CHAPTER 14
Paris Liberated
Paris, the capital of worldly wisdom, used to everything, astonished by nothing, neither by disastrous failure, dazzling success, excessive abundance nor extreme privation; Paris which understands and loves life and knows that death is inevitable; Paris used to tempests and to the ashes from which it knows it will surely rise again.
— Alice Jahier
France Remembered, 1944
While Paris slept uneasily, forward units of General Jacques Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division spent the night probing the outer ring of the German defences. Warnings had come from the Resistance of enemy troop concentrations, some supported by panzer units, at key locations: the École Militaire near the Eiffel Tower; the Palais Bourbon, home of the National Assembly, overlooking the Seine; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Les Invalides; the Luxembourg Gardens (pre-war meeting place of the French Senate and now Luftwaffe headquarters); and the Prince Eugène barracks at the Place de la République. The fact Captain Dronne had been able to skirt these danger zones on his way to l’Hôtel de Ville did not mean the Germans would not fight ferociously to hold their ground. Shortly after midnight, a detachment of Colonel de Langlade’s column that had secured the pont de Sevres stealthily made its way across the bridge. Once on the right bank of the Seine, a regiment moved cautiously down the avenue de Bellevue. It was pitch-dark. The battle of Paris was at hand.
As Commandant Jacques Massu led his men forward, they could hear sounds of Germans soldiers advancing toward them. A Moroccan infantryman caught sight of a large artillery piece pulled by a half-track — an armoured vehicle with wheels at the front and caterpillar tracks at the rear. When he cried out in alarm, German machine guns set up along the side of the road began firing aimlessly in the dark. During the next half hour, bitter hand-to-hand fighting punctuated by grenade blasts shattered the night calm. The half-track blew up when a grenade exploded its gas tank.[1] Massu, a veteran of the African campaigns who had commanded a colonial unit in the Tibesti Mountains of Chad, remembered the flames lighting up the area enough to allow the French troops to “adjust their fire and not kill each other.” The hurried tossing of grenades down a staircase that connected the avenue with a lower street turned back a fresh attack. The Germans abandoned three armoured cars and three guns before retreating. Massu’s men estimated they’d killed forty to fifty Germans and taken prisoner a dozen wounded. For the rest of the night, French patrols fanned out from the site of the battle, alert to any return of the enemy.[2]
At dawn on that never-to-be-forgotten Friday, August 25, Commandant Massu reassembled his men and began a march that would take them to the Place de l’Étoile by half past nine. On the way, they laid siege to the Hôtel Majestic, a secondary German headquaters located just off the Étoile. Massu, a brawler of a man almost as tall as de Gaulle, but much heavier, swept into a room filled with German officers. When he shouted “Heraus! Heraus!” (Out! Out!), the startled officers threw their hands into the air and surrendered. After securing the Majestic, Massu and his men raced to the Arc de Triomphe, where they paused to tear down the Nazi banner and run up the Tricolour. As Massu bowed his head in tribute to the Unknown Soldier buried at the Étoile,* a shell from a German tank in the Place de la Concorde whistled through the arch and fell on bare paving stones. Fortunately, there were no injuries. Massu’s detachment next stormed down the Champs Élysées toward the Place de la Concorde where some of the fiercest fighting of the liberation was to take place.
Fighting French columns had streamed into Paris from early morning, welcomed by delirious citizens up at dawn to celebrate their liberation. The mist had lifted to reveal a sunny day. At six o’clock, Simone de Beauvoir ran along the boulevard Raspail to see “the Leclerc division parade on the avenue d’Orléans** and along the sidewalks, an immense crowd applauded … From time to time, a shot was fired; a sniper on the roofs, someone fell, was carried off, but no one seemed upset; enthusiasm stamped out fear.”[3] On every route taken by the 2nd Division, people flooded into the streets with offerings of wine and food, while women covered the faces of the soldiers with so much lipstick some looked as if they had been bloodied. Church bells pealed continuously. Those of Leclerc’s men who had never been in Paris — especially black colonial soldiers — felt themselves in a dream world, receiving offerings beyond anything they’d ever imagined. Many who had family in the city handed down notes from their tanks to people in the crowd asking them to phone their relatives to announce their return.
