LIVING RECKLESSLY
Early one freezing morning in January 1944, Jacques Jaujard walked over the Pont des Arts toward the Louvre gardens, transformed three and a half years earlier into vegetable plots1 to feed Parisian schoolchildren, and mulled over the telephone conversation he had had the night before with Quartus.
Quartus was a well-chosen nom de résistance for the forty-three-year-old Alexandre Parodi. Just like Quartus, the first-century Athenian martyr, Parodi was a child of the elite, the son of a professor of philosophy and himself a high civil servant. Parodi had immediately rejected the armistice of June 1940 and gathered trusted French civil servants around him. Together they set up the Comité Général d’Études under Jean Moulin, the emblematic figure of the French Resistance. This committee of experts and lawmakers, thinking ahead, were devising the legislation of the future liberated France and of a new French republic. After Moulin was arrested, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo in July 1943, Alexandre Parodi became the head of the clandestine Free French administration in occupied France.
The protection of France’s art collections was as dear to Charles de Gaulle and Alexandre Parodi as it was to Jaujard, who had tirelessly fought to save them from Nazi greed. It had not been easy. The most valuable artworks had to be moved from castle to castle and from the cellars of small provincial museums to other secret depots more than once, especially after November 1942 and the invasion of North Africa by the Allied forces and the subsequent end to the Free Zone in the south of France. Jaujard had managed to send not only hydrometric measuring equipment but also water pumps, fire extinguishers, and electric heaters to every place that stored the most fragile artworks of the national collections. With the agreement of his unlikely ally Count Wolff Metternich, who covered his activities as much as he possibly could, Jaujard had ordered that all the Rubenses, Tintorettos, Delacroix, Titians, Poussins, and the Mona Lisa leave the Ingres Museum at Montauban, where they had recently arrived, to be dispatched farther north and divided up among small castles in the Périgord region. The Mona Lisa had arrived at the Château de la Treyne, where André Chamson, an archivist-paleographer by training, a novelist by métier, and an improvised keeper of France’s treasures by force of circumstance, lived with his family.
By now Jacques Jaujard was feeling exhausted and beleaguered. The brutal dismissal of his silent ally Count Wolff Metternich in September 1942 had made his personal mission even more difficult and dangerous. A month before the count’s removal, Marshal Pétain had personally authorized a Nazi commando to take from the Pau Museum the priceless polyptych Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a masterpiece of Flemish primitive art that Belgium had entrusted to France for safekeeping during the war. Jaujard and Metternich had immediately protested to their respective hierarchies. Metternich, relieved from his post at once, had been sent on the first train back to Bonn and to his art history teaching, while Pétain’s culture minister, the collaborator Abel Bonnard, had told Jaujard on the phone: “I’ll make you crawl and one day I’ll make you disappear. Do you understand what I am saying?”2
Jaujard could, however, rely on the complete loyalty and abnegation of his thousands of employees posted throughout France guarding some of the world’s most valuable treasures with their lives, which was the subject of his phone call with Quartus. Allied bombing was going to intensify in the next weeks and months (in preparation for the D-Day landings), and Jaujard and his employees had to clearly mark the different places where paintings and sculpture were hidden so that the Allied bombers could spare them. Quartus did not say more; he said that one of his agents, with the nom de guerre Mozart, would soon make contact with Jaujard directly.
A state of general recklessness and audacity permeated those first months of 1944: everyone could feel that momentous events were being carefully planned but did not know exactly when they would occur, death could strike at any moment, the German occupants were restless and crueler still, everyone lacked essentials, everyone was hungry, cold, and yet hopeful.
One afternoon, Mozart knocked at the door of Jaujard’s office. At the sight of the liaison agent, Jaujard froze. Mozart was a forty-year-old platinum blonde, a 1930s movie star named Jeanne Boitel. She asked questions in order to gather information and report back to Quartus and left Jaujard in a daze for the rest of the day. In his diary that night he wrote: “Man has a brain, a heart, a sex and a stomach. They do not necessarily get along well, and the brain is not always the dominant organ.”3 Jaujard was not the only one struck by the encounter—within a few days Jeanne and Jacques were lovers. As résistants and as lovers (Jaujard was married and had children), they both led double “double lives.” And they were by no means the only ones in Paris.
* * *
Albert Camus’ plays Le malentendu (The Misunderstanding) and Caligula, about to be published by Gallimard, were doing the rounds of celebrated theater directors in Paris. L’étranger (The Outsider), published in 1942, closely followed by Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), had established Camus, barely thirty, as a rival to the thirty-nine-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre. Marcel Herrand, an actor-director who was currently filming in Les enfants du paradis, organized a reading of Le malentendu at his home. The twenty-two-year-old actress Maria Casarès, who had one of the supporting roles in Les enfants du paradis, was in attendance. A mesmerizing Spanish beauty whose Republican parents had found refuge in France, Casarès already had strings of male admirers. Camus came to the reading alone. His wife, Francine Faure, a concert pianist, lived far away, in the safety of their hometown, Algiers, in North Africa.
During the reading, Camus and Casarès looked at each other from across the room. “Both were foreign conquerors. And she had the charm of a sorceress.”4 There was no courtship. They became lovers a few hours after their encounter and would spend as much time together as they could. At night either she walked to his place, 1 bis rue Vaneau, where he stayed unknown to the police and the Gestapo at the novelist André Gide’s empty flat, or he walked to hers, at 148 rue de Vaugirard.
Sonderführer Gerhard Heller, the German censor of French literature, had stopped wearing a military uniform, to his great relief. Now invisible in the Parisian crowd, he enjoyed walking in Paris at night, to purge himself of his own double “double life.” Heller walked for long hours to chase away his rising anxiety and to fight a profound existential malaise. Here was a young man whom the tragic caprices of history had brought to where he had always wanted to be, Paris, living among writers he venerated. Not only was he living among them, he also exerted the ultimate power over their writings. He had, too, the ability to protect them from the Gestapo and, sometimes, from certain death.
Heller never officially met Camus, and had he bumped into him he would not have introduced himself. Somebody else would later tell Camus that Heller had read the manuscript of The Outsider in January 1942, starting in the afternoon and not putting it down until four o’clock in the morning, and that a few hours later he had phoned Gaston Gallimard’s secretary to approve its publication, granting as much paper as needed and offering to help smooth any difficulties that might arise.5
Sometimes his compatriot Ernst Jünger joined him in his aimless wandering. Heller and Jünger were “good German officers” in morally untenable positions. A celebrated novelist, a Francophile opposed to Hitler and yet an army captain in the Wehrmacht, Jünger worked for the chief of military staff, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Among his tasks: the translation into German of the farewell letters written by the thousands of civilian hostages executed by the Germans in retaliation for the French Resistance’s actions. After such dreary work, Ernst Jünger would set out in the streets of Paris to chase rare editions at the bouquinistes, those secondhand booksellers whose stalls line the Seine, and then go and have dinner with Parisian friends such as Jean Cocteau.
