CHAPTER 12

To the Barricades!

The Île de la Cité had not seen such strife since the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871. Here, in the spiritual heart of Paris, on the island where some of its greatest monuments had been erected over the ages, two thousand striking policemen milled about in the square between the Préfecture de police and Notre Dame Cathedral. Some, surly and snappish, argued among themselves while others kicked the paving stones, perhaps trading guesses as to what the day might bring. The French Tricolour flew above the Préfecture, put there at dawn to replace the Nazi banner that had desecrated its flagpole the past four years. Orders had gone out the night before from the Gaullist Honneur de la Police, one of three police Resistance organizations, to take possession of the Préfecture at first light. Charles de Gaulle would write of this time that Paris, for so long “asleep, captive and stupefied,” was to suddenly “reappear among us,” no longer “the remorse of the free world.”[1]

At the Préfecture, a young blond policeman, dressed in civilian clothes like his comrades, climbed atop a car parked by the large iron gates that barred entry from the Boulevard du Palais. Yves Bayet was an intelligence officer with a history of opposition to the collaborationists who had given the Paris police such an unsavoury reputation. “In the name of the Republic and General de Gaulle,” he shouted, “I take possession of the Préfecture de police!”[2] It was Saturday morning, August 19, and the start of a tumultuous weekend that would send Parisians into the streets to build barricades, harass enemy strong points, and take aim at German soldiers, using stolen rifles, hand guns, and homemade bombs, to prepare the way for the liberating armies now approaching the city.

First there had been walkouts by railwaymen, the postal and telegraph workers, and by the conductors and drivers of the Metro. Then, at midweek, all but a handful of the city’s fifteen thousand policemen obeyed their leaders’ calls to stay off the job. “The hour of liberation has come,” the strike order declared. “Today it is the duty of the whole body of the police … to do nothing further to maintain order for the enemy.… [Y]ou will refuse to arrest patriots.… March with the people of Paris to the final battle.”[3] The police action came as an angry rebuttal to the Germans for having disarmed police detachments in two Paris suburbs.

The city ground to a halt, food was running short, and at the Hôtel Meurice on rue de Rivoli, headquarters of the German command, General Dietrich von Choltitz pondered the seriousness of the uprising. Adolf Hitler had personally given him command of the Paris Military District only two weeks before, at a bizarre meeting in the “Wolf’s Lair” at Rastenburg, East Prussia. Hitler was still recovering from injuries received in the July 20 bomb attempt on his life. Von Choltitz had found the Fuhrer “filled with rage,” demanding that Paris be made into “a frontline city.”[4]

In picking von Choltitz, Hitler had chosen a man with a record of devastation behind him, having led the attacks that all but wiped out Rotterdam and Sevastopol during the first great German offensives of the war. Heavy set, the very image of the stern Prussian officer, von Choltitz, just turning fifty, was also a realist. He knew he had no real chance of defending Paris against the Allied armies. He was more concerned about how to achieve a largely peaceful withdrawal of his remaining twenty-two thousand troops and the several thousand German civilian workers still in the city.

Policeman Bayet’s call from atop the police car outside the Préfecture was met by applause and the singing of “La Marseillaise.” This was followed by a surge of men through the gates and into the vast courtyard around which the building had been erected. Among the policemen were workers who would keep the building functioning, and by mid-morning a measure of deliberate organization had settled over it. In the lull, Yves Bayet headed out to a destination that had been given him the day before: the café Les Deux Magots on boulevard Saint-Germain, just across the Seine. There, he found Charles Luizet, a bespectacled man formally dressed in a suit, vest, and tie, taking coffee on the terrace. “Monsieur le Préfet, your office and your men await you,” Bayet told him. He hustled Luizet into a black Citroen and escorted by two other vehicles, had him driven to the Préfecture.[5]

Charles Luizet was one of General de Gaulle’s most trusted lieutenants. A graduate of Saint-Cyr and a former student of de Gaulle’s, he had put in a decade of army service in Algeria before being appointed the French administrator of the international zone of Tangier. It was there, on hearing of de Gaulle’s Appeal of June 18, that he wired London to volunteer with the Free French. De Gaulle told him to stay put but to send him intelligence. He was appointed prefect for Corsica after the island’s liberation, and in July was called to London where he was told he would be the prefect of police in a liberated Paris. Luizet parachuted into the Vaucluse district of Provence just in time to make his way to Paris. It is unclear how deeply he was involved in planning the occupation of the Préfecture, but there is no doubt the bold move gave the Gaullist wing of the Resistance an upper hand in deciding the fate of Paris.