It was four years to the day since General Leclerc had joined the Free French in the Cameroon, and he began this day by following Colonel Billotte’s column through the Porte de Gentilly at 7:45. Immaculate in an American-type uniform topped by a French kepi, Leclerc moved on to Gare Montparnasse where he established his headquarters. Colonel Billotte was on the Île de la Cité at 8:30, receiving the congratulations of policemen defending the Préfecture. Colonel Louis Dio’s men had moved through the adjacent Porte d’Orléans and split into two groups, one headed for Les Invalides and the other for the Palais Bourbon and the Quai d’Orsay. The main body of Colonel de Langlade’s column began the day by taking the big Renault factory before entering through Porte de Saint-Cloud and making for the Étoile. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division, meanwhile, had come in through the Porte d’Italie opening that Dronne had used the night before. The American regiments turned eastward at the Place de la Bastille and made their way along the longest street in Paris, the avenue Daumesnil, leading to the Bois de Vincennes at the eastern edge of the city. Once there, they would regroup for the final push through eastern France toward the Rhine River.
Amid fighting between regiments of the 2nd Armoured Division and German defenders, random firing from rooftops and windows was killing French and Germans alike. Volunteers, mostly young and mostly men, who had joined FFI units, were picking off German troops from upper-floor windows. Wearing homemade Cross of Lorraine armbands, they used any weapon they could lay their hands on — First World War rifles, hunting guns, pistols, or weapons taken from captured Germans. At many points, German snipers killed civilians as they rushed to the aid of wounded Resistance members. Red Cross nurses ran to rescue the victims. In the Place de la Concorde, German troops lined up six young men and one woman against a wall and shot them. Other Germans fired aimlessly into any window flying a French flag. When the FFI surrounded the Prince Eugène barracks to prevent its twelve hundred German troops from breaking out, a steady barrage of shots from inside kept the Resistance at bay. Germans who tried to escape the barracks through the subway tunnels under the Place de la République found themselves trapped in bitter fighting, with exploding grenades and the flash of rifle fire the only light in the dark passageways. Germans who were taken prisoner were marched off, grim-faced and sullen, their hands on their heads, to be confined in buildings under control of the FFI.
On the streets, Parisians began to parade known collaborators who had been rousted from their homes. In a scene repeated throughout Paris, four women accused of having consorted with Germans — collaboration horizontale — were marched down boulevard Saint-Michel, their heads sheared “as bald as babies.” The crowd jeered. “That woman,” a bystander said pointing to one who glared defiantly at the crowd, “had a husband in Germany as a prisoner. He escaped and returned to her, but she betrayed him and he was shot.”[4]
The barricades that had been hastily thrown up to block German tanks had by now become barriers to the liberating forces. At an intersection near the Trocadero, Claire Fauteux came upon a crowd busily demolishing a barricade to allow troops to move along rue Jean de la Fontaine. The Canadian painter, who had been stranded in Paris four years earlier, had endured a German prison camp and for the past two years had lived under Gestapo surveillance. She had spent the morning dodging bullets and crouching behind sandbags as she joined in the joyous welcome to the Fighting French. Her happiness helped blot out bitter memories of Nazi brutalities she’d witnessed since being put on a prison train that took her to Besançon in eastern France. She would not forget seeing the mother of a newborn baby who died after being dragged from her bed, or the Englishwoman beaten and kicked for stepping off the train before its departure from the Gare de l’Est. Her thoughts were diverted by the arrival of a Sherman tank that spurred the work of demolition. When Fauteux climbed up to shake the hand of the young French soldier who had poked his head out of its turret, she warned him about the snipers. “Do be careful,” she said, “They are firing from the rooftops.”[5] Some were Germans, others were members of the dreaded Milice, pro-German traitors doing the work of the Nazis. As the soldier lifted himself from the tank, Fauteux heard two shots and saw him stagger and fall over the side, blood pouring from his mouth. He died at her feet.
At Place Denfert-Rochereau, where Simone de Beauvoir had run to catch a glimpse of General Leclerc, Elisabeth de Miribel paused in her little sports car when Leclerc’s column halted before a barricade at the Lion de Belfort, the huge statue dominating the square. Résistants had torn up the pavement to build the barricade, but Leclerc’s tank rolled easily over the stones. Soldiers cried with joy as they were showered with kisses and flowers. While de Miribel waited for the rubble to be removed so she could drive on, a tall, beautiful woman approached her. “What can I do for you?” she asked. Elisabeth de Miribel gave her the phone number of her parents and asked her to let them know she had arrived safely in Paris. Later, she took lunch with a Resistance cell on rue Schoelcher before heading for Gare Montparnasse, where General Leclerc would await the arrival of General de Gaulle. The hundred-year-old, low, grey building, with its slanting wooden floors, unswept and dirty, held silent echoes of the footsteps of thousands of travellers who had trod its boards. She noticed that a wooden table and a few chairs had been set out on the departure platform in preparation for a momentous ceremony later in the day.[6]
Before that could happen, General von Choltitz would have to be induced to surrender without carrying out Hitler’s orders to destroy the city. And the surrender had to be taken by the Fighting French, in order to fulfill General de Gaulle’s orders that the Communist-led uprising be given no opportunity to take credit for freeing the city. General Von Choltitz, his monocle firmly in place, took his last meal in the Hôtel Meurice at noon, having rejected a demand from Colonel Billotte — conveyed through Consul General Nordling — that he lay down his arms.
