When Paris Went Dark (40 page)

Picasso celebrates the Liberation.
(Photograph by Francis Lee)

While waiting for the city to be liberated, Picasso painted a joyously liberating work,
The Triumph of Pan,
which he told friends he worked on as he listened to the battle going on around him. It depicts a Dionysian festival, one that might celebrate the joy of freedom from want and fear. The work is small and done in watercolor and gouache, but its exuberance belies all the somber work that had preceded it during Picasso’s volitional exile in Paris during the war years. In the words of one critic, “Picasso seems to have equated the reappearance of Dionysus, ‘his epiphany as a bringer of happiness after [a] dark period
of hunting and sacrifice,’ with the deliverance of Paris and, by extension, the world after the great sacrifice symbolized by the war.”
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While painting, Picasso must have wondered: What is going on? Who is winning? Are the Germans regrouping? Where are the other Allies? Jean Guéhenno gives a tersely vivid account of trying to cross the Seine and finding himself trapped near Les Halles, the great marketplace on the Right Bank: “German tanks were patrolling. As I was trying to get across the Boulevard de Sébastopol, one of them began firing only thirty meters from me, decapitating a woman and gutting a man. On side streets fifty meters from that scene, strangely enough, people were sitting on their stoops gossiping. Curiosity and joy are at their strongest.”
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The city had become a patchwork of violence mixed with celebration, both sides firing indiscriminately not just at each other but also into crowds. The passions of the last four years had created an explosion of fury, misdirected and unable to distinguish combatants from tired and frightened citizens. Many Parisian civilians were fearless. Running openly into crossroads, they would tear down the innumerable German-language signs that had decorated their city for more than four years. Film clips show that not all the panels were destroyed; some were taken off as trophies and are probably still in attics and wine cellars across Paris.
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Such small dramas filled the forty-eight hours that separated the erection of the first barricades, the first openly defiant insurgency against the Occupation, from the late-night arrival of the first French-manned tanks of the Second Armored Division, which had rolled through the city’s Porte d’Orléans. Carrying the first French soldiers in Paris since June of 1940, this small tank force, under Captain Raymond Dronne, had sped along the side roads and backstreets of the suburbs, crossed the Seine by the Pont d’Austerlitz, and driven along the quays on the Right Bank to reach the Hôtel de Ville just before midnight on August 24. Few Parisians knew this, for curfews had prevented them
from leaving their homes, and the still Nazi-controlled radio only reported what seemed to be repeated instances of successful German defense against the victors of Normandy, who were trying to reach the city. But everyone heard the giant bells of Notre-Dame begin to ring, something they had not heard since the Occupation had begun.

Even after the Germans had surrendered or left, small battles still were occurring throughout Paris. By then the fights were part of a civil war between the FFI and remnants of the Vichy Milice. Uniforms did not distinguish the combatants; the Milice had changed into civilian clothes, some even putting on FFI armbands as a disguise. Among the latter were not only last-ditch supporters of the Vichy regime but also young men trying to escape Paris alive, to return to their homes in the countryside. No one knew whom to trust, and despite de Gaulle’s appointment of General Pierre Koenig, Gaullist commander in chief of the FFI, as military commander of Paris, disorder would rule the streets for a few more days.

On Saturday, August 26, Berthe Auroy, our schoolteacher who lived in Montmartre, had gone to the Champs-Élysées to watch de Gaulle strut in victory down the grand avenue.
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Everyone was excited, laughing, dressed as if for Bastille Day in all sorts of blue, white, and red regalia. On her way back along the Rue de Rivoli, she and her sister heard machine-gun fire and the whistle of bullets. The FFI irregulars yelled at everyone to lie on the sidewalk, to keep their heads down. Then, at a break in the firing, they urged the frightened crowd to run for the Jardin des Tuileries. But inside the garden’s gates, the firing continued, and Auroy and her sister again ran, fell to the ground, got up, and ran a few more yards, until they reached the Louvre. There they saw a group of people in a line, seeking refuge, with the aid of a ladder, via a service entrance; someone had broken a large windowpane, and the civilians
were climbing into the museum. Berthe and her sister ascended to find themselves

