness, dirt, selfishness, cruelty all mingle … It is very cold … washing with others in freezing water. The indecency of it. Odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before … Drancy is an immense material and moral garbage heap. I live in a state of perpetual nausea.’
The film star Arletty, who had seen her popularity soar during the Occupation, when going to the cinema provided not only a form of escapism but one of the few places that was warm and a useful venue for sexual encounters, much cheaper than renting a hotel bedroom, was also now a focus of attack. In 1938 cinema attendances had been gauged at 220 million but rose to over 300 million in 1943. As American and British films had been banned, the French movie industry flourished and 220 or so films were made between September 1939 and the summer of 1945. It was, paradoxically, a golden age for French cinema and a good time for female stars on the screen. Arletty, leading lady of some seven hit films who earned one of the highest salaries in the business, came to symbolize for many what it meant to be a Parisienne who collaborated. She was not just beautiful but funny and sexy in a nonchalant, devil-may-care Parisian way, and believed she had done nothing wrong. She did her job and fell in love. She was proud of her working-class origins, having started life working in a factory before graduating to modelling and music hall, never losing her trademark parigot, the working-class Parisian accent.
But she had celebrity status and therefore she could not be allowed to walk free. Even though she had made no films with the Germanrun Continental Studios, she was now judged as someone who had, quite literally, embraced France’s acceptance of the German presence, evidenced by her passionate love affair with Hans-Jürgen Soehring. She had attended events both at the German Embassy and at the German Institute. For much of 1943 and early 1944 she had been making the great Marcel Carné film Les Enfants du paradis, in which she starred as the courtesan Garance. When that was finished, Soehring urged her to flee with him, but she refused.
Nonetheless, as the battle for Paris raged, Arletty, now forty-six, was frightened enough to cycle across the city to find refuge with friends in Montmartre. She then moved to a hotel close to the Champs-Elysées where, in October, she was arrested by two policemen. When they asked her how she was feeling that day, she, ever ready with the bon mot, replied: ‘Not very résistante …’ She was taken to the dungeon of La Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette had spent her last weeks before her execution in 1793, and after eleven miserable nights was transferred to Drancy. Arletty had to be seen to have a spectacular trial, but she escaped being shaven or any other serious punishment. She was released a few weeks later, remembered by posterity for her quip that ‘Mon coeur est français mais mon cul, lui, est international’ (My heart is French but my arse is international). She was later sentenced to eighteen months under house arrest at the Château de la Houssaye in Seine-et-Marne.
Chanel, too, although arrested and questioned by the FFI in August 1944 on account of her well-known love affair with Spatz, Hans Günther von Dincklage, the suspected spy, was quickly released. According to one story, she reported ‘with snobbish disdain’ afterwards that ‘the most ghastly thing about her arrest was hearing her armed captors say “tu” to the doorman.’ There has been much speculation about whether or not Churchill himself intervened on her behalf as he felt an attachment to her ever since her affair more than a decade before with his great friend, Bendor, Duke of Westminster. She had written to Churchill in a complicated attempt to arrange the release of her nephew, André, from a prisoner-of-war camp, controversial negotiations which also involved her friend Vera Lombardi in Madrid and another German officer, Captain Theodore Momm, known to Chanel. While there is no proof that her activities were treasonous, they were certainly unsavoury, and it is clear that she was prepared to consort with Germans when it suited her, that she uttered ‘long tirade[s] against the Jews’ and that she was extremely lucky to escape a more severe prison sentence or worse.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist turned intelligence officer working for MI6 and sent to Paris after the Liberation, was shocked by the vindictive fury and chaotic conditions he encountered. After a visit to Fresnes, where he was appalled to find five or six women in a cell intended for one, he concluded that the judicial and prison systems were bursting. His main task was to investigate the writer P. G. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel (who became lifelong friends) as well as Chanel, suspected of spying partly because of her association with von Dincklage. The Wodehouses had been living in Le Touquet near Boulogne until the town was captured by the Germans in May 1940, whereupon he was interned in various camps for more than a year. Released in June 1941 on account of his age (he was sixty), he was sent to Berlin where he was joined by Ethel, who had also been detained in France, and agreed to write and record five talks describing his experiences. The talks, entitled How to be an Internee without Previous Training, were not political but were intended to be humorous anecdotes about Wodehouse’s experiences as a prisoner. They were initially broadcast only to the United States, with which Germany was not, at the time, at war. But they were also later broadcast to England where they caused a storm. The content was not objectionable, but by giving talks on German radio it was felt that he had aided the Nazis. Muggeridge, however, having considered the case, concluded that there was no evidence whatever that he had acted traitorously or had intentionally given any aid to the enemy, and judged that the broadcasts were neither anti- nor pro-German, but just ‘Wodehousian’.* Having done that, Muggeridge turned his attention to Chanel and decided that her success in withstanding the first épuration assault had been achieved ‘by one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general; she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for GIs, who thereupon queued up to get their bottles of Chanel No. 5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head’.
