CHAPTER 1

The Débacle of Paris

The Battle of France has begun. The order is to defend our positions without thought of retreat.… May the thought of our wounded country inspire in you an unshakable resolution to hold where you are.

— General Maxime Weygand

Commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in France

Order of the Day, June 5, 1940

In Paris that spring the lilac and wisteria bloomed early. Along the Champs-Élysées, the chestnut trees blossomed gloriously but briefly, their white flowers fading too soon before falling to the pavement. The newspapers were filled with optimistic accounts of the war, and the premier, Paul Reynaud, went on the radio to give assurances that France was “calm and stood strong” in the face of the enemy. Crowds flocked to theatres and cinemas. Polish émigré Alexandre Ryder premiered his anti-German docudrama, Après Mein Kampf, mes crimes, at the Olympia, but Goodbye Mr. Chips, showing at Le Triomphe, played to far larger audiences. Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker entranced visitors at the Casino de Paris. Shoppers in chic outfits sunned themselves at sidewalk cafés. French couturier Lucien Lelong linked high fashion to patriotism: “The more French women remain elegant, the more our country will show foreigners it is not afraid.”[1] In the Bois de Boulogne, the stands were filled at Auteuil racetrack for the annual spring meet. Some lucky winners enjoyed a celebratory dinner at the elegant Pré-Catalan café, first pausing to admire the elephant-skinned beech tree that stood nearby, said to have been planted before the French Revolution.

On the Left Bank, writers and artists gathered at such favoured cafés as the Dome, La Rotonde, and Café de Flore, debating whether to support the war. Simone de Beauvoir — her paramour Jean-Paul Sartre having been conscripted into the army — confessed her attachment to these places in a passage in her diary: “I feel as if I’m home with my family and that protects me against anguish.”[2]

In the poor outer regions of Paris — later to be called the Red Belt — workers with families jammed into tiny walk-up apartments grumbled at again having to work six days a week, the forty-hour week introduced during the brief regime of the leftist Popular Front now all but forgotten. Communists in factories and foundries, and they were many, hewed to the party line that the war was a conspiracy among imperialist powers, undeserving of working-class support. Union members paraded as usual in the traditional May Day celebration of labour, but festivities were subdued. A front-page editorial in Le Figaro noted that employers and workers were each marking the day “on their own terms, in the interests of the national solidarity of France at war.”

The diversions and labours of the citizens of Paris acquired a sudden urgency on Friday, May 10, 1940, when the German Wehrmacht unleashed a fearful armed attack — the blitzkrieg, or lightning war — across Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and into France. A month later, Paris had suffered its first air raid, units of the German 9th Division were at the Seine River sixty kilometres below Paris, and, for the second time in the lives of many of its citizens, the capital became a besieged city. Sandbags were hastily piled up around Paris monuments. It was a city beset by rumours — that German parachutists had landed in the Tuileries Gardens and that poisoned chocolates had been dropped by air over Gare d’Austerlitz, with at least one child having died from eating them. Parisians who had not already fled were startled by the pall of acrid smoke and fumes that hung over the city, detritus from the burning of tons of government documents. Knots of retreating soldiers, some drunk, their rifles lost or thrown aside, clustered around felled trees and overturned buses and trucks, meagre barricades against oncoming German panzer tanks.

Parisians who had cars and could obtain gasoline clogged the roads to the south. Thousands shuffled in lines for hours at Gare Lyon and other stations, desperate for tickets on the last departing trains. Refugees from regions already overrun pushed carts and bicycles filled with pitiful belongings. A barge filled with fleeing civilians was seen making its way up the Seine. Government officials were in the forefront of those fleeing Paris. Yann Fouéré, an official with the Ministry of Information who took part in the evacuation, wrote of the panic on the routes leading out of the capital:

The scene along the roads was staggering. The whole population was in full flight, on foot, on bicycles, by car and in carts. Most of the cars had mattresses on the roof. Having lost their regiments, a number of soldiers mingled with the crowds and fled with them. Struggles were breaking out around the petrol stations. Grocery shops and bakeries of villages along the way could no longer cope. Some people slept, exhausted, in the ditches. A massive exodus from Paris had begun as soon as the government’s departure had been officially announced on the evening of the 10th of June. Why them and not us? If they are fleeing, we must also flee. At the time, it was estimated that there were ten million people on the roads. Paris was fleeing, distraught, causing the rest of the country insoluble problems.[3]