In his memoirs, written almost thirty years later, Heller tried to explain the unexplainable.
It is difficult to understand, and certainly to accept that we lived happily when, right next to us, people were famished, hostages executed, Jewish children sent to concentration camps. I knew all this but I didn’t have the power nor enough conviction and courage to resist such atrocities directly. I was simply trying, in my capacity, to protect as best as I could what I believed were France’s true values and talents whose existence depended partly on me. I lived in a kind of blessed island, in the middle of an ocean of mud and blood.6
During his night walks, Heller also had what he later called “brief encounters.” He admitted to two,7 one with a charming fifteen-year-old gamine he called Reinette whom he met regularly for months until one day in the summer of 1943 she disappeared without a word. A young Frenchman, Jacques, also about fifteen, soon replaced Reinette in Heller’s heart. “We looked at each other, and we smiled. I invited him to walk with me.” Heller took the working-class teenager, who had a job as a delivery boy, to the opera on Christmas Day 1943. They attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Their hand holding and kissing were Gerhard’s secret life. During the day, though, he sat in his office at the German Institute, 57 rue Saint-Dominique, with his secretary and German fiancée, Marie-Louise, who was typing his correspondence and reports in the little room next door.
Like Camus, Sartre would later learn that his play The Flies had been able to run in Paris thanks only to Heller’s intervention. When his colleagues from the Propagandastaffel pointed to the controversial nature and rebellious spirit of Sartre’s play, Heller wrote a report to reassure them that it had “nothing to do with the Resistance but was a play about ancient Greece,” nothing more. However, neither Heller nor clandestine résistant newspapers and the collaborationist press were fooled: Sartre’s play was heard as a call for insurrection.
Heller increasingly spent time walking up and down the rue des Arènes in the 5th arrondissement where Gallimard publisher and in-house résistant Jean Paulhan, a man he deeply admired, lived at number 5. Jean Paulhan’s house was a very distinctive and striking neo-Gothic building on one of the oldest streets in Paris, winding around the Roman arena, les Arènes de Lutèce. Paulhan’s front door stood directly opposite a discreet portal into the arena and its gardens and could offer both the perfect escape route for a résistant and an efficient observation post for the Gestapo. Heller had strong suspicions that his leather-clad colleagues might arrest Paulhan. Heller would walk down the rue des Arènes most mornings and evenings to check that there was no agent from the Sicherheitsdienst waiting to ambush his friend. Like Paul Éluard, in hiding with other résistants in the psychiatric asylum of Saint Alban, 350 miles south of Paris, Jean Paulhan would soon need to go to a safe place. Too many people knew of his clandestine activities.
HIDING, DISAPPEARING, AND FLEEING
Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne had spent the last eighteen months at the Hôtel Escoffier in Roussillon-en-Provence, a little Provençal village where Madame Escoffier was catering for a full house of refugees. Beckett had quickly found work as a farm laborer and handyman. It paid for their hotel and food bill. In this forced retreat, and rather boring and uncomfortable life, Samuel Beckett had at last found his voice. He had written Watt, “a book which broke a silence.” And “for the first time, Beckett achieved his characteristic style, a syntax full of reservations and uncertainties, denials and admissions that something else might be the case, with a superb use of the comma.”8 His only link to the events that were shaking the world was the radio in Madame Escoffier’s kitchen. The whole village would drop by to listen to the news from London.
* * *
In the spring of 1944, the tide of history was clearly starting to turn, and collaborationist writers flocked to the German Institute and Heller’s office in the rue Saint-Dominique. They needed ausweise and visas. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a virulent anti-Semite and a literary genius, a radical pessimist as he called himself, or simply a nihilist, knew he would need to flee but when he visited Heller, he said loudly, for everyone to hear: “Heller, you’re an agent of Gallimard and the private secretary of the résistant Jean Paulhan. Everybody in Paris knows that!”9 This did not make Heller’s life any easier with his stern colleagues from the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared Nazi Party’s security service).
Jean Paulhan often wrote Heller small notes and letters asking him to intervene and free people from detention, or allow captives to slip through the net. Heller complied and braved more than once his fear of the SD, and argued with them. Why make unnecessary martyrs? Heller asked them. The SD usually let go of Heller’s French friends, but not always.
Albert Camus was rehearsing Sartre’s latest play, Huis clos (No Exit), which he had agreed not only to direct but also to star in, alongside Wanda Kosakiewicz. It was an important play that would have a formidable impact—Camus was certain of this. However, when Olga Barbezat (née Kechelievitch), the other actress in the cast, was arrested on February 10, Camus refused to go on with the rehearsals. There were considerations for Camus outside of solidarity: he did not feel he was good enough to act or direct. Besides, he was no longer in love with Wanda, and Maria Casarès now occupied all his thoughts (and nights). Sartre accepted Camus’ resignation gracefully and moved forward swiftly. He gave his play to the director of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, Raymond Rouleau, who read it immediately. A couple of hours later, the play’s rehearsal was scheduled to resume the next morning, this time with a professional cast and metteur-en-scène; rehearsals did not take place in an actress’s hotel room anymore but in the more serious atmosphere of a real theater.
The Allied bombing of the city’s outskirts and industrial quarters was intensifying. The Germans were arresting people in broad daylight, not only at night, as they had been. On March 8, Hélène Berr was stopped and picked up by the SD as she walked home to the rue de Grenelle, in the 7th arrondissement. The twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman, a student of English literature, had started writing a diary after meeting Paul Valéry two years earlier. She was taken to the transit internment camp of Drancy, along with her parents. On March 27, her twenty-third birthday, they were put on the train to Auschwitz.10 The same day, Nathalie Sorokine, the tall Russian beauty who was a student and occasional lover of Simone de Beauvoir, came rushing back to La Louisiane, where she stayed in a room just below Beauvoir’s. Her Jewish boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Bourla, a former student of Sartre’s, had just been arrested, along with his father and sister, and taken to Drancy. Sonia Mossé11had also disappeared from the Café de Flore, where she was a regular. Her friends learned of her fate only months later.