American soldiers queuing in front of 31 Rue Cambon to collect their free bottles of Chanel No. 5.
Muggeridge described Chanel at sixty-two as looking ‘immensely old and incorporeal; I had the feeling that she might expire that very evening’, prematurely aged perhaps as a result of years of taking drugs. In pre-war days she and her confidante Misia Sert had made numerous visits to Switzerland together to various clinics and to stock up on morphine. In January 1942 this became more difficult and her good friend the journalist Boulos Ristelhueber had to make an emergency visit to an all-night pharmacy for opium supplies for Chanel and Misia, both hopelessly addicted. When Muggeridge came to write his report on his evening with her he concluded that ‘really there was nothing to say except that I was sure the épuration mills, however small they might grind, would never grind her – as indeed proved to be the case’.
Summary justice was occasionally still resorted to on both sides throughout 1944 but punishments were now increasingly organized by courts, however imperfect. Elie Scali, friend and former lover of Renée Van Cleef, who had committed suicide in 1942, now gave evidence in support of René Marty, the Vichy bureaucrat and first cousin of Vichy police chief René Bousquet. Marty had supplied Scali with many official passes enabling him to cross the demarcation line from one zone to another and had turned a blind eye to his business activities. Colonel Marty was subsequently employed by Van Cleef & Arpels after the war where, according to a woman whose mother had worked since 1919 as a polisher at the company, he clearly continued to receive ‘de très hautes protections’. Marty was extremely useful whenever there was a problem with various authorities. ‘For example, there had been a series of thefts at Van Cleef, of gems and jewellery, and the “Colonel” solved the problem since he deduced that it must be a staff member. All staff were questioned by police and the culprit was discovered.’
At the Comédie-Française, Mary Marquet, one of the company’s most revered actresses, was arrested and sent to Fresnes, accused of collaborating. During her trial she admitted contacting Vichy police in 1943 and asking them to prevent her son François from joining the resistance; but, in spite of a severe warning, he did enlist and was arrested and deported to Buchenwald where he died. Marquet was acquitted, perhaps because it was recognized that she had suffered enough, that any mother would try to protect her son, or that she had not passed on secret information to the enemy. Nonetheless she could no longer act with the Comédie-Française and, although she lived until August 1979, her career was destroyed. From then on she was offered roles only in minor films or light comedies and struggled to make a living.
By contrast, Béatrice Bretty had taken the clear decision at the outset that it was not possible to perform in a company which excluded Jewish actors. She had devoted herself to following Georges Mandel where possible and caring for his daughter Claude. Mandel, having declined Bretty’s suggestion that they marry in Buchenwald, was subsequently handed over by the Gestapo to the Milice in Paris and, while being transferred from one prison to another by the latter, was taken out of the car and on 7 July 1944 assassinated by them in Fontainebleau forest. A heartfelt letter which he had written to Bretty a few weeks earlier from Buchenwald arrived after his death in which he told her of his anguish at her suffering as much as his own. ‘Your affairs touch my heart as strongly as my own … Of all the things which I had to suffer before my exile nothing affected me as profoundly as the unprecedented bad behaviour you received at the Comédie-Française … so rest assured that as long as I have a breath of life I look forward to the reparations you deserve.’ Two months after Mandel’s death, Bretty was reinstated at the theatre and on 18 September she was on stage once again playing one of her best-known roles, Toinette in Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire. There was rapturous applause at her return.