Luizet was still feeling his way around his new office when the man who was technically in charge of Resistance forces in Paris, Henri Georges René Tanguy — better known by his pseudonym, Colonel Rol-Tanguy — arrived at the Préfecture. As head of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), this devout Communist and wounded veteran of the Spanish Civil War, thirty-six years old, a metalworker and trade union organizer, was one of the most powerful of Resistance leaders. Yet he had known nothing of the Préfecture takeover, and when he arrived on his bicycle and tried to gain entrance, he was blocked at the door. He retreated to a nearby garage that served as a safe house, put on his old Spanish Civil War uniform, and, returning to the Préfecture, managed to gain entrance. Rol-Tanguy and Luizet would have eyed each other warily, but they agreed to travel together to an important meeting that was about to begin in a Left Bank apartment on rue de Grenelle, just beyond Saint-Germain des Prés.

Accompanied by Yves Bayet, the men sat down to hear reports of fighting breaking out all over Paris. There was talk of the latest German atrocity: thirty-five young prisoners of the Gestapo had been taken to the Bois de Boulogne, shot, and their bodies dumped in a grove of oak trees. Representatives of all the main Resistance groups were in the room. This session of the Comité National de la Resistance faced a monumental decision: whether to accede to the demands of the Communist-led Paris Liberation Committee for an all-out uprising. Although German forces vastly outnumbered the Resistance in both men and firepower, the Communists were determined on immediate rebellion.

The head of the CNR, Georges Bidault, a school teacher who had joined the Resistance at the behest of Jean Moulin, counselled caution. As he spoke, a burst of rifle fire could be heard from the street. As the sound of shooting died out, Bidault was joined by Alexandre Parodi, who as de Gaulle’s delegate-general in France was the highest-ranking Gaullist in the room. A senior civil servant in pre-war France, fired by Vichy for “wrongful thinking,” Parodi was playing a perilous game. He had ordered the taking of the Préfecture as a means of asserting Gaullist leadership of the police; now he was struggling to prevent the Communists from riding roughshod over the CNR. He had just begun to speak when André Tollet, the head of the Paris Liberation Committee, interrupted him. Tollet accused Parodi of having started the insurrection prematurely by ordering the action at the Préfecture. Colonel Rol-Tanguy leaped in, shouting “Paris is worth two hundred thousand dead!”[6] The meeting had to be interrupted while tempers cooled. Rol-Tanguy was in an argumentative mood. Not only was he upset over not being told about the seizure of the Préfecture, but the night before he had written an inflammatory call to arms that ended with the injunction: Chacun à son Boche (“Everyone Kill his Hun”).[7] Across Paris that morning, in accordance with a carefully orchestrated plan Rol-Tanguy had drawn up, assaults were being made on eighty public buildings. The targets included the mairies (town halls) of the city’s twenty arrondissements, the post offices, the slaughterhouse, and even the Comédie Française.

Alexandre Parodi realized that an uprising engineered by Communists alone carried the risk that de Gaulle could be faced with a coup d’état on his arrival in Paris. It was for this reason that he made the wrenching choice, with the backing of Charles Luizet, to extend Gaullist support to the insurrection. The decision brought Parodi into conflict with Charles de Gaulle’s military delegate in France, General Jacques Chaban-Delmas. Later that day, Chaban (his Resistance name) demanded of Parodi: “Why did you ignore orders forbidding you to launch an insurrection?”[8] Parodi’s answer was that it was necessary to maintain a united Resistance front.