With the arrival of Leclerc’s division, there were touching scenes of French men and women being reunited after long separations. The soldiers and officers who were Parisians themselves jumped off their motorbikes and tanks to run into the nearest café to call home: “Mom, I’m coming; I’m almost in Paris.” One writer described a scene in which a young tanker sees his father in the crowd of Parisians yelling their pleasure at seeing their liberators. “That’s my papa,” he screamed; jumping from his vehicle, he ran up to the stunned elder man. The father just stared, then grabbed his son’s cheeks with both hands and pulled him so close and so tight that bystanders had to separate them. Scenes like this, often filmed and photographed, justified de Gaulle’s canny insistence that the first Allied troops to enter the capital be French.
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Von Choltitz surrendered three times on August 25 before he was spirited off to England, then to a prison camp in Mississippi, of all places. The first time was at the Hôtel Meurice, on the Rue de Rivoli, where the military commander of Paris had been installed since June of 1940. Von Choltitz had ordered his guards to put up a modest resistance before giving up the building; when French irregulars burst into his office, one demanded awkwardly: “Sprechen Deutsch?” Von Choltitz, who had laid his arms on his desk, answered suavely: “Yes. A bit better than you.” He was taken by a French tank commander to the Préfecture de police, where he officially surrendered to General Philippe Leclerc, commander of the Free French Second Armored Division. Von Choltitz knew he had lost the city when, the evening before, he had heard the great bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral ringing for the first time since the Occupation began, signaling a new day in Paris. Soon every church bell in the city was vigorously pealing. The general had picked up his phone and called General Speidel at the Wehrmacht headquarters near Soissons, some fifty miles north of Paris; putting the receiver up to the window, he said: “Please, listen. Did you hear?” Speidel replied, “Yes; I hear bells.” Said von Choltitz, “You heard well: the French-American army is entering Paris.”
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Finally, von Choltitz was taken to the Gare Montparnasse, the major railway station on the Left Bank, to sign official papers and an order that all German resistance cease. That order had to be transmitted by means of loudspeakers mounted in Jeeps that went to all the strongpoints left in the city. The last fortress, at the Palais du Luxembourg, finally surrendered at midday on August 25. Paris was liberated.

French soldiers are first into a liberated Paris.
(Musée du général Leclerc de Hauteclocque et de la Libération de Paris / Musée Jean Moulin EPPM)

Von Choltitz came out of all of this with shining colors, more than any other German leader of Paris during the Occupation. Though he manufactured much of his legend (“I saved Paris for the Allies!”), his patience and sangfroid most certainly kept France’s capital from being severely damaged during those hectic two weeks. Nevertheless, he had approved the deportation of more than three thousand political prisoners just a week before the surrender, and members of the Gestapo, at least those who had stayed until the last minute, were still tailing, arresting, and torturing “terrorists,” including those they would massacre in the Bois de Boulogne. In addition, among the reasons why Paris was not demolished were that General Speidel had refused to order the Luftwaffe to bomb it, and, fortuitously, perhaps, that von Choltitz did not have the personnel or the materiel to do the massive destruction demanded by Hitler.
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The anonymous authors of the United States Army’s
Pocket Guide to France
were quite aware that Paris would be one of the major attractions for the soon-to-be-victorious GIs. “If you get to Paris, the first thing to do is to buy a guide book, if there are any left after the Nazi tourists’ departure. Paris is in a sense the capital of Europe and regarded as one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world. We don’t know just what the war has done to Paris. These notes will assume that there’ll still be lots to see.”
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By the time the Americans had arrived in the almost German-free Paris, most of the street fighting had ended. Most of the Germans and their Vichy Milice supporters had been captured, wounded, or killed. Many of the captured were the bureaucrats who had overseen the Occupation, pouring out of the elegant Meurice, Majestic, Lutétia, and Raphael hotels at the first sign of the FFI or French soldiers entering their lobbies. There are reports that some patriotic Nazis fired on their more pusillanimous fellows as they crowded through doors, hands raised. Anywhere from one thousand to 1,500
résistants
and Parisian citizens died, and about 3,500 were wounded. About 130–150 members of the Second Armored Division were killed or died from wounds after the Liberation; they also lost a large number of tanks, half-tracks, and materiel, which shows that the Germans were not totally ineffective. Estimates of the number of Germans killed range from 2,500 to three thousand. The battle for Paris was not one of the major urban confrontations of the war, but it was not a skirmish, either.
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De Gaulle had insisted that the first Allied forces to enter Paris be French, and they were, as noted, the legendary Second Armored Division (Deuxième Division Blindée).
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They had been heavily outfitted by the Americans and were driving American tanks and trucks, wearing American uniforms and helmets, and carrying American gear. Thus, for the first time, Parisians saw close-up not only their victorious soldiers but also the significant role that the Americans were playing in the liberation of their nation. One of the most meaningful filmed events of the liberation of Paris occurred a day after de Gaulle had marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées: the American Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division and Fifth Armored Division, trooping the same path.
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This American show of force drew huge crowds; their enthusiasm brought smiles to the faces of the soldiers who had just endured the rigorous Normandy campaign and who would be involved in major battles for the next eight months as they made their way to the Rhine and into Germany. Grins and grit, the air of confident vigor, sent a clear message to the world: the Americans were in Europe to stay, not because they were imperialists but because without them Europe would have disintegrated.