But as Sadie, or Florence, star of the Bal Tabarin, proved, it was possible to perform without collaborating. Disguised as an attentive, elegant French wife, she had helped escort escapees and Jews past police and soldiers until in the summer of 1944 a German cultural officer warned Frédéric Apcar, her dancing partner and one-time lover, that she was about to be arrested. So she hid in the secluded safe house in the suburbs which Frédéric had used to hide other Jews, such as Dr Gilbert Doukan, a Jewish escapee from Drancy and resistance hero, and Marcel Leibovici, both men Florence had helped. One morning an American tank rolled up, the driver shouting out for directions to Paris. Frédéric and Florence followed the tank to the capital, where they witnessed the final scenes of the Liberation, and with delight saw Doukan now fighting in a French officer’s uniform.
Paris that September was a strange combination of rejoicing and retribution. Once the fighting had ceased, the Americans were handing out chocolate, oranges, chewing gum and bananas – luxuries not seen for four years – and for many women in Paris who had endured those grim years of Occupation it felt like the end. But celebrations were premature while the rest of the world was still fighting and the Germans were far from surrendering. Lee Miller, who had been in France less than a month and reported graphically on the battle for Saint-Malo as well as on the 44th Evacuation Hospital – where, she noted, they used both calvados and penicillin – was disappointed to have been refused permission to continue into Germany with the 83rd Division. ‘It is very bitter for me to go to Paris now that I have a taste for gun powder,’ she told her editor. But she had a scoop because, although she had been allowed only to report on how things were being managed after the St Malo battle, in fact the battle was not yet over. ‘I sheltered in a Kraut dugout squatting under the ramparts. My heel ground into a dead detached hand and I cursed the Germans for the sordid ugly destruction they had conjured up in the once beautiful town,’ she wrote in the unlikely pages of Vogue. ‘I picked up the hand and threw it back the way I had come and ran back, bruising my feet and crashing into the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in the blood. Christ it was awful.’
Miller’s ability to look horror in the face, not to shirk the unmentionable, gave her photographs and her writing a raw power shared by few of her colleagues, male or female. It may also have contributed ultimately to her breakdown and her inability to continue with her work once she had had her own child. In the short term it landed her in trouble with the authorities for a couple of days, for going beyond her agreed zone, but then she moved into Paris, the Paris which she knew so well, the Paris of her youthful love affairs. She soon realized that, as well as a comfortable room at the Hôtel Scribe, the international HQ for all journalists, there were endless stories there for her to write.
Also at the Scribe for a short time was Mary Welsh, the journalist from Chicago, accredited to Time magazine, who was now in love with Ernest Hemingway. Welsh had been commissioned to write stories of how fashion in Paris was coming back to life and what displays were in the boutique windows already, tame stuff for a war correspondent in Paris that August. But she soon moved into the Ritz with Hemingway, who she found sitting on the bare floor of his bedroom there with some resistance friends, ‘intermittently cleaning rifles and sipping champagne’. Hemingway and his small band of irregular fighters which he called the ‘Hem Division’ – as a war correspondent he knew he was forbidden to command troops – had made their way on the afternoon of 26 August, the day of de Gaulle’s triumphal walk, directly to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company in the Rue de L’Odèon, which he had known so well from his pre-war days of living in Paris. Sylvia, who had endured six harsh months at the Vittel camp before being released in 1942, dramatically recalled: ‘I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered.’ Sylvia and her French librarian lover, Adrienne Monnier, overjoyed after the tense months when their shop had been closed, the precious books hidden from the Nazis upstairs, invited their old friend and liberator up to their apartment to drink with them. Hemingway, however, thought it more important to check for snipers from the roof before moving on with his men to liberate the wine cellars of the Ritz, as he was fond of recalling later.
Lee Miller was more interested in seeing her old friends Paul and Nusch Eluard, as well as Picasso, still in Rue des Grands Augustins. With her sharp eye she noticed bullet holes in buildings, and girls with flowers in their hair, girls offering kisses or riding bicycles or drinking wine – she saw how Parisian girls dazzled. ‘Their silhouette was very queer and fascinating to me after utility and austerity England. Full floating skirts, tiny waistlines. They were top heavy with built up, pompadour front hairdos and waving tresses; weighted to the ground with clumsy, fancy thick-soled wedge shoes. The entire gait of the Frenchwoman has changed with her footwear. Instead of the bouncing buttocks and mincing steps of “pre-war” there is a hot-foot long stride, picking up the whole foot at once.’ When she asked American soldiers what they thought of Paris they became starry-eyed and told her it was ‘the most beautiful place in the world and the people smell so wonderful’. Most were pleased and surprised that Parisiennes ‘were so beautifully dressed and amiable instead of lean and hungry and sour’.