The painful decision made, Parodi took it one step further. He ordered mobilization of all Resistance members between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and instructed they be enlisted in the French Forces of the Interior. That concession put them under the command of Colonel Rol-Tanguy. He hoped it was the right decision. “If I have made a mistake I shall have a lifetime to regret it in the ruins of Paris.”[9] He did not want another Warsaw, where the Red Army idled outside the Polish capital while in the city the Armija Krajowa (Home Army) fought a hopeless battle against a well-armed and ruthless occupier.

The Préfecture now became the first test of the ability of the FFI to hold their ground. They did not have long to wait. As the Germans had done in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, where they sent tanks to shell the town hall after its takeover by the Resistance, heavy armour was brought into the Boulevard du Palais. Behind a parade of armoured cars came three German tanks led by a powerful Tiger I machine equipped with an 88 mm cannon. It was followed by two smaller, French-built Renault tanks from the 5th Sicherunregiment. It was 3:30. Police in the Préfecture answered their appearance with marksmen shooting from open windows. There was occasional firing from some old machine guns sheltered behind sandbag barriers. With bullets whizzing into the square across from the Préfecture, the Tiger unleashed two shells. One scored a direct hit on the iron gates of the Préfecture, blowing the left side of the great door off its hinges and opening the way into the building. The second made a hole in the Préfecture’s outer wall. Inside, the impact lifted Edgar Pisani out of his chair at the Préfecture’s switchboard. Regaining his feet, he pressed an alarm button signalling every Paris police station of the attack. As the smoke from the tank shells cleared in the courtyard, someone drove a bus into the open gateway, wedging it there as a barrier. Others panicked, and ran down a stairway to a special entrance to the Metro used only by the police. Armand Fournet, a police sergeant, leaped onto a handcart and threatened to shoot the first man who tried to get by him. “Our only chance of survival,” he told them, “is to win!”[10] The rush to the Metro stopped.

In the basement of the Préfecture, a civilian was busy with two assistants, pulling corks from champagne bottles. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, son-in-law of Marie Curie, the co-discoverer of radium, refilled the bottles with gasoline and sulfuric acid. He was a committed Communist and had brought the deadly mix from the Curie laboratory. The bottles were wrapped in rags soaked in potassium chlorate and a team of runners carried these Molotov cocktails up to the roof. From there, police hurled the missiles onto the German cars and tanks. Several splattered on the pavement, but one fell into the open turret of a Renault tank, exploded, and sent a sheet of flame high into the air. Other German tanks and armoured vehicles began to make their way across the bridge from the Left Bank.

The police scored more direct hits with their Molotov cocktails, prisoners were taken, and ammunition and medical supplies in the armoured vehicles was confiscated. By five o’clock, twenty vehicles had been destroyed and fifty German soldiers killed. Whether it was due to the ferocity of the police counterattack or a lack of firm orders from the German command centre, the tanks remaining at the Préfecture, including the massive Tiger, backed up and drove off. The streets around the Préfecture fell silent. The police still held the building, but for how long?

A troubled observer of the day’s events was Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul in Paris. Born in France, married to a French woman, he was able, due to his status as a neutral diplomat, to act as a go-between with the German authorities. Late in the afternoon he received a call from Charles Luizet pleading for help. Nordling agreed to see General von Choltitz, with whom he had earlier arranged a prisoner swap that freed four thousand men from jails around Paris. He hoped to build on that success by bringing the fighting at the Préfecture to an end. When he went to see the German commander at the Hôtel Meurice, he heard a torrent of invective against the police. Von Choltitz told Nordling he was planning an aerial attack on the Préfecture in the morning. When Nordling warned him this would likely result in severe damage to Notre Dame and other nearby churches, von Choltitz replied, “I am a soldier. I get orders. I execute them.”[11]

Nordling pressed the issue, urging von Cholltitz to consider a truce. He told him the struggle of the Resistance was mainly against Vichy, and the Germans were really only caught in the middle. There was no point in fighting over Paris, the diplomat reminded von Choltitz, because in the end he would have to withdraw anyway. These arguments made sense to the German general. He knew or cared little or nothing of French politics and was concerned only with the welfare of his men. If a truce would put a stop to their killing while he completed plans to evacuate the city, it could be a useful tool. Left unsaid was any reference to orders von Choltitz had received from Hitler to destroy Paris. By nine o’clock, the two had worked out the terms of a truce. The conditions came close to delivering victory to the Resistance: the Germans would recognize members of the FFI as regular soldiers, not as terrorists; they would not attack the Préfecture de police; and the Germans would make an orderly evacuation from Paris using outer boulevards of the city. The FFI, in turn, would have to agree not to attack German positions. Now, Nordling faced the task of winning Resistance agreement to this remarkable diplomatic achievement.