The first few months of 1944 were a time of frantic somnambulism. “Everybody was going about their day like sleepwalkers, carrying their fate over their shoulder like a sling bag, toothbrush and soap in one’s pocket, just in case of an arrest. We all lived in transit, between two round-ups, two hostage-takings, and two misunderstandings.”12
This aspect of the Occupation is essential to understanding the spirit of those years, and how it marked and shaped the generations who lived through it. The concept of enemy is real and absolutely clear only when separated from us by “a barrier of fire,” as Sartre wrote. And this was mostly the experience of American and British soldiers. In Paris there was also an enemy, one of the vilest nature, but it was faceless. It was not the German officer who offered his seat on the métro to women and elderly people, it was not the lost German soldier who politely asked his way, it was not the simple German soldiers who had become part of the furniture. Those who actually saw the face of that enemy rarely came back to tell the tale. Sartre compared this faceless enemy to an octopus, which would take away the country’s best men at night and made them disappear, as if guzzled up by an invisible monster. “It seemed that every day around us, people were silently swallowed from beneath the earth.”13 One day you would call a friend and his phone would ring and ring and ring in his empty flat; you would knock at a door but nobody would come to open it. “If the concierge forced the door open, you would find two chairs, close together, in the entrance hall, with German cigarette butts scattered on the floor.”14 Wives and mothers would seek some news at the SD’s torture chambers on the avenue Hoche, where they would be courteously received; but at night, on that same avenue, screams of terror and pain would be heard from the cellars’ air vents giving onto the sidewalks. Everybody in Paris had a friend or a relative who had been arrested, deported, or killed. Yet nobody talked about it much, out of dignity or caution. People would say: “They took him away.”
The photographer Brassaï had also vanished and temporarily abandoned his work at Picasso’s studio. He, too, had had to flee his home and stay with friends, with fake identity papers he had obtained through acquaintances. As a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, he had received a mobilization order. A foreigner and a deserter in Paris in 1944 could never be too cautious. He had found a warm shelter from the absurdity of life at La Grande Chaumière15 and had been going there almost every day since Christmas. Since its opening in 1904, this art school offered free drawing and sketching sessions with live models in heated rooms. Who could ask for anything more in Paris in 1944?
When Brassaï knocked again at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, on Tuesday, April 27, Picasso himself opened the door, half awake, unshaven, and still in his slippers. Just before Brassaï’s arrival, the sprightly Jean Marais had woken Pablo up, arriving with his dog, a broomstick, and an urgent request: “Can you make a sumptuous scepter out of this stick?” Marais was rehearsing the part of Pyrrhus in Racine’s Andromaque at the Théâtre Édouard VII. He had planned to appear on stage almost naked, with just a leopard skin around his waist and a scepter to show his rank. “I need it to be truly barbarous and spectacular, and I need it for tomorrow. Is this possible, Pablo?” Picasso was still contemplating the broomstick when Françoise Gilot, now officially introduced to his friends as his new love, the actor Alain Cuny, and Jean Cocteau arrived together.
Cocteau and Picasso had known each other for twenty-eight years. Cocteau had been coming to see him more often lately. The old friends frequently had lunch at Le Catalan; they were a constant source of inspiration to each other. They also bickered. Picasso complained that “Cocteau was always trying to imitate me,” while Cocteau often pointed out that “Picasso was trying his hand at metaphysics, but knew nothing about it.”16 However, Cocteau understood that, like him and their friend Apollinaire, Picasso, too, was a poet—but one who, unlike Cocteau, had not compromised himself during the war.
Cocteau had a great weakness and a great strength: he refused to take the war seriously, at least in public. He smoked opium on perhaps too regular a basis and often seemed oblivious. He continued going to openings and high-society events without any concern as to where the invitation came from or from whom, Otto Abetz, Gerhard Heller, or the résistant Jean Paulhan. To him it was irrelevant. He metaphorically and literally lived in a bubble, on the first floor of 36 rue Montpensier, giving onto the Palais Royal gardens with their arcades and candelabra dating back to Cardinal Richelieu.
The collaborationist press hated Cocteau for his homosexuality, and he had been beaten up more than once by young collaborator thugs as he walked down the streets. His lover Jean Marais had even slapped the face of Alain Laubreaux, the theater reviewer of the pro-Nazi weekly newspaper Je Suis Partout, who had trashed Cocteau’s play La machine à écrire (The Typewriter) without even seeing it. This was brave of Marais: Laubreaux had powerful connections with the Gestapo.
That Tuesday, April 27, 1944, the fifty-five-year-old Cocteau looked as slender and young as ever, without a silver thread in his hair. He was gearing up to direct a film, which the eccentric genius Christian Bérard would design and in which Marais would take the lead role. He was thinking of calling it La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast). Picasso liked the sound of it. After the morning visitors had gone, Brassaï could go back to photographing Picasso’s war production, a seemingly endless task.
Gerhard Heller was right to fear for his friend Jean Paulhan’s safety. Serving as a private sentinel, posted at the little entrance of the Roman arena just opposite his front door, he was now also able to keep an eye on a nearby building at 7 rue de Navarre, where the writer Jean Blanzat was hiding the high priest of French letters François Mauriac. In fact, with his panoramic view Heller was guarding three résistant French writers at once. On May 6, a letter of denunciation accusing Jean Paulhan of being Jewish proved enough for the SD to act. Alerted in time by Heller, Paulhan fled over the rooftops.17
Three weeks exactly after Paulhan escaped torture and deportation to Germany, Sartre’s Huis clos opened at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. Set in hell—that is to say, in a hotel room—two women and a man discover the bitter experience of being judged by others. Sartre’s most famous play intended to show that our acts in life define who we are and how others look at us. The three characters expected hell to be a torture chamber, but they soon realize that they are each other’s hell. The older woman is attracted to the younger woman, who in turn is attracted to the young man, who is in no mood, at first, for seduction games. In real life, the young Russian-born actor Michel Vitold was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover and the young actress Gaby Sylvia the theater director’s wife.
“We never were freer than during the German occupation,” Sartre wrote a few months later. “Since the Nazi venom was poisoning our very own thinking, every free thought was a victory. The circumstances, often atrocious, of our fight allowed us to live openly this torn and unbearable situation one calls the Human Condition.”18
PARIS WHEN IT SIZZLES
In the early hours of June 6, 1944, Albert Camus and Maria were braving the midnight curfew, cycling downhill somewhat drunkenly after leaving the flat of the celebrated theater director Charles Dullin in Pigalle, where there had been another fiesta. “Fiesta” was the term coined in the spring of that year by Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and a cohort of their friends who now partied all night in the face of the occupants. They could not stand it anymore; something had to give. With Albert on the saddle and Maria on the handlebar, the pair were whizzing through the place de la Concorde in darkness while a 150,000-strong Allied force, led by American, British, and Canadian soldiers, was about to land on the beaches of Normandy. Operation Overlord was under way, the largest air, land, and sea operation ever undertaken. On the boats, young men, most of them still teenagers, carried eighty pounds of equipment on their backs. The majority had never seen Europe’s shores. As the boats approached the beaches, some prayed, others gritted their teeth, but all had learned by heart what was expected of them: as soon as the boat ramps go down, jump, swim, run, and crawl in the sand, up to the cliffs two hundred yards in front of you. Until they reached the relative safety of the cliffs, they had no protection but God’s. Hell was upon them—a different kind of hell from the one that Parisians had known for four years.