Plenty, however, were lean and hungry and sour but, as Miller rightly observed, they were not out on the streets. Those out on the streets celebrating were the dazzling, joyful young girls ‘hilarious at their victory in Paris and proud of their battle scars’. These were the Parisians determined to celebrate ‘the world’s most gigantic party’ even if there wasn’t any food.
Yet, in the chaos of the Liberation, the Germans were keen to take a final load of looted treasures with them and, as railway workers went on strike, it was not unusual to see German civilians dragging huge bags to train stations only to find no porters. As some dealers tried frantically to escape with one last haul of paintings, it was once more the indefatigable Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume who rescued five railway wagons of priceless paintings and other works of art. Valland, the woman who had risked her life day after day spying on the Nazi thefts, knew that whatever was left at the Jeu de Paume, some of it even classified as ‘degenerate’, including much of Paul Rosenberg’s collection, had been hastily packed by the ERR into 148 crates, taken on 1 August to the sidings to be loaded on to waiting train number 40044. Five wagons contained some 967 paintings, including works by Picasso, Dufy, Utrillo, Braque, Degas, Modigliani, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec; another fifty trucks held miscellaneous belongings confiscated from Jews. She immediately notified Jaujard, her boss, who gave details to the resistance who, through sabotage and various ruses, prevented the fully loaded train waiting in a siding at Aubervilliers to the north of Paris from departing for Germany.
On 27 August a detachment of the French 2nd Armoured Division, which had just been involved in the Liberation of Paris, captured the train led by a young lieutenant, Alexandre Rosenberg, son of the exiled art-dealer Paul. The soldiers banged on the boxcars’ doors (holding fire in case there were prisoners inside), and out straggled some old German soldiers who had been assigned to accompany the booty to Germany. Lieutenant Rosenberg found his own family’s paintings on the train which he had last seen in their apartment in Paris.
While this was going on, Valland herself was briefly held captive by Free French troops and liberators who suspected her of collaboration. With a machine gun held to her back she was forced to open the storage areas in case she was hiding Germans there. When it was seen that there were none, they released her and she continued with her work. On 24 November the Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA) was created and Rose Valland named its Secretary, effectively its head. She elected to go to Germany to find the art that had been stolen from France, and for the next five years was a vital liaison officer between the CRA and the French government.
On 20 March 1944 de Gaulle’s provisional government had announced that they would, for the first time, allow women to vote once the whole of France was liberated. Before elections could occur, a consultative assembly was created and the General appointed Lucie Aubrac to join as a resistance representative. Aubrac, a daring résistante who had organized the escape of her husband, Raymond Samuel, from a Lyons prison by pretending she had to marry him – the man who had made her pregnant – thus became the first woman to sit in a French parliamentary assembly. She too was keenly aware of the gendered response to Liberation as France enjoyed its new-found freedom, and she was determined that the country should resist falling for the simplistic notion that the women had collaborated while the men had fought. She insisted it was women who had given the resistance its breadth and depth – the women who had been the essential mailboxes because they were at home, the women who had become couriers because they looked less suspect carrying suitcases, as well as the women who had daringly used weapons. Not everyone in Paris was ready to hear her voice – most were preoccupied with trying to resume normal life. As the year ended, any rejoicing was muted by the cold, the shortages of food and fuel and the knowledge that at least three million men and women were either dead, missing or still in German prisoner-of-war camps. In the flurry of books, magazines and pamphlets printed as the Liberation was unfolding, one image stands out: a photographic view over the rooftops of Paris, taken on Christmas Day, 1944, during one of the coldest winters of the century, stretches with clarity to the distant horizon. There is no smoke coming from any of the chimneys to mar the view.
* After the war she volunteered to bring camp survivors suffering from typhus back to France but contracted TB herself and died in 1950 aged twenty-seven.
* This was an impressive achievement as British women reporters were not being given official accreditation to report on front-line battles. It was easier for American women, but some, like Martha Gellhorn, still had to resort to ruses to ensure they got to report on front-line action, not just from hospitals, on the post-battle bomb damage.
* Wodehouse was never really forgiven in Britain, however, and in 1947 the couple left France for America.