A wild thunderstorm drenched Paris early on Sunday, but that did not deter a group of French Garde Mobile who rushed into l’Hôtel de Ville, the Paris city hall, just before seven o’clock. Their leader, Léo Hamon, went to the prefect’s office to announce that he was taking possession “in the name of the Paris Liberation Committee and on behalf of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.” The first thing he did was demand that a bust of Marshall Pétain be removed. Hamon then ordered the arrest of the prefect, René Bouffet, and the entire municipal council including the mayor, Pierre Taittinger, on grounds of collaboration.[12]

Hundreds of little skirmishes were breaking out across the city, nearly every incident claiming lives. A German sound truck drove along the main streets blasting out word of the truce. The truce had not yet been ratified by the Resistance; this would have to wait for an eleven o’clock meeting of the Committee of National Resistance. Perhaps because of the turmoil, only six members showed up to vote on whether to accept the arrangement that Nordling had negotiated. After hearing Parodi and Chaban-Delmas make the argument for the truce, all but the lone Communist present, Pierre Villon, voted to accept it.

Two who voted “yes” at the meeting, Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Léo Hamon, were sent with one other man to the Swedish consulate where Nordling shuttled between rooms containing the French and German representatives. It did not take long to ratify the agreement, but the truce almost fell apart before it had time to take effect. Around three o’clock, the Gestapo stopped a car carrying Alexandre Parodi and two of his Gaullist colleagues. They found maps and plans of the uprising, and took the trio to a Gestapo office. They likely would have been shot, except that a German intelligence agent named Émile “Bobby” Bender convinced the Gestapo to phone General von Choltitz for instructions.[13] Von Choltitz ordered the three men, described as “members of the de Gaulle government,” brought to him at the Hôtel Meurice. Then he called Nordling, who arrived quickly and identified the trio.

By the time Parodi was released, around 6:30, many Parisians were in the streets celebrating. They also assumed the curfew had been cancelled, but this was not the case, and German soldiers fired over the heads of crowds. An FFI radio station went on the air long enough to play the national anthem.

Colonel Rol-Tanguy, convinced that as long as the Germans were in the streets of Paris Frenchmen should fight them, announced he was not accepting the truce. Remembering the electrifying message, Tous aux Barricades!, that had summoned people into the streets of Paris on more than one occasion, Rol ordered the printing of posters bearing that slogan, directing people to erect barricades around the city. Before the week was out, four hundred such barriers would be thrown up. They were made of paving stones torn from the street, trees that had been cut down, furniture dragged out to create an obstacle, and anything else Parisians could get their hands on. “Peuple de Paris,” one poster exhorted, “the long-awaited day has arrived! French and Allied troops are at the gates of Paris. It is the sacred duty of all Parisians to do battle! The hour of national resurrection has sounded.” The German occupiers of the City of Light might be prepared for a peaceful end to the Occupation, but the citizens of Paris were not.

During a ninety-kilometre drive into Cherbourg and the headquarters of General Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle reflected on what he’d heard of events in Paris. When he met Eisenhower, he was told the pace of the Allied advance was picking up all along the front. General Patton’s 3rd Army would soon cross the River Seine south of Paris, while the American 1st Army under General Hodges would make the leap north of the city. Meanwhile, General Montgomery’s British and Canadian forces were advancing toward Rouen on the east bank of the Seine. De Gaulle was surprised there had been no mention of entering Paris. “I don’t see why you cross the Seine everywhere, yet at Paris and Paris alone you do not cross,” he told Eisenhower.[14] This was de Gaulle’s first meeting with Eisenhower since before D-Day.