And then came the Americans.
(Creative Commons)

All the same, there was distrust on both sides of the ledger. Had not French soldiers let the Wehrmacht roll over them in just a few weeks in 1940—and then sheepishly gone off to prison camps? Had they not left their wives and children behind to fend for themselves during the harsh Occupation? The Americans still did not have much respect for a country that had been so docile in defeat, and most viewed French culture as immoral. Officers reminded their men constantly that French girls were “too easy” and that they should be careful to avoid catching something. In return, the French still remembered the World War I American doughboys’ rough impatience with their mores. And almost immediately, the presence of American soldiers in Paris brought tension between them and the FFI irregulars. There appeared, in the opinion of the latter, to be a masculine entitlement on the part of the GIs, a strong hint that Paris and France now needed to be “remasculinized” in the image of a virile, conquering, confident, and smiling army. More important, the news brought to Paris by refugees from the Normandy front, where thousands of civilians had been hurt or killed and where whole city centers had disappeared, suggested the Americans had been rather careless in their bombing. Finally, stories—true and exaggerated—of the exuberant Yanks in their Jeeps, looting anything not nailed down, and their rough treatment of French women, including multiple episodes of rape, attenuated some of the joy at seeing these sons and grandsons of the First World War doughboys, who themselves had been especially rambunctious. Yet for the most part, the appearance of this new, powerful army temporarily overcame these differences as the French joyfully jumped on tanks and trucks to kiss, embrace, and give gifts to the Yanks. And after all,
weren’t they “sexy,” an erotic observation enhanced by their apparent innocence?
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“Le peuple français est bon et joli!” (The French people is good and pretty [sic]), yelled an American soldier awkwardly when a French microphone was put before him as he entered Paris. The American army only spent a few days in Paris after its liberation, but the memory of those healthy, young, and always grinning men, marching with a certain nonchalance in contrast to the memory of the rigidly disciplined Wehrmacht, would have a lasting effect on Paris’s collective memory of those joyful days. One of the Groult sisters wrote amusingly about seeing her first “liberator,” a blond, blue-eyed architecture student named Willis. Flora watched him from her balcony as he asked her neighbors in broken French for a place to get a bite to eat. She rushed down and in perfect English asked him up for a meal. Her mother and sister found him casual, intelligent, charming, and, for the first time in years, they felt comfortable talking to a man in uniform. Having been given permission to wash up, he casually removed his shirt in front of the women, all of whom noticed his white complexion, sunburned neck, and gently muscled chest. “[After his ablutions], we sat down to supper, and he ate without knowing it one of our last eggs. How could he have guessed, this little conqueror, that we only had four left?”
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Obviously, Willis had not read, or had forgotten, the admonition that could be found in the
Pocket Guide to France,
distributed by the millions to young Americans at the time of D-day:

After dinner, the sisters delightedly climbed into his Jeep, and the proud GI drove them around a Paris still delirious with the scent of freedom. The next day Willis came back with packages of bacon and stewed beef, but then he suddenly left Paris, and for good, off to continue the fight against a retreating but still dangerous Wehrmacht. “They are different, these free men, with their sun-browned skin, their innocent looks, rolled-up sleeves, who fight, kill, spend a little time with you, then leave.”
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Many of her contemporaries would wonder how an army so casually disciplined could have been so successful against the rigorously disciplined Germans. And they smiled so often and so spontaneously!