The literary icons of France also took note. Paul Valéry, poet, author, and a member of Académie française wrote of the flight of refugees in his journal, the Cahiers: “The impression of living, poignant disorder. Every possible conveyance, carts stuffed with children in the straw. They don’t know, nobody knows, where they are going.”[4]

Out of five million Parisians, fewer than one million remained in the capital. The evacuation — l’exode — went on hour after hour, spurred by conflicting declarations from General Maxime Weygand: first, that there must be no retreat; then, his sudden pronouncement that Paris was an open city. French bureaucrats, recalling the chaos of 1914, when Paris emptied out in the face of a German advance, had made careful plans to manage the evacuation. It soon became a case of every man for himself. At the Ministry of War, housed in an eighteenth-century stone hôtel particulier on rue Saint-Dominique, a short distance north of the complex of military museums that make up Les Invalides and a kilometre east of another Paris landmark, the Eiffel Tower, officers debated who should leave first. The newly appointed undersecretary for defense, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, found an office filled with noise and confusion when he arrived to take up his charge on June 6. In a room filled with medieval armour, he called together his staff and, standing in front of a wall covered with a large map, gave a clear and honest account of the situation. His blunt presentation seemed to calm his listeners, even if it did not give them cause for optimism.

De Gaulle’s arrival at the War Ministry came in answer to a summons he had received while leading the French 4th Armoured Division in a series of counterattacks northeast of Paris. Filled with a sense of fury that the war was beginning so badly, he had hurled his three tank battalions against the oncoming German panzer brigades, the only time during the Battle of France that the Wehrmacht had been forced to retreat. The French High Command, insistent on a strategy of defensive warfare, had failed to grasp the awesome offensive power of tanks. Their powerfully armed Renault, Hotchkiss, and FCM machines were the equal of, if not superior to, Germany’s Mark I and II tanks. But rather than deploying them in forward-attack brigades, French commanders dispersed their tanks among regular divisions, rendering them largely ineffective for offensive purposes. De Gaulle had railed against this blindness in a stream of papers, memos, and books that argued the urgent need for France to master the new strategies of mechanized warfare.

Not everyone at the War Ministry approved of this ungainly figure with his imperious ways, who, at the age of forty-nine, was still relatively young as senior French officers went. De Gaulle was accustomed to ridicule and bullying, brought on as much by his unusual height — 1.9 metres (six feet, five inches) — and a face dominated by high cheeks and an enormous nose that led detractors to call him “the Great Asparagus,” as by his behaviour. He smoked incessantly and you could see nicotine stains on his fingers and teeth.

Premier Reynaud had summoned de Gaulle to the Cabinet during a frantic reshaping of French leadership that saw two revered First World War leaders, General Weygand and Marshall Philippe Pétain, called back to service. Pétain, who had agreed to become vice-premier, was eighty-four years old when Reynaud summoned him from Madrid, where he had been ambassador to Spain. Weygand, seventy-four, was brought out of retirement to replace the disgraced General Maurice Gamelin, who had presided over the retreats and routs of eight hundred thousand Allied soldiers — French, British, Dutch, and Belgian — in the first days of the blitzkrieg.

De Gaulle’s first meeting with Weygand after his appointment to the Cabinet had not gone well. He’d taken a room at the Hôtel Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail and had himself driven to the office of the commander-in-chief at Château de Montry, the army headquarters on the outskirts of Paris.

It took only a few words from Weygand to convince de Gaulle that the commander was resigned to defeat. “When I’ve been beaten here,” Weygand told him, “England won’t wait a week before negotiating with the Reich.” He added despairingly: “Ah! If only I were sure the Germans would leave me the forces necessary for maintaining order!”[5]

Weygand was not the only voice of despair in the French capital that week. Marshall Pétain, revered for saving the French army in the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, also was ready to throw in his hand. He had made it clear in a letter to Premier Reynaud that France was left with no choice but to ask for an armistice.