“I don’t accept ultimatums,” he stuffily replied.[7]
While he ate, his orderly packed a suitcase of clothing for him, and after lunch von Chotitz told his officers to prepare for surrender, but only to Fighting French or U.S. soldiers, not to the Resistance. He had issued no order to destroy any buildings, bridges, or other landmarks.[8] Von Choltiz could clearly hear the fighting going on around the rue de Rivoli and Place de la Concorde, where a squadron of Billotte’s tanks was engaged in battle with German defenders. One tank, the Mort-Homme, burned to bits on the rue Royale, and a second, the Douaumont, was abandoned in the Place de la Concorde, its dead left inside it.
The first soldiers of the 2nd Armoured Division reached the Hôtel Meurice around two o’clock. Lieutenant Henri Karcher, anxious to reconnect with his Parisian family, rushed the front door of the hotel with three of his men. Smashing it open, Karcher spotted a huge picture of Adolf Hitler hanging in the lobby. He turned his machine gun on it, ducked behind the reception desk, and threw a phosphorous grenade in the direction of an old German soldier firing at them from behind a pile of sandbags. Karcher saw the old man’s helmet clatter to the floor as the German fell dead. A second Frenchman, Private Walter Herreman, aimed his flamethrower at the elevator cage.
As the lobby filled with smoke and flames, the remaining Germans threw their hands into the air. Karcher bounded up the stairs to the first floor where he confronted a German who quickly surrendered and agreed to take him to von Choltitz. Opening the door to where the general sat, Karcher saluted and announced: “Lieutenant Henri Karcher of the Army of General de Gaulle.” He asked von Chotitz if he was ready to surrender. The German said he was.
More French soldiers were pouring into the room. One of them, Major Jean de la Horie, escorted von Choltitz to a waiting armoured car and stuffed him inside, barely escaping a mob of civilians screaming “Le général boche, le général boche, tuez-le!” (kill him). An FFI man knocked von Choltitz’s valise from the hands of his orderly and as it fell open, people grabbed at the general’s uniform that had dropped on the road.
Back in the Meurice, Karcher picked up a telephone, asked for Auteuil 04.21, and spoke to his stepfather, a retired general who did not think highly of de Gaulle. Karcher told him he had “just captured a German general, his staff, and his flag.”[9]
It was shortly after three o’clock when Major de la Horie, with an escort of foot soldiers and an armoured car, delivered General von Choltitz to the Préfecture de police on Île de la Cité. Colonel Billotte and twenty policemen took von Choltitz through the courtyard and into the building. General Leclerc was waiting for the German in the billiard room, with sets of the surrender paper, typewritten and reproduced on a Gestetner machine, laid out on the table. With Leclerc was de Gaulle’s military designate to the Resistance, General Chaban-Delmas. The préfect de police, Charles Luizet, and the commander of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, Major General Raymond Barton, stood close by.
The surrender document was in the name of the Provisional Government of the French Republic and it consisted of six clauses. The German command was to order that all its units cease fire and fly a white flag, with arms to be collected and troops mustered in the open. No sooner had Leclerc and von Choltitz exchanged the formalities demanded by their positions, though, than Colonel Rol-Tanguy burst into the room with his deputy, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont. Rol was furious that he had not been invited to the ceremony. There was no mention of the FFI in the surrender document and it failed to provide a place for Rol-Tanguy’s signature. He argued volubly with Leclerc while von Choltitz, listening with his imperfect French, must have wondered what the dispute was about. General Barton, not wishing to be part of a French political argument, left the room. It was only after Charles Luizet argued in favour of Rol-Tanguy being allowed to sign the surrender that Leclerc gave in. With a German officer acting as interpreter, everyone around the table began a clause by clause review of the document. Von Choltitz asked for one minor change. It was made, and the surrender was duly signed.
Leclerc ordered that teams of French and German officers drive together throughout the city and make the surrender known to the public. He led the German general out of the Préfecture and into an armoured car for the drive to Gare Montparnasse, where they were to await General de Gaulle. Proceeding down boulevard Saint-Michel and along boulevard Montparnasse, Leclerc stood while von Choltiz sat behind. Rol-Tanguy’s Communist deputy, Kriegel-Valrimont, drove the car.