On the same day, Henri Cartier-Bresson, discreetly back in Paris after escaping his prisoner of war camp in Germany a year earlier, had an appointment with Georges Braque. The Alsatian publisher Pierre Braun was starting a series of small monographs on great artists and wanted their portraits taken in the intimacy of their studio. Cartier-Bresson was overjoyed. A few months earlier he had met Matisse in his Vence studio, near Cannes, and had captured the painter “cutting through light,” working hard on a new thing, collages and découpages, paper cutouts, in other words “painting with scissors.”
Now it was time to shoot Georges Braque, the father of Cubism. Cartier-Bresson arrived around noon at the painter’s studio in the Montsouris area, south of Montparnasse, at 6 rue du Douanier-Rousseau.19 The two men were chatting away, the radio purring in the background, when they suddenly both stopped midsentence. Cartier-Bresson would always remember Braque’s expression at the very instant he realized what he had just heard on the BBC, the default setting of most wireless devices in Paris at the time. The Allies had landed. After a long pause the sixty-two-year-old painter slowly walked to a bookcase from which, according to the historian Pierre Assouline, he pulled a book given to him by Jean Paulhan and handed it to Cartier-Bresson without a word: Zen in the Art of Archery by the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel.20
A week later, when Le malentendu, Camus’ second play, opened at the Théâtre des Mathurins with Maria Casarès in the leading role, Parisians did not know much about the Allies’ progress on the ground. In Picasso’s studio, Brassaï couldn’t focus on his photography, and morning visitors were too elated to talk about anything else, but information was scarce, especially with the Germans jamming the BBC radio frequencies. The only certainty was that the towns of Bayeux, Isigny, and Carentan had been liberated and that the Allies’ armies and aviation were firmly holding their ground against the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Parisians had even stopped talking about food shortages and power cuts, even though the situation on that front had suddenly become much worse since Paris’s supply lines had been cut by the Allied landings.
Parisians were now starving and in greater danger than at any time during the Occupation. The archivist-résistante Édith Thomas had stopped receiving the writers from the Comité National des Écrivains in her flat—too many had been arrested. One morning in the first days of July she looked inside her kitchen cupboard and smiled: she had “enough dry noodles and white beans to withstand a long siege.”21 Parisians mostly fed on optimism and hope, though. They had begun flocking to the bird stalls along the banks of the Seine to buy millet and hemp seeds. The birds had almost all been eaten and did not need it anymore.
A week later, near the métro exit of Réaumur-Sébastopol, the German police rounded up Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. Men were body-searched while women were only asked to show their papers. Camus had the proofs of the clandestine newspaper Combat in his briefcase. He managed to give them to Casarès just before being searched. They were allowed to go, but it was time to leave Paris and lie low. Camus immediately cycled to Verdelot, a five-and-a-half-hour ride sixty miles east of Paris, and found shelter at a friend’s cottage, where he gorged on his favorite food, Maizena cornstarch.
Then came Bastille Day, July 14. Patrolling the city or guarding Nazi offices, German soldiers were on edge, their hands firmly holding their rifles but their fingers increasingly febrile around the trigger. They looked mean. In fact, they were frightened. Parisians had decorated their city in their own particular way, as if a silent rallying cry had spread through the city. On the boulevard Saint-Michel, at the crossroads with the rue Soufflot, on a balcony, someone had hung clothes to dry: a navy blue overall, a bright white tablecloth, and a bloodred scarf, all blowing and floating in the air.22 In the bright summer morning light, the vision was startling. Nearby, a florist had only blue delphiniums, white lilies, and red roses to sell. Women had dressed in the same way, wearing only the three national colors, and in workmen’s upper pockets, three pencils, blue, white, and red, were often seen sticking out. For the first time in four years, Parisians started looking at each other again, searching, seeking a sense of fraternity.
Despite being assured by Roosevelt and Churchill that his provisional government would be France’s next, Charles de Gaulle had been given no guarantee that Allied armies would help liberate Paris. In pure military and strategic terms, de Gaulle knew that Paris was not a priority, even if politically there was no greater stake, even for the Allies. He could not be too sure of Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower’s plans and even less of Roosevelt’s.
He and the French Resistance were planning ahead, making contingency arrangements in case they received no military help from the Allies. Field hospitals and first aid stations were organized by arrondissement, mobile units made up of doctors, nurses, and stretcher bearers were given supplies so they could operate independently. To think that the Forces Françaises Intérieures23 (FFI) and the Free French army, most notably Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division and its 14,500 men, could defeat the Wehrmacht alone was to believe in miracles and in one’s own destiny. De Gaulle believed in both.
But the Germans intended to leave with a bang, a big bang. Hitler wanted Paris destroyed, Paris in ruins. General Dietrich von Choltitz, whom Hitler had personally named commander of Gross-Paris on August 7, had instructed army engineers to set demolition charges throughout the city. Tons of dynamite were laid under every one of Paris’s forty-five bridges, its power station and water-pumping plant, and its most famous monuments. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Élysées Palace, the Opéra, the Hôpital des Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb, the Palais du Luxembourg, and the French Senate were all marked for destruction.24
That week, Gallimard’s house fascist, Drieu La Rochelle, bumping into a friend on the avenue de Breteuil, near the Invalides, said: “I’ve made my decision, I’m leaving.” A few hours later he was attempting suicide. Gerhard Heller leaped on his bicycle, arrived at his bedside, and whispered in Drieu’s ear: “I’m slipping a passport for you under your pillow.” The passport had a visa for Spain and Switzerland. But Drieu was fixed on a one-way journey to hell. That night, Gerhard Heller packed his Paris diaries of the last four years, together with a manuscript entrusted to him by Ernst Jünger titled “Peace.” He put the documents in a small tin suitcase and set off toward the Invalides, a small shovel in his hand. The air was muggy; Heller could feel the sweat pearling down his brow. He spotted a tree on the esplanade, looked at the distance and angle between the rue de Constantine, rue Saint-Dominique, and rue de Talleyrand, made a mental note, counted his steps, and started digging discreetly. He felt the urge to—literally—bury his Paris life in order to save himself.
“WHAT IS AN INSURRECTION? IT IS THE PEOPLE IN ARMS”
Wednesday, August 16, 1944, heralded a week of momentous change, a week of danger and of fraternity, one that would leave its mark on generations. That Wednesday, the journalists and editors of the pro-German publications Pariser Zeitung, Je Suis Partout, and Le Pilori had vanished during the night. Resistance publications had immediately moved into their now empty offices.25 Radio Paris, the notorious pro-German radio station, had also disappeared. The insurrection had already started on the airwaves.
Later in the day the different branches of the French Resistance met. Allied forces were not on their way to the capital and the communist leaning FFI (Forces Françaises Intérieures) had not agreed on when to start the insurrection. For the Gaullists, Charles de Gaulle’s followers, it was imperative to remain cool-headed and not to risk thousands of civilian casualties and the complete destruction of their capital city. They wanted to wait long enough to give the Free French army the chance to arrive on time and drive away the German occupants.