To hear these sentiments from the men charged with protecting the Republic was excruciatingly painful to de Gaulle. He was in favour of defending the capital, no matter the risk, and he clung to the hope that the French army could yet be rallied to resist the German tide, either in a closely defended redoubt in Brittany, or, if necessary, from bases in French North Africa. How could the nation live with itself if it had not done everything possible to save its most sacred precincts from the enemy? Officers de Gaulle talked to, however, were not so certain. To a man, they appeared convinced that in the upper echelons of the High Command “the game was considered lost.” The surrender of Paris, these exasperated men reasoned, might offer the only means of saving it.[6]

The idea of capitulation was repugnant to de Gaulle. When he joined the army as a nineteen-year-old officer cadet in 1909 — 119th out of 221 candidates who wrote exams to enter Saint-Cyr that year — he had been swept up in an enormous sense of the grandeur of France. To be a soldier “was one of the greatest things in the world,” he would write in his Mémoires de guerre.[7] Living in Paris as a young man, nothing struck him more forcefully “than the symbols of our glories; night falling over Notre Dame, the majesty of evening at Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe in the sun, conquered colours shuddering in the vault of the Invalides.” Now that everything that meant so much to him was under threat, he could conceive of no other course than to exert every ounce of strength in the defence of these precious symbols.

In the early months of 1940, the symbols of the Third Republic were being challenged from within as well as without. The year had barely begun when all 294 members of the Senate, in a rare act of unanimity, voted to strip the seventy-two Communist members of the Chamber of Deputies of their parliamentary immunity. Vice-premier Camille Chautemps called the decision “a link in the chain against terrorism.” It was one of a series of actions expressing France’s revulsion at the German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in August 1939, an accord that left Hitler free to make war as he chose, knowing his eastern flank was secure. The premier of the day, Édouard Daladier — head of one of forty-two French governments to play out their cards in the 1930s — immediately banned L’Humanité and other Communist newspapers. The party itself was outlawed and hundreds of its members were interned. The moves were generally applauded. After the German-Soviet pact, French Communists had indicated their strong support for the Moscow line, becoming vocal critics of the war. Some were said to have carried out acts of sabotage. After several warplanes blew up mysteriously shortly after takeoff, the young Communist Roger Ramband was accused of tampering with seventeen of them. His puncturing of gas lines was said to have allowed fuel to drip onto red-hot exhaust pipes, causing explosions.

At the opposite end of the political pole stood forces of the right. Hating what they saw as the moral decadence of the Third Republic and preferring fascist dictatorship to either liberal democracy or dictatorship of the proletariat, they were equally opposed to vigorous prosecution of the war. They drew their strength from the wealthiest segments of France’s grande bourgeois class made up of industrialists, property owners, bankers, senior civil servants, and the larger patronats. Their abhorrence of Communism was often accompanied by a generous mixture of anti-Semitism, long a powerful force in France, with a dash of Anglophobia thrown in.[8] One of the most vicious anti-Semites, Charles Maurras, warned in his L’Action Française that the French people must not allow themselves “to be slaughtered unsuspectingly and vainly at the will of forces that are English-speaking Jews, or at the will of their French slaves.”

Adding to the increasingly bitter social atmosphere were the actions and teachings of the Catholic Church, resolutely anti-Communist and supportive of laws to entrench traditional family values, and from whom Premier Daladier was assured of approval for his edict imposing heavy penalties against abortion.

The political right of France never forgave the anti-fascist Popular Front government — a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals that ruled from 1936 to 1938 — for its encouragement of sit-down strikes, and its enactment of higher wages for workers, the forty-hour week, the raising of the school-leaving age from thirteen to fourteen, and the nationalization of the railways and munitions factories. Most of all, the rightists hated the Popular Front for supressing their fascist-flavoured leagues, notably La Cagoule (literally, The Hood), which had terrorized Paris with bombings, and Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire), a veterans’ organization of three hundred thousand members.