Both men were feeling edgy and de Gaulle sensed he was embarrassing the supreme commander. It was all a matter of strategy, Eisenhower explained; he didn’t want to risk the destruction of Paris and the heavy loss of civilian life that might come from a direct assault. It would be preferable to bypass the city, returning to it afterwards. Anyway, the Resistance had started too soon, Eisenhower added.

“Why too soon,” de Gaulle asked, “since at this very moment your forces are at the Seine? The fate of Paris is of fundamental concern to the French government.”[15]

Left unsaid, de Gaulle may have thought, was the matter of feeding Paris. Once liberated, the well-being of this hungry city would become a joint French and Allied responsibility; it would take four thousand tons of supplies a day to support the five million people in Paris and its suburbs. Was it that the Allies had no wish to divert army supplies to satisfy the hunger of famished Parisians? De Gaulle added, ominously, that if necessary he would personally order General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division to move forward. Eisenhower, possessed of diplomatic skills rare among generals, made the decision to soothe de Gaulle’s feelings. He told him it would not be long before he would give the order to march on Paris. General Leclerc and the 2nd Armoured Division would be the ones to get the call.

Settling for that assurance, de Gaulle and General Koenig steered for Rennes, passing through “demolished cities and burned-out villages” en route to the Breton capital. People gathered to greet him along the road and the streets of the towns were bedecked with flags and flowers. At each place he spoke briefly and led the townspeople in “La Marseillaise.” That night, standing in the rain in Rennes, de Gaulle addressed a large crowd that included the mayor and his council and the general’s own newly appointed commissioner. The next day, de Gaulle made it as far as Laval and delivered another of the impromptu speeches he would repeat hundreds of times all across France. He began work on a letter to General Eisenhower which he sent via General Koenig on August 22.

De Gaulle used the letter to renew his argument for an immediate drive on Paris:

The information I have received from Paris today makes me think that in view of the almost complete disappearance of the police and of the German forces in Paris and the extreme shortage of food there, serious trouble is to be expected in the capital very shortly. I believe it necessary to have Paris occupied by the French and Allied forces as soon as possible even if it means a certain amount of fighting and a certain amount of damage within the city.[16]

To Eisenhower, the pressure to bow to de Gaulle had become irresistible. He scrawled a note across the top of the letter before sending it to his assistant, General Bedell Smith: “It looks now as if we’d be compelled to go into Paris. Bradley [American ground forces commander] and his G-2 [Intelligence] think we can and must walk in.”[17]

General von Choltitz held the telephone from his ear. It was the only way he could soften the berating he was receiving from the new commander of German forces in France, Field Marshall Walter Model. Model had skilfully extracted the remnants of German 7th Army from the trap of the Falaise Gap, and now it was up to him to oversee the defence of Paris. Hitler had told him to “hold the Paris bridgehead at any price … regardless of the city’s destruction.”[18] It would take two hundred thousand men, he told Hitler, knowing that no such force could be assembled for such an unlikely task. Now, he was on the phone to von Choltitz. General Model accused the Paris commander of having lost control of the city. There were even rumours he was negotiating with terrorists. Von Choltitz denied the charges, but he couldn’t put out of his mind the fact that the truce agreement he had made with the Resistance was not working very well. Barricades were going up in the streets and sharpshooters were picking off German troops. In the last twenty-four hours he’d lost another seventy-five men.

Von Choltitz had no sooner put down the phone than he was confronted by Otto Abetz, the truculent German ambassador who, it seemed, had his fingers in every intrigue of Nazi-occupied Paris. His years in France had brought him to an intimate familiarity with French culture (he was married to a beautiful French woman), but it was said of him that he “loved France rather as a peasant does the livestock he will one day eat.”[19] Abetz, no doubt already having chosen the hour he would leave Paris, asked von Choltitz how he could be of use to him.

“My dear Ambassador,” von Choltitz replied, “in what way could you be useful to me?”

Abetz had a ready answer: “I could send to Headquarters and to Ribbentrop [Nazi foreign minister] a signal condemning your brutal behaviour in Paris.”