Supervising operations from the catacombs below the place Denfert-Rochereau, a stone’s throw from Montparnasse, Resistance commanders, mostly in their early twenties, were restless. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s right-hand man in Paris, managed to persuade them to wait for at least twenty-four hours. In many different parts of Paris a general strike was starting to bear fruit, enabling thousands of civil servants from the Hôtel de Ville—the town hall—and various administrations to join the ranks of the underground fighters and get their hands on weapons.
On Friday, August 18, Parisians woke up to see Resistance posters with the crossed French flags pasted on every wall. It was a general mobilization order for all former officers and officer cadets, calling on “all able-bodied men and women to join the ranks” and “strike the Germans and Vichy’s traitors wherever they could be found.” The French Resistance was presenting itself as France’s one and only legitimate army with de Gaulle at its head. The Gaullists were trying to proceed in an orderly manner and gather as many young men with military training and knowledge of firearms as possible before risking the lives of Paris’s civilians. They had managed to rein in the Communists for yet another day.
The uprising began on Saturday, August 19, at dawn. Around two thousand armed men had locked themselves in at the Préfecture opposite Notre Dame and started shooting at German soldiers and tanks. Almost on cue the people of Paris, resorting to an old tradition, started building barricades. Cobblestones, trees, old bicycles, odd pieces of furniture—everything and anything was used throughout the city. The insurrectionists’ mission was to stop German armored vehicles at all costs. The FFI started occupying key buildings such as Paris’s various arrondissement town halls, ministries, printing works, and newspaper offices. Free French forces and the Paris police were working hand in hand. For Parisians this was a most welcome but also rather unsettling vision: the Paris police, who had been under German orders for four years, had been responsible for rounding up thirteen thousand French Jews in July 1942, who were eventually deported to concentration camps in Germany.
The confusion and panic of the twenty-thousand-strong German force was palpable. German snipers posted on rooftops were taking aim at civilians. Bullets whistled and flew over Parisians’ heads—often fatally. Seventy-five years later, the bullet holes are still there on the buildings.
Pablo Picasso heard a bullet miss him by just a few inches. Fearing for the safety of his nine-year-old daughter, Maya, and her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, he left his studio at once. He ran, squatted, took shelter behind trees and in doorways, and looked up at the roofs of the buildings before crossing every street. He finally arrived at 1 boulevard Henri IV, at Marie-Thérèse and Maya’s. He would stay with them and paint. He had taken with him a print of Nicolas Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan.
On Sunday, August 20, French, American, and British flags could be seen everywhere, but the situation was still critical. Half of Paris was now in the Resistance’s hands, but for how long Parisians would be able to hold their position against German tanks remained uncertain. In the morning, at Allied headquarters in Cherbourg, Charles de Gaulle confronted Eisenhower, who finally had to admit that he had no intention of sending his troops to Paris—it was not a strategic priority for the Allies. Charles de Gaulle threatened to order General Leclerc, commander of the French 2nd Armored Division (known as the 2nd DB) of the Allied forces, to begin his division’s descent on Paris at once. Positioned in Normandy, 130 miles from Paris, General Leclerc had no intention of waiting for the American High Command’s permission and, ready to risk a court martial, he immediately sent a small advance party to reconnoiter.
Embedded with the 2nd DB was the New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling, still as unfit but as sharp an observer as ever. There was no other place the American reporter wanted to be. From the beginning, Liebling had viewed the Second World War almost exclusively as “a campaign to free France. It was the world of France that Liebling wanted fiercely to restore.”26 For this, he could not have been on a better tank than General Leclerc’s, but time was pressing. How long would it take Leclerc to reach the gates of Paris?
On Monday, August 21, Parisians picked up the first editions of Resistance newspapers printed in a single-sheet format. Combat, Libération, Le Front National, L’Humanité, Le Populaire, and Le Parisien Libéré had emerged from clandestine printing factories and were sold by fearless young street vendors. The different editorials exhorted Parisians to “hold the siege and keep attacking the enemy in every possible way.” The words of Combat’s editorial signed by Albert Camus particularly struck readers: “What is an insurrection? It is the people in arms. What is the people? It is those within a Nation who will never kneel.”27 Back in Paris, and now the editor of Combat, Camus was sleeping and writing in his tiny office at 100 rue Réaumur.
On Tuesday, August 22, A. J. Liebling arrived in Montlhéry, a village twenty miles southwest of Paris, with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and Leclerc’s “2nd DayBay,” as he called it. A few hours earlier, Eisenhower and General Bradley, the American field commander, had ordered the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to help Leclerc liberate Paris. Liebling was staring up at the medieval tower of Montlhéry when he heard an American voice say “Good morning!” It was a Signal Corps lieutenant from the East Coast. “Come over here!” The young lieutenant handed a pair of binoculars to the New Yorker reporter. Paris was there, in the same place he had left it four years, two months, and fifteen days before.
For the photographer and escaped prisoner Henri Cartier-Bresson, now was the time to document the insurrection and show it to the world, time to leave the farm in the Loire-et-Cher region where he had been hiding since his encounter with Georges Braque on D-Day. He carefully packed his Leica and took as many rolls of film as he could, along with a shirt or two, and hopped on his bicycle. Using only little country lanes, he reached Paris at night after a nine-and-a-half-hour ride, a 110-mile journey.
On the morning of Wednesday, August 23, after a few hours of sleep on a friend’s sofa, Cartier-Bresson set off to the Resistance’s photographers’ pool on the rue de Richelieu, next to the French National Library. Robert Doisneau, four years his junior, was there too, with his Rolleiflex. Each of the twenty photographers was given a few quartiers to cover. Cartier-Bresson was in charge of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Ménilmontant, and Batignolles.28
Cartier-Bresson left immediately with a group of young FFI toward Sacha Guitry’s grand home near the Eiffel Tower. The playwright, known for being overtly friendly with the Nazi occupants, kept his cool when he saw the young résistants bursting into his imposing and beautiful mansion. Guitry naively thought that his popularity would protect him, but the FFI’s rifles and guns were still warm from firing at German snipers. Collaborators like Sacha Guitry were as important to the Resistance as the German occupants. They were the symbols of French ambiguity and immorality, and deserved to be judged and sentenced accordingly. The young FFI wanted to take Guitry for interrogation to the 7th arrondissement town hall, 116 rue de Grenelle, and no, they would not give him time to dress. Henri Cartier-Bresson immortalized the moment when Guitry, in his yellow-flowered pajamas, jade-green crocodile pumps, and Panama hat, was escorted through the streets. It looked like a parade, one that was meant to awe Parisians and shame the playwright, and it lasted the twenty-five minutes it took them to reach the town hall. The interrogation started in room 117. “Why did you have dinner with Hermann Göring?” asked a young FFI. “Out of curiosity,” replied Sacha Guitry. Wrong answer.