Financial support for right-wing conspirators came from the chief German agent in Paris, Otto Abetz, who cloaked his activities as an art dealer, publishers’ representative, and founder of the Comité France-Allemagne. A familiar figure in the salons of right-wing society, Abetz paid off French writers with lucrative German publishing contracts and saw to the wining and dining of politicians and businessmen on expense-paid trips to Germany. He funded the notoriously fascist Parisian daily La Liberté, the organ of Jacques Doriot, an ex-Communist who would win a German Iron Cross for his services on the Eastern Front. When the criticism of Abetz’s activities could be no longer ignored, Premier Daladier ordered his expulsion. At the same time, the Communist Party chief Maurice Thorez, having spent his boyhood in the coal mines of the Nord, found his citizenship revoked even though he was French-born. Conscripted into the army, he deserted and fled to Moscow. It would not be the last France would see of either Thorez or Abetz.

In the face of the quarrelsome factions that beset France, it nonetheless still met the test for nationhood set down by historian Ernest Renan in 1882 when he wrote in Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (What is a Nation?):

Now, the essence of a nation is that the people have many things in common, but have also forgotten much together. To have the glory of the past in common, a shared will in the present; to have done great deeds together, and want to do more of them, are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people.… One loves the house which one has built and passes on. We love the nation in proportion to the sacrifices to which we consented, the harms that we suffered.[9]

More than most Europeans, the French clung to their traditions and continued to feel the tug of the soil.[10] Many Parisians identified more closely with the small towns or rural lands of their parentage than the city where they now lived but in which they often felt “de-rooted.” A people of conservative and Catholic heritage — although agnosticism had been growing since the final split between church and state in 1905 — the French loved soccer, cycling, and the cinema. Cautious, sometimes devious, not entirely trustful of strangers, most French threw a wall of fierce protection around their private lives. Their women still belonged in the home and possessed neither the vote nor the right to enter into business without permission of their husbands. The average Frenchman didn’t much care for priests, wrote the literary critic Jules Lemaître, “but he is not intolerant; he lets his wife and children attend Mass.” The perilous economy of the 1930s drove multitudes into abject poverty; economic statistics showed workers spending 60 percent of their income on food, compared to 10 percent on housing (well-off bourgeois families spent only a third as much of their income on food, but the same proportion, a tenth, on housing). Many felt oppressed by bureaucracy and regarded taxes and military service as something to be avoided. But in one sentiment the French were united: their visceral fear of war. [11]

William C. Bullitt, the United States ambassador to France, a one-time journalist and novelist, was determined to stay in Paris despite the flight of the French government. On June 5, fearful the British were holding back aid for France in order to set the stage for a peace accord with Hitler, Bullitt sent a coded telegram to President Roosevelt: “It will mean that the British intend to conserve their fleet and air force and their army, and either before a German attack on England or shortly afterwards, to install eight Fascists trained under Oswald Mosley and accept vassalage to Hitler.”[12] The message revealed his colossal ignorance of European affairs.

A veteran actor on the diplomatic stage, Bullitt had been the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was remembered in Moscow for getting a bear drunk at an embassy party. He continued his partying ways after his posting to Paris in 1936. An ardent Francophile with fluent command of the language, he kept a cellar of eighteen thousand bottles of wine. He also followed the antics of the Paris press, whose editors were as adept at game-playing as the politicians and army commanders.

In a telegram to the State Department on November 17, 1939, Bullitt called Washington’s attention to how “the French press remains confused … by shouts and alarms pointing one day to the certain danger of attack against Holland and Belgium, another time to the raid that is to be made [by France] on Hungary and Romania.” The day after the attack on the Low Countries, Le Temps, France’s most prominent daily, read in embassies and newsrooms around the world, credited the German war machine with the power to “break the resistance of the Allies and all those which M. Hitler views as his enemies.”[13] What Bullitt did not have to mention, because it was so well-known, was the widespread corruption of the French press. Le Temps at one time was receiving payoffs from the embassies of five different countries. French government departments routinely gave out cash-filled envelopes to correspondents on their beats. Government officials wrote many of Le Temps’s editorials.