The crowds cheered Leclerc and directed insults at von Choltitz. Arriving at Gare Montparnasse, von Choltitz clutched his chest. The stress of surrendering Paris may have brought on a heart attack. He was taken to the baggage master’s office where he extracted a pill from his pocket and downed it with a drink of water. For a moment it was feared he had poisoned himself, but this was not the case. After resting, he asked for a sheet of paper. On it, General von Choltitz wrote out the cease-fire order: “Resistance in the military district and defense points is immediately to be stopped.”[10]
Charles de Gaulle spent most of Friday as he had the day before, pacing the flagstone terrace of Château Rambouillet while receiving reports on the progress of the 2nd Armoured Division. He had put on a plain khaki uniform, adorned only with the insignia of the Cross of Lorraine and a patch that bore the symbol of FFI ground forces, a red sword between two blue wings. De Gaulle’s mind was on the plans he had made for his return to the capital. All that he did, he had decided, would be aimed at fusing “all minds into a single national purpose” — and to demonstrate that “the authority of the state” was once more on display in France.[11] At about three o’clock, came the signal to move. The motorcade of three black sedans escorted by two Jeeps armed with machine guns swept out of the village and headed east, picking up Route national 20 as it neared Paris. De Gaulle and General Juin rode in the back seat of an open, black Hotchkiss. De Gaulle was ecstatic at the thought of returning to his beloved Paris. He felt both “gripped by emotion and filled with serenity.”
By the time the convoy reached Longjumeau, a market town less than twenty kilometres south of Paris, cheering crowds formed a “jubilant tide,” until, on reaching Porte d’Orleans, the mob became almost impassable. Instead of proceeding to l’Hôtel de Ville as the crowd had expected, de Gaulle branched onto an almost deserted avenue du Maine. He reached Gare Montparnasse shortly before four o’clock; there he was taken directly to Platform No. 3. General Leclerc, his red kepi tilted to one side and his uniform now sweat-stained and dusty, was the first to welcome him. De Gaulle hugged his old friend, delighted that Leclerc’s troops had “brought off a complete victory without the city’s suffering the demolitions or the population the losses that had been feared.”[12] De Gaulle reacted with surprise as he was introduced to his military delegate, General Chaban-Delmas. The man was so young! “Well, I’ll be damned,” de Gaulle was heard to mutter. Next in line was the Communist, Colonel Rol-Tanguy. De Gaulle congratulated him for having “driven the enemy from our streets, decimated and demoralized.”[13] Rol-Tanguy must have cursed silently to himself; the presence of the general meant there would be no new Paris Commune, after all.
Standing off to one side, the American, General Barton, was content to leave the spotlight to his French comrades. When de Gaulle took his seat, spectacles on his nose, he read the surrender document on which the ink had barely had time to dry. He stiffened when he saw Colonel Rol-Tanguy’s signature on the paper, an indication that the Germans had surrendered to the Resistance as well as to the Provisional Government. “That is not exactly true,” he told Leclerc. “You were the highest ranking officer, therefore the only person responsible.”[14] Then de Gaulle read out the proclamation that had been issued that morning on behalf of “the French nation.” He told Leclerc he had no business allowing the Resistance to be a party to the surrender. Leclerc apologized for his error, and the two embraced again.
De Gaulle’s next embrace was for his son, Philippe, who was present as an ensign in the 2nd Armoured Regiment of Naval Rifles. He kissed Philippe on both cheeks and wished him well as he sent him off with a German major to take the surrender of troops at the Palais-Bourbon.
The ceremony at Gare Montparnsse completed, de Gaulle returned to his car and made for his next point of call, the War Ministry on rue Saint-Dominique. As the four-car convoy rolled north, a burst of fire from nearby houses caused everyone in the cars but de Gaulle to duck for cover. The convoy veered off boulevard des Invalides and onto rue Vaneau and rue de Borgogne for the run to the War Ministry at 14 rue Saint-Dominique. Its long, low stoneworks loomed up before de Gaulle, giving, as it always had, the appearance of a structure formidable and dark. A unit of the Garde Républicaine waited in the courtyard to present arms. When de Gaulle reached his old office, he found everything just as it had been when he left on the night of June 10, 1940. “Not a piece of furniture, not a rug, not a curtain had been disturbed.”[15] He had brief meetings with Charles Luizit, the prefect of police, and Alexandre Parodi, his delegate-general. Law and order and food supplies were of utmost priority, and it was on those matters that their brief discussions centred.