While Guitry was transferred to Fresnes Prison, General von Choltitz was taking a phone call from Berlin at the Hôtel Meurice. Holding the receiver as far away from his ear as he possibly could, he heard the voice distinctively enough. It was screaming. It was Adolf Hitler. The Führer was furious and ordering him to blow up Paris’s bridges and burn the city to the ground. Von Choltitz knew about destroying cities; he had supervised the ruthless destruction of Rotterdam in May 1940. This time, however, he knew the situation was hopeless and that saving Paris would later play in his favor.29
Loosely affiliated with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, Ernest Hemingway was twenty miles south of Paris with his own little liberating army. He called it the “Hem division.” Made up of regular and less regular French and American fighters, the group consisted of sixteen men traveling in a convoy of four jeeps. Hemingway, on an assignment for Collier’s magazine, had collected his very own band of brothers on the road from Brittany. When they reached the top of a hill and had a good, clear view, Hemingway asked the driver to stop the jeep. He grabbed a pair of binoculars and adjusted the focus. He scanned the horizon, then stopped moving. “I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was the city I loved best in all the world.”30
“THIS IS THE DAY THE WAR SHOULD END”
The U.S. 4th Infantry Division let Leclerc enter Paris first. A small vanguard of Leclerc’s tanks reached the square of the Hôtel de Ville at 9:20 p.m. on August 24, 1944. The Radiodiffusion de la Nation Française, which had radio operators nearby, called on the priests of Paris to ring all the church bells. At 11:22 p.m. the 258-year-old lowest-pitch bourdon of Notre Dame Cathedral, the thirteen-ton bell known as Emmanuel, Notre Dame’s largest, rang out in F sharp so loudly that it could be heard at least five miles away.31 Every church in Paris relayed the news to Parisians.
The writer and art critic Léon Werth, to whom Saint-Exupéry dedicated his children’s novel Le petit prince, recalled the moment in his diary: “I did not know that History existed. I did not believe in History. And suddenly, History was hitting me in the face.”32 The thirty-year-old Gaullist and résistant Yves Cazaux noted: “The incredibly grave sounds belching out from Notre Dame stunned us. With Notre Dame’s bells rose a more profound voice, which seemed to be saying ‘reflect, pay your respects, the moment is superb but it is also terrible.’”33
Then came Friday, August 25. At dawn, the young composer Maurice Jarre, then nineteen, suddenly woke up in the two-room flat he shared with his aunt on the avenue d’Orléans, the large artery linking the south gate of Paris to Notre Dame. He could feel tremors. The whole building was shaking. “We thought it was the German Armoured Division sent by Hitler to help von Choltitz squash the Paris insurrection. We thought we were finished. We were petrified. The roaring sound became greater and greater. I opened the window and crawled onto the balcony. I looked. When I realized what it was, it took my breath away. Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division was entering Paris. There were no words to describe what we felt at that instant in time.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, leaving his room at the Hôtel La Louisiane on the rue de Seine in haste, ran toward the boulevard Saint-Michel. The philosopher was one among hundreds of thousands of Parisians now crowding the pavements to get a glimpse of their liberators. The Free French and the Spanish Republicans enlisted with Leclerc’s 2nd DB started pouring into the boulevards, coming from the south gate of Paris. American, British, and Canadian soldiers from the U.S. 4th Infantry Division were entering the city from the east gate of Paris, from the Porte d’Italie to the northeast. Sartre watched Leclerc’s Free French on their tanks rolling down toward the Seine: “They looked, screamed, smiled. They waved at us with their fingers forming the V of Victory and we could all feel our hearts beating as one. There were no civilians, there were no soldiers, there was one free people.”34
It was the details that moved people most. Every tank of Leclerc’s 2nd DB bore the name of a Paris street, a quartier, or a Napoleonic victory such as Austerlitz, Jena, or Wagram. One tank, baptized simply PARIS, had a live snow-white rabbit proudly resting next to the driver’s hatch and enjoying the attention. On another was a portrait of Hitler with the word merde written across it. Another had a banner reading DEATH TO THE ARSEHOLES!35 As for the Spanish Republicans, they had named their tank GUERNICA.
While a convoy of Paris firemen climbed up on top of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe to raise the French flag, von Choltitz was still at the Hôtel Meurice, negotiating the terms of his surrender with the French Resistance commanders. Escorted to the Police Préfecture and then to Leclerc’s headquarters, set up at Montparnasse train station, von Choltitz signed his surrender at 4:15 p.m., along with more than twenty cease-fire orders. Paris was still fighting the hard core of SS units who had sworn to kill German “traitors” such as von Choltitz and continue the carnage among civilians.36 Charles de Gaulle arrived fifteen minutes later. On seeing the signature of the Communist Rol-Tanguy, head of the FFI, next to that of von Choltitz and Leclerc on the official rendition paper, de Gaulle gave Leclerc a stern look. The Communists seemed to be stealing the show.
Ernest Hemingway and his Hem division had arrived, too, driving straight from the Porte d’Orléans to the rue de l’Odéon. Stopping at number 12, facing number 7, he yelled “Sylvia! Adrienne!” Sylvia was the first to respond. “I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people in the street and in the windows cheered.”37 Adrienne watched the scene from above. “I saw little Sylvia down below, leaping into and lifted up by two Michelangelesque arms, her legs beating the air. Ah, yes, it was Hemingway, more a giant than ever, a caveman with a shrewd and studious look.” “What can I do for you ladies?” asked Hemingway. Could he and his men go and check the rooftops, please? There had been rumors of hidden German snipers nearby; Sylvia and Adrienne had heard shots and saw from their windows passersby shot like rabbits. The Hem division hurried up, guns in hand, and came back twenty minutes later. “All clear, ladies.” “A drink?” replied Sylvia,38 but when she turned her head toward the door the American novelist had vanished. She leaned over the window; he was jumping into his jeep, waving good-bye. “Au revoir!” On his way to the Hôtel Scribe, where war reporters embedded with Leclerc’s 2nd DB and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division were all meeting, the Hem division stopped once more, this time in front of 7 rue des Grands Augustins. Picasso was not in—he was still with Maya and Marie-Thérèse. The concierge asked Hemingway if he wanted to leave something with his note. Without a pause, Hemingway went straight to his jeep and came back with a wooden case full of hand grenades on which he wrote “To Picasso from Hemingway” and handed it to the concierge.39
At 6:30 p.m. the Palais du Luxembourg finally fell to the Resistance. Earlier in the afternoon, they had taken the German headquarters, the much-hated Kommandantur, on the place de l’Opéra.