As de Gaulle struggled to cope with the chaos enveloping the War Ministry, he would have found it difficult to push all thoughts of family from his mind. His wife, Yvonne, was with their handicapped daughter, Anne, at La Boisserie, their country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, 240 kilometres east of Paris. He believed that it was time for them to go, though; they should by now be packed and on their way to her sister’s home near the Loire Valley town of Orléans. If only he could be sure she had received his letters, the ones in which he’d addressed her as his “darling little wife,” and congratulated her on her fortieth birthday. There was no telephone at La Boisserie and it was hopeless to try to leave a message with the village postmaster, as he’d sometimes done before the war.

He missed his little angel, Anne, who was just twelve years old and suffered from Down’s syndrome, a condition that left her with little ability to walk or speak. He loved to get down on the floor to play with her, and when he was stationed at Metz, 140 kilometres away, he often ordered a car to take him home in the evening so he could rock her to sleep in his arms.

Then there were the older children. De Gaulle had given instructions to his son Philippe, attending Collége Stanislas in Paris, to collect his sister Elisabeth from her school, Notre-Dame-de-Sion, and make for their aunt’s residence, where they might meet up with their mother and Anne. But travel was uncertain in the chaos that had overtaken much of the country. He had to get money to them somehow.

Charles de Gaulle spent the morning of Monday, June 10, overseeing the amassing of War Ministry files, some to be packed for removal but most to be burned. Those he chose for safekeeping were among the 7,700 tons of archival materials that would be sent out of Paris on fourteen special trains. De Gaulle also found himself fending off a stream of visitors bearing rumours of imminent disaster, while telephones in his office “rang without cease.”[14] The Italian ambassador arrived to tell the undersecretary for foreign affairs, Paul Baudouin, that at midnight his country would be at war with France. “Much good will come of it,” the Italian promised. Filled with agony on “this day of anguish,” de Gaulle must have thought the man sly and deceitful.[15]

He managed a light lunch at his desk and had a mid-afternoon meeting with Premier Reynaud. It took place one floor up from de Gaulle’s ground-floor office, in the War Ministry office that Reynaud maintained by virtue of also holding the Defense portfolio. While the two worked on a statement in response to the Italian declaration of war, they found themselves confronted by General Weygand. He burst into the room, claiming he had been summoned.

“Not by me,” Reynaud and de Gaulle insisted in turn.

“A mistake, then, but a useful one,” Weygand answered, handing Reynaud a note. It urged that France sue for an armistice. The room took on, de Gaulle would remember, “a most heavy atmosphere.”[16]

That evening, de Gaulle received a phone call advising him it was time to leave Paris. The smell of cordite from German guns, added to the fumes from burning papers, made the night air even more suffocating. De Gaulle and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Geoffroy de Courcel, got into a staff car for the short drive to the Hôtel Matignon, official residence of the premier, on rue de Varenne.[17] Only twenty-seven, de Courcel was descended from a once-noble family in Lorraine. Despite being nearsighted — his thick glasses bearing testimony to the state of his eyes — de Courcel had seen duty with a cavalry regiment in the French protectorate of Lebanon and was on leave in Paris when he was picked for de Gaulle’s staff.

After a simple meal accompanied by wine and ample servings of coffee, the two accompanied Reynaud to a waiting limousine. Shortly before midnight, the black Citroën, carrying the French Tricolour on its hood but with its headlights off due to the blackout, cleared Port de Châtillon and edged out of the Paris suburbs. It was bound for the Loire Valley and the temporary safety of the Touraine, the old French province of châteaus and vineyards 140 kilometres to the southwest. The French government was in flight. Paris would be sure to fall within days.[18]

We can imagine that the drive to Orléans would have seemed barely endurable. The night was hot, the car was stuffy, and one roadblock after another held up the premier’s car. De Gaulle struggled to stretch his long legs in the Citroën’s uncomfortable confines, but Reynaud, the “littlest man” in French politics (1.6 metres — five feet, three inches) had no such problem. Both, however, were angered by the sight of a convoy of luxurious American automobiles that swept by. They were filled with members of the corps diplomatique, with armed militiamen on the running boards and motorcyclists at their sides.