And so he did, thereby lifting from von Choltitz’s head the threat of condemnation for any failure to enthusiastically execute the Führer’s orders. These were growing more frantic by the hour. The latest demanded that Paris be “transformed into a heap of rubble.” The last German defender must, if necessary, “be buried beneath it.”

Among the members of the CNR, second thoughts about the truce spread on Monday and Tuesday. Colonel Rol-Tanguy, having rejected it outright, told the FFI to step up its attacks on such German strong points as the Palais du Luxembourg and the École Militaire. The latest FFI success was the occupation of the Hôtel Matignon, traditional home of the head of the French government. Alexandre Parodi established himself there and began issuing orders to his appointees throughout the city. By Tuesday afternoon, the 22nd, the truce no longer had widespread support. In the name of the Paris Liberation Committee, Parodi signed the order to renew the insurrection. He didn’t bother to refer the proclamation to the CNR. His statement bristled with determination:

The struggle continues. It must be prosecuted until the enemy is driven from the Paris region. More than ever now, all must take part in the fight. Respond to the general order of mobilization. Join the FFI. The population must use all means of preventing the movement of the enemy. Cut down trees, dig anti-tank ditches, erect barricades. It will be a victorious people who will welcome the Allies.[20]

Parodi’s order added yet more confusion to a tumultuous situation where no one had a complete picture of what was happening. It was amid this disorder that a Paris doctor, Robert Monod, sent a letter to Colonel Rol-Tanguy proposing that a mission be sent through the German lines to tell the Americans of the urgent need of their intervention in Paris. When he got no answer, he began phoning contacts in the FFI, and at six o’clock Sunday evening, Rol-Tanguy’s chief of staff, Major Roger Gallois, showed up at his apartment. The FFI had decided Monod’s gambit was worth a try. They left in Monod’s car at 5:30 Monday morning, carrying a Red Cross pass that allowed them into the front lines.

That evening they reached a sanatorium that Monad knew of at Saint Nom la Bretèche, thirty kilometres from Versailles. From there, a contact pointed Gallois to the American lines while Monod returned to Paris. Just before dark, Gallois slipped through a forest and found himself at an American forward base. It took him several hours to convince the soldiers to take him to the main American camp a few miles behind the front line. He eventually told his story to an intelligence officer who recognized the value of Gallois’s information: the fact that an uprising was underway in Paris, barricades were being erected, and the German high command had accepted a truce — one that was already being violated. It was now Tuesday, August 22, and at 1:30 in the morning, Gallois found himself in front of a sleepy American general, George S. Patton. A lively discussion ended with Patton producing a bottle of champagne and offering a toast to victory.

Later in the day, Patton had Gallois flown to Le Mans, a city of fine museums and public gardens that had become the nerve centre of the American forward operation. Patton told General Omar Bradley, commander of all American ground forces, of what he’d learned from Gallois about the situation in Paris. Bradley himself flew to Le Mans, where General Jacques Leclerc was waiting at the airport with Gallois for Bradley’s arrival. Over the noise of the still running engines, Leclerc was told, “You win. They’ve decided to send you straight to Paris.” Standing on the Le Mans air strip, Bradley impressed on Gallois the seriousness of the steps they were taking: “A grave decision has been made and we three bear the responsibility for it: me, because I am giving the order to take Paris; General Leclerc, because he is the one who has to carry out this order; and you, because it is based on the information that you have brought that we have acted.”[21]

The order from General Eisenhower had come just in time to prevent an irreparable split in the Allied front. General de Gaulle, irritated and frustrated by what he considered to be further stalling, had already given Leclerc the order to launch a reconnaissance column toward Paris. To lead it, Leclerc chose Major Jacques de Guillebon, a veteran of African fighting. He had commanded a regiment of black riflemen from Senegal, the West African colony, and had played a key part in the capture of Kufra in Libya. Twenty-four hours later, de Guillebon’s column was well on its way to Rambouillet, the jumping off point for Paris. The road to the capital now was open to whoever dared take it; any opposition would come from German defenders, not from dissenting voices in the Allied High Command.