The century’s most talented photographers and film operators found themselves in Paris on August 25 and 26, 1944. Their pictures and their films would travel the world, making the liberation of Paris one of the most iconic events of the Second World War. Strategically and militarily, the liberation of Paris was only a footnote in the war’s history; however, it carried a sense of poignancy, which photography deeply enhanced. French photographers had help from American war photographers and film operators in immortalizing the street battles of that day. Robert Capa, on assignment for Life, and Lee Miller for Vogue had just arrived. So had David Seymour, also known as Chim, and the playwright Irwin Shaw. Those heroic hours not only marked forever all those who were privileged to live them; they would also profoundly affect everyone who lived them by proxy, through reading war reporters’ articles, looking at the pictures and newsreels. The photographers’, film operators’, and reporters’ work was incredibly difficult and dangerous, and the people who saw and read their work could not believe the risks Parisians were taking. Civilians were swarming the streets while fighting was still going on. One moment a young soldier was kissed by a pretty Parisienne, the next he was shot in the chest by a sniper’s bullet.
Thirty-one-year-old Irwin Shaw, a radio playwright born in the Bronx, a handsome man, built like a bull but with the eyes of a deer, saw Paris for the first time on that afternoon of August 25. His small Signal Corps camera unit was made up of two cameramen, a driver, and himself, all of them PFCs, Private First Class soldiers, the third-lowest army rank. Their jeep, decked with flowers and gifts from the people in the little towns on the road to Paris, carried a small store of tomatoes and apples and bottles of wine that had been tossed to them as they slowly made their way through the crowds.40
Shaw and his unit were on their way to the Opéra, where they had been ordered to report back and leave their rolls of films at the Allied headquarters, when they heard the sound of artillery fire. Tanks from the 2nd French Division were attacking the headquarters of the German Naval Forces on the place de la Concorde. On the horizon, four huge columns of smoke swirled into the sky. Shaw’s unit stopped to capture the scene, but where to film it from? They needed to get on a rooftop. A man, an actor, who had overheard their conversation, took them to a theater nearby, the Comédie-Française, the hall of which had been transformed into a crude hospital. Shaw and his cameraman climbed up the grand staircase toward the roof, passing the busts of the great actors and actresses of France adorning each landing. “On the roof, we were sniped at once as Drell was finishing taking his pictures with the fussy, lens-adjusting deliberation that is so exasperating at moments like this. The bullet made a nasty, sudden whistle between us.”
Back in the theater hall, Irwin Shaw could not help but be transfixed by the scene playing out in front of him. “The nurses were all actresses, most of them from the Comédie-Française company. They were very pretty and dressed in light, soft dresses; the effect, with the sharp contrasts of the light and shadow, the white gleam of the wounded bodies, was that of a painting by Goya for whom the models had been picked by Hollywood’s Samuel Goldwyn.” Shaw walked to one of the dead men lying on the marble floor. A very young blond French boy had been shot through the temple. “He had a thin, handsome, sunburned, healthy-looking face. He had a streak of rouge lipstick on his cheek, like all the soldiers in Paris that day, and there was a dark wine stain down the front of his khaki wool shirt.”41
Irwin Shaw did not know that Jean-Paul Sartre was at this same instant sitting in the stalls inside the theater. The French philosopher had been asked by the Comité National des Écrivains to go and guard the Comédie-Française with his life (but without a gun). Had Irwin Shaw waited a little he would have bumped into Albert Camus, on a visit to Sartre. Later in the afternoon, Camus found Sartre dozing off on his red velvet seat and woke him up: “Hey, Jean-Paul, you’re finally in sync with the events!” The tone was amicable, but the irony was not lost on either man. Camus had been an active résistant while Sartre had been an armchair one.
Shaw and his unit had to report to the Hôtel Scribe and hand over their rolls of film for developing. On the rue de Rivoli, where the firing had stopped, Shaw and his unit walked down the middle of the street. On seeing these GIs going unharmed and taking it as a signal of victory, thousands of people flocked out from the side streets, applauding, cheering, kissing them, men and women alike, indiscriminately. “The smell of perfume from the crowd was overpoweringly strong, and the variety of rich, sweet odors, as kiss followed kiss, was dazzling and unreal to a soldier who had been living in the field, in mud and dust, for two months.”42
Simone de Beauvoir and her little family of former and current lovers and students had agreed to spend the evening together in the room that le petit Bost and Olga shared at the Hôtel Chaplain, just behind the Luxembourg Gardens. As usual, each brought the little food they had managed to save and shared it. That night, dinner was mostly potatoes, which they cooked on an improvised stove without butter or salt.43 They were comparing their memories of the momentous day. Beauvoir was still reeling from the death of a young Leclerc soldier, shot in the chest by a German sniper right in front of her door at the Hôtel La Louisiane. Then somebody thought of switching on the radio, already tuned to Radiodiffusion de la Nation Française. The speaker was at the Hôtel de Ville and he was trying to make himself heard over the very noisy crowd. Charles de Gaulle was about to address the nation. Beauvoir and her young friends looked at each other and listened. De Gaulle spoke to a crowd that had never seen him in the flesh: “There are minutes which go beyond our poor lives. Paris! An outraged Paris! A broken Paris! A martyred Paris! But, a liberated Paris!… Since the enemy that held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to her home. She returns bloodstained, but resolute. She returns enlightened by immense lessons, but more certain than ever of her duties and of her rights.”
In his bedroom at the Hôtel Scribe, Irwin Shaw was listening to the voices of the crowd down below, an endless swelling mixture of cheers, song, and high, feminine laughter. As he fell asleep, he remembered what he had heard a GI say earlier that afternoon: “This is the day the war should end.”
ONLY THE PEOPLE CAN CROWN A MAN
On Saturday, August 26, word that de Gaulle would be marching down the Champs-Élysées with Leclerc’s 2nd DB spread fast. De Gaulle knew that in France, only the people can crown a man. He wanted to be that man. The U.S. Army agreed to fly a few planes to protect Paris and the march from the Luftwaffe.
The French general urgently needed to assert his control over the Resistance’s different factions and especially over the Communists, whom he distrusted. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to be certain not only that de Gaulle had the people with him but also that he had a strong grip on the Communist résistants. They would recognize his government only if and when they were convinced he had achieved both. While the French were busy gorging on their recently recovered freedom and celebrating with their liberators, de Gaulle had already started a silent war against the French Communists. However, because they represented half of the Resistance, having proved both their valor and their organizational skills during the war, Communists were highly regarded in the country. De Gaulle would need to navigate carefully.
Simone de Beauvoir had hopped on her bicycle and rode toward the place de la Concorde. In the crowd, she lost sight of Olga and Wanda, who managed to get to the top of the Champs-Élysées while she stayed at the bottom. Sartre had chosen to watch the events from a balcony of the Hôtel du Louvre giving onto the rue de Rivoli, right opposite Jacques Jaujard’s office.