Premier Reynaud tried to reassure his new undersecretary of defense that he would not permit the surrender of France. One of Reynaud’s last acts before leaving Paris had been to cable a passionate appeal to President Roosevelt for all possible aid short of troops: “Today the enemy is almost at the gates of Paris. We shall fight in front of Paris; we shall fight behind Paris; we shall close ourselves in one of our provinces to fight and if we should be driven out of it we shall establish ourselves in North Africa to continue the fight and if necessary in our American possessions.”

De Gaulle was skeptical of the premier’s protestations; he knew that as well as dealing with the defeatism of the High Command, Reynaud had to put up with the equally troubling interference of his appeasement-minded mistress, Countess Hélène de Portes. She was following close behind in a second car, accompanied by her retainers. It was common knowledge that the countess, while floating about Parisian high society, had enjoyed expounding on her fondness for fascism. The daughter of a wealthy Marseille dock contractor and a widow, she was much younger than Reynaud — thirty to his sixty-two — and was short, plain, and not especially attractive. She and Reynaud had lived together since before his divorce and they planned to wed as soon as a change in the law, permitting marriage a year after divorce, came into effect. De Gaulle perhaps thought it just as well that now, amid the turmoil of war, the change might never come. He would have agreed with Ambassador Bullitt who had predicted a few days before to President Roosevelt: “In the end, she will be shot.”[19]

Jarred by constant stopping and starting in the clogged traffic, the official party were unable to get much sleep. Tired and disheveled, they reached Orléans, where the Loire River makes its great bend on its way to the Atlantic, shortly after five o’clock. Steeped in French history, it was a place that had seen Roman, English, and Prussian soldiers storm its streets, and was the site of the great victory over the English in 1429, said to have been engineered by the never to be forgotten Jeanne d’Arc. The war had so far left Orléans almost entirely untouched. All up and down the Loire, handsome châteaus, occupied by “surviving aristocrats and other country gentlemen,” offered panoramic views of the shallow river. Arrangements had been made for the government to take over many of them, from Briare in the east where General Weygand was to take up residence, to Tours in the west where the departments would set up their offices.

Driving in off the old Boulevard Chemin de Fer, Reynaud’s car pulled up in front of the Préfecture on rue de Bourgogne, a one-time Benedictine monastery that now housed the area’s civil administration. At the Orléans post office, a stack of three hundred coded telegrams awaited the premier’s attention. Ignoring the official papers, Reynaud sent for the préfet while he and de Gaulle shared coffee and croissants. After, they went to separate offices to make telephone calls. De Gaulle’s took only a few minutes, and when he moved to the room where Reynaud was on the phone, he heard the premier speaking with Weygand. De Gaulle was shocked to hear that, unknown to anyone in the government, the general had arranged for Winston Churchill to arrive later that day for an emergency conference.

“Are you really going to allow General Weygand to invite the British prime minister on his own authority?” de Gaulle exploded. “Don’t you see the generalissimo is pursuing a policy that is not yours?” He was convinced Weygand was working behind the premier’s back to extract Churchill’s blessing for a French surrender.

“You are right,” Reynaud answered. “This situation must cease.” Perhaps it was time to replace Weygand. “What is your view?” Reynaud asked.

De Gaulle had a candidate in mind. “The only one I can see now is Huntziger,” de Gaulle replied, referring to General Charles Huntziger, commander of the 2nd Army, whose retreating forces were encamped at the village of Arcis-sur-Aube, 150 kilometres east of Paris. “He is not ideal, but he is capable.”

Reynaud agreed. At first Reynaud thought they should both go to see Huntziger, but he then decided it was more important for him to stay in the Loire and prepare for the meeting later that day with Winston Churchill. “I’ll see you in Briare,” he told de Gaulle.[20]

It was now approaching seven o’clock, and de Gaulle faced a long drive back to the north, a perilous trip in the face of an advancing enemy. All this could have been avoided, he might have reflected, if the High Command had accepted even the most basic principles of the strategy for mechanized warfare that he had preached in his lectures and books. “At least,” as he would later declare, “we would have had a battle instead of a débacle.”[21]