Berthe Auroy wrote about meeting her first Americans in early September, well after the “war of the rooftops” between the FFI and the remnants of Vichy resistance was over. Walking down to the Place de Clichy (then, as now, a center for nightclubs, sex shops, and open prostitution), she met three American GIs. “I asked them to climb up the Butte [Montmartre] with me. Two were pink and chubby-cheeked, like babies, and the third had big, very American teeth and glasses.”
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Not unlike the young German soldiers who saw Paris on leave in July of 1940, these Yanks had a day pass to visit the city, which they had found stunning. In fact, many American soldiers, having marched through dozens of towns and villages damaged by the war, were surprised at how “whole” Paris was, how few were the signs of the conflagration that was going on around it. The next day, Auroy went to the Champs-Élysées to see an American encampment; there she was struck by how friendly these “giants” were and embarrassed at the sight of her countrymen reaching to grasp the cigarette and gum packages thrown to the crowd. Yet, she remarked how nice it was to see the cafés filled with the (yes) smiling, laughing, friendly young men in khaki and how relaxed the French patrons sitting near them were, a state of affairs that Paris had not experienced for more than four years.

Much younger than Berthe Auroy, and much more interested in flirting, the Groult girls were also astute analysts of what it was that made the Americans so different. First was the endless supply of canned goods, condensed milk, chocolate, and cigarettes they distributed with abandon. Every American invited into a Parisian home brought with him evidence of the wealth of that faraway country. An enormous war machine most likely bolstered their naive self-confidence. And indeed, the Yanks were patronizing; after all, the United States was once again rescuing Europe from its own excessive incompetence. Yet the GIs were touched and amused by the generosity of those they had “liberated.” Civilian and army journalists were expansive in their coverage of how the GIs had been embraced by the delirious French. Flora Groult attempted to explain:

The Parisians were bedazzled, but still held on to an old European view: Americans are strong and rich, but without the culture that Parisians still treasure. The images that immediately came back to the United States via the great magazines
Look
and
Life,
plus the newsreels shown weekly in American movie houses, emphasized the affectionate response of French women and girls to the arrival of Americans. The rapturous delight of children reaching out their hands for chocolate and chewing gum were also a photographic staple. Americans were not only liberating; they were showing the expansiveness of the culture and mores of the United States.

One of the first Americans into a liberated Paris was the incorrigible Ernest Hemingway, officially there as a correspondent for
Collier’s
magazine.
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Hemingway had finagled himself onto one of the LSTs (landing craft able to carry men and large machinery, including tanks) that were in the first wave approaching the Normandy beaches on June 6, but the Allied command did not allow him to land with the troops. (His wife, Martha Gellhorn, had been able to land on that day from a hospital ship, a feat for which Ernest never forgave her.) Returned to the mother ship, he had to wait before finally setting his boots on French soil. For the next two and a half months, the macho author acted as correspondent, morale officer, combatant, and overall pest as the Allies broke out of the invasion beachheads and made their way to Paris. Because he was such a well-known writer, and because he was reporting for a massively popular American publication, his version of what happened as the Second Armored Division was mopping up still resonates and, for many, left a definitive record of the emotion that enveloped those who had helped to liberate the capital. We know that Hemingway had already had an emotional relationship with the city;
A Moveable Feast,
published after his suicide, in 1961, tells us that. His almost valiant attempt at being among the first Americans into the quasiliberated capital speaks to the sentimental value that the capital had for him. “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 spread the city I love best in all the world.”
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There he had been a beginner, a newlywed, an impecunious writer; now he was a famous author, a hero, and he could return to—and in his own way help liberate—the place that had given him the independence every writer needs.

The Americans brought more than military liberation. Their casual acceptance of French enthusiasm, their obvious pleasure in being kissed and hugged by thousands of French girls, their distribution of candy, cigarettes, and chewing gum (still the term used by the French for this delicacy), their lack of ideological fervor, their protection of German soldiers and bureaucrats who had fallen under their authority, their
obvious joy at being victorious: all these signs created an image of a nation ready to help its wounded cousin recover, efforts that would continue after the war with loans, reconstruction funds, and eventually the very generous Marshall Plan. On the other hand, American soldiers did loot; they did attack women; they often showed little respect for French custom, but at the same time they reminded the French of what absolute and unquestioned freedom could be. It was as if they were saying: “We’re free. It’s fun. Come along. We’ll help you get there again.”