Jacques Jaujard had invited his lover Jeanne Boitel but also many friends from the Comité National des Écrivains to watch history pass his windows. Among Jaujard’s guests was a twenty-four-year-old curly-haired redhead named Anne-Marie Cazalis. She was the youngest member of the Comité National des Écrivains44 and had won the Paul Valéry award for her poetry a year earlier. Braving her vertigo, Anne-Marie chose to sit on the giant ledge below Jaujard’s office windows. A hundred yards west, Ernest Hemingway was walking toward the rue de Rivoli from the Ritz while Henri Cartier-Bresson was loading yet another Agfa roll into his Leica at the corner of the rue de Castiglione. A. J. Liebling was not going to miss the event for anything but was still debating where best to position himself. How he wished he could follow the action from a restaurant terrace serving champagne; he was exhausted and emotionally drained. Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, holding hands and kissing, would follow the flow wherever it went. Camus had just written the next day’s editorial: “Four years of a monstrous history are ending, and with it an unspeakable struggle during which France was fighting both her shame and her rage.”45
The American magazine Life put it this way: “Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale—a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was this week.”46
After inspecting Leclerc’s troops, de Gaulle started walking down the Champs-Élysées with Parodi on his left. Around him were Free French soldiers, résistants of all political inclinations including the Communist FFI, their guns on their hips, gendarmes in their uniforms, even a bailiff with his golden chain around his neck, a symbol of the republican ritual. There was madness all around. Indescribable chaos and confusion. De Gaulle recalled this moment in his memoirs: “Ah, this is the sea! An immense crowd, perhaps two million souls … At this instant in time, something is happening, one of those miracles of the national conscience, one of those gestures which, sometimes, through the centuries, come and illuminate France’s history.”47
Having reached the bottom of the Champs-Élysées, at the place de la Concorde, de Gaulle climbed into an open car and headed toward Notre Dame through the rue de Rivoli, the crowds parting in front of him as the Red Sea did for Moses. De Gaulle had just passed below Jacques Jaujard’s windows, and the Hôtel du Louvre’s balcony where Sartre was standing, when gunshots went off. Many in the crowd threw themselves flat on the pavement; others, confused and less accustomed to fighting, ran in all directions, easy prey for diehard collaborators and German snipers firing from the roofs. With lightning speed, the young Anne-Marie Cazalis climbed up from the ledge into Jacques Jaujard’s office and threw herself under a table. A young man collapsed at her feet, shot in the chest, dead.
In front of the Hôtel de Ville, American and British war reporters and photographers were waiting for de Gaulle, ready to report back to Washington and London. De Gaulle inspected troops again in front of the cameras, ignoring the Communist FFI, then walked to Notre Dame for a short mass. Along the way there were more gunshots, more snipers; people ran for cover while de Gaulle walked tall across the Seine on the Pont d’Arcole. The bullets whizzed around him as he marched on. Inside the cathedral he lowered his voice and exchanged a few words with Leclerc: “Let’s keep the mass short and get rid of those snipers.” After an extremely fast service of fifteen minutes, interrupted by the sound of machine guns fired in retaliation by Leclerc’s men, positioned in the cathedral’s galleries, de Gaulle left Notre Dame and went straight to talk with Eisenhower over the phone: “I need your help to clean Paris of its few remaining enemies. Two American divisions should do.” That day there were three hundred civilian casualties, and the two collaborators who had attempted to kill de Gaulle in front of Notre Dame were found and executed.
In a week, 700 résistants and 2,800 civilians had lost their lives; 3,200 German soldiers had been killed and 12,800 taken prisoner. That night Édith Thomas wrote in her diary: “It is finished, it is beginning. In the eternal sway of history. The moment we have so much desired has finally come, but what will it be?”48
Amid this “orgy of fraternity,” as Simone de Beauvoir called it, this debauchery of joy, there were ugly scenes in the streets of Paris. In the rue de Seine, the street where she lived, Simone came across the revolting spectacle of a naked woman humiliated by an uproarious mob. The woman was accused of having slept with the enemy. Many other women were shaved in public and sometimes beaten up for the same alleged crime. Beauvoir, whom Albert Camus had just hired to write about those historic days for Combat, wrote of the “medieval sadism” of such rituals. She was relieved each time she saw the FFI protecting those women from the lynching crowds. Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson refused to take pictures of the shamed women. They loved the people, but not when they became a mob.49
Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government ordered the disbanding of the command structure of the Communist Forces Françaises Intérieures, in effect ordering résistants to disarm or to enroll in the Free French army for the duration of the war. Jean Cocteau’s dashing partner Jean Marais enrolled immediately. It was never too late to be a patriot, and many Frenchmen who had lived through the four years of the Occupation with the shame of the armistice but had not had the courage to join the Resistance or go to London seized the opportunity to clear their conscience.
Those days were heavily charged with tension, danger, and emotion and suffused with carnal desire and eroticism. When the Germans had taken Paris on June 14, 1940, they compared the city to a woman who had turned to stone. When the Free French and the Allies liberated her four years later, they brought her back to life. That week Picasso, ensconced right in the heart of the battlefield, did not choose to paint another Guernica. He had been studying Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, of which he drew an ink sketch and then painted a gouache, a watercolor, and an oil. Always his own man and never a slave to events, Picasso was in fact in tune with history. That week he left behind the mournful natures mortes and skulls he had painted for four years. The sixty-three-year-old was in love again, with the twenty-four-year-old Françoise Gilot; Paris was being liberated, he was bursting with life and joie de vivre and was going to let the world know. With his Bacchanales, inspired by Poussin, Picasso was at once modern and archaic. While the tanks were shaking the buildings all around him and gunshots were going off continuously on the boulevard Henri IV at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis where he painted, Picasso was unleashing his erotic euphoria.
Now that Paris was safe and rid of its snipers, he could leave Marie-Thérèse and Maya, knowing they would be safe. A crowd was waiting for him at his studio. Picasso had, despite himself, become the standard-bearer of liberated Paris and the symbol of fortitude during the Occupation. He received everyone, from simple GIs to heads of international museums, from known and unknown fellow artists to students curious to meet him in the flesh. He basked in universal glory, answering reporters’ questions and genially posing for pictures. “For weeks, Picasso’s doors were wide open. His studio became a fairground and a brothel. Mixing in this heady fraternity, were international reporters, photographers, superb North American girls from the U.S. and Canadian armies, GIs with their little French girls on their arms, very thin young women wearing the scars of years of privation, students in white socks and black turtlenecks, old beauties from the Moulin Rouge wearing feather boas at eleven in the morning, and some ‘aristocrack’ as Picasso called them.”50
Fraternity was everywhere. In the streets, in bars, Gaullists, Communists, Catholics, and Marxists sang together—they had fought together and swore that nothing could separate them. In the streets, children were chanting a new song: “We will not see them again, it’s over, they’re finished.”51 But what about those French citizens who had connived with the Nazi occupants and were still there?