De Gaulle was urged to move onto l’Hôtel de Ville where leaders of the FFI and the Committee of National Resistance were awaiting him. “Let them wait,” he declared. He had no intention of elevating the Resistance to the level of government. Instead, he would stop next at the Préfecture de police in order to demonstrate his appreciation for the support of the police. At seven o’clock, de Gaulle stood in the courtyard of the Préfecture, where he received the adulation of the assembled officers “now trembling with joy and pride.” It was clear to de Gaulle that the police had at last “revenged themselves for a long humiliation.” From the Préfecture, de Gaulle went on foot to l’Hôtel de Ville, pressing through the crowd along avenue Victoria to the square in front of the city hall. Another guard of honour, this time made up of FFI irregulars, many with tears in their eyes, saluted his entrance.[16]
A tumultuous roar filled the building as de Gaulle made his way to the foot of the grand staircase leading to the great salon on the first floor. Waiting for him were Georges Bidault, president of the CNR, André Tollet, head of the Paris Liberation Committee, and Marcel Flouret, prefect of the Seine. As the crowd clustered around, de Gaulle felt surrounded by “combatants of the same battle, an incomparable link … the excitement of the dangers risked and the cataclysms survived.” Climbing the stairs to the great hall, he made a point of asking Flouret, “How is the purge coming along? The whole business must be finished within a few weeks.”[17] He was signalling that collaborators must be dealt with speedily.
Once in the hall, the crowd surged around de Gaulle as cameras flashed and everyone began talking at once. Georges Bidault called the crowd to quiet and began to speak. “Here is the man who we have been waiting for four years … it is splendid!” De Gaulle had not prepared a speech and he had no podium from which to address the throng. Had we been there to witness the momentous occasion, we would have seen a man towering over those who stood around him, calm and even aloof, surveying all about him with cool detachment. Bareheaded, driven by a determination summoned up from the struggle that had consumed his every moment for the past four years, his gesturing hands kept time with his words as he spoke:
Let us not conceal the emotion we all feel, both men and women, who are now here and at home in a Paris that has been roused to liberate itself and has done so of its own volition. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!
Since the enemy which held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to her home. She returns bloody, but quite resolute. She returns there enlightened by the immense lesson, but more certain than ever of her duties and of her rights.
I speak of her duties first, and I will sum them all up by saying that for now it is a matter of the duties of war. The enemy is staggering, but he is not beaten yet. He remains on our soil.
It will not even be enough that we have, with the help of our dear and admirable Allies, chased him from our home for us to consider ourselves satisfied after what had happened. We want to enter his territory as is fitting, as victors.
This is why the French vanguard has entered Paris with guns blazing. This is why the great French army from Italy had landed in the south and is advancing rapidly up the Rhone valley. This is why our brave and dear forces of the interior are going to arm themselves with modern weapons. It is for this revenge, this vengeance and justice, that we will keep fighting until the last day, until the day of total and complete victory.
There was more, but the crowd was already entranced by the lyrical phrases that had enveloped the room. The task done, as film of the occasion would show, de Gaulle gulped nervously, inhaling deeply. Cries of “Vive de Gaulle” and “Vive la France” followed him as he strode into the office of the prefect.
Now would be the time, Georges Bidault thought, for de Gaulle to “proclaim the Republic before the people who have gathered here.”[18] De Gaulle refused; the Republic had never ceased to exist — despite the actions of Vichy, now null and void — and as he was president of the government of the Republic, there was no need to proclaim it. Instead, de Gaulle stepped onto a small balcony outside the prefect’s office. To the horror of those behind him, he leaned over the low railing to wave to the mass of people assembled below, oblivious to the danger of falling. A terrified Bidault grabbed de Gaulle by his belt and stiffened himself to hold on. In a moment, de Gaulle stepped back, smiling.
The echoes of another singing of “La Marseillaise” followed de Gaulle from l’Hôtel de Ville. Returning to the War Ministry, he found that Commandant de Lignières had done his work well. His only instructions had been: “De Gaulle will sleep tonight at the Ministry … prepare a dinner for fifty people.” It was by chance that de Lignières had been told of a master chef who was out of work. Summoned, the man shamefacedly admitted he had been in the service of the Vichy government and had been sent to Paris to wait for Marshall Pétain’s return. He was pleased to serve the Provisional Government and with the supply of a dozen chickens, the menu that night featured coq au vin and foie gras, with vegetables, American rations, and French wine. The City of Light with its “symbols of our glories” that had meant so much to Charles de Gaulle as a young man was free now, and the soldier had come home.