When Paris Went Dark (41 page)

And then there was the Jeep, first produced in 1942—the emblem of American industrial ingenuity. One of the most memorable photographs of Americans in a liberated Paris shows two soldiers in a Jeep coming up the stairs from a Métro stop. They had obviously backed the Jeep down the steep steps so that they looked as if they were emerging from the underground. They have huge smiles on their faces as they tease the Parisians into believing for a moment that they had done the impossible. Paris suddenly found itself under a new version of occupation, much more benign but ultimately more influential and long-lasting.

On April 26, 1944, only four months before the liberation of the city, Maréchal Philippe Pétain had visited Paris for the first and only time as chief of state of the Vichy government. The crowds had been moderate but enthusiastic, as contemporary photographs reveal. (Schoolchildren had been given the day off.) Speaking at a lavish dinner in the Hôtel de Ville that evening, the elderly statesman offered, “This is the first visit I have paid to you. I hope that I will be able to return soon to Paris without being obliged to inform my [German] guardians… I will be without them, and we will all be much more at ease.”
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Even at this late date, there had been many who were still confident in the doughty old man’s leadership. Indeed, until the Liberation, there were those who seriously believed that he and de Gaulle would eventually meet, shake
hands, and together bring France back from the destitution and division of four years of war and the Occupation. Pétain himself had wanted to go to Paris once it was liberated, but his German handlers forbade it, spiriting him and his close cadre off to a castle in Germany, where they remained until the end of the war. On August 26, only four months after this triumphant visit, a determined Charles de Gaulle would enter the Hôtel de Ville and stand in the same spot as his former commander to declare that Paris once again belonged to its citizens.

The Liberation of Paris had filled the world with exultation. Spontaneously, “La Marseillaise” would be sung around the world in plazas, on avenues, in offices, in movie houses, even in legislatures. No event, except the end of the war itself, would receive such widespread notice and occasion such joyous expressions of relief and happiness. Their capture of Paris had given the Nazis a great propaganda victory and had convinced the world that the Third Reich was a force that would last—if not a thousand years, then at least a few decades. Their subsequent loss of Paris, as the Allied armies streaked across northern France and wended their way vigorously up from the south, seemed to put the imprint of final and total victory on a horrific conflict that had lasted for five years. But the liberation of the city had come at a cost to the plans of the Allied command. Generals Eisenhower and Bradley had been correct: taking the capital of France had slowed the advance of their motorized armies. Precious fuel supplies had been depleted; diverting troops to encircle and take the city had weakened their advance units. As a result, the Germans were able to retreat in some order to the Siegfried Line (a major series of fortifications on the border of France and Germany) and hold off the invasion of their homeland for another six months. Was Paris worth the Battle of the Bulge and the other major last-ditch efforts of the Reich that caused hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths? This unanswerable question is almost never asked, for the Liberation of Paris was such a major symbolic victory of the forces of good against the legions of evil.

Yes, in the end, de Gaulle took most of the credit for having saved Paris on behalf of the “French people.” The
Pocket Guide to France
sustains this myth. We should admire the French, it admonishes its naive readers: “The French underground—composed of millions of French workers, patriots, college professors, printers, women, school children, people in all walks of life of the real true-hearted French—has worked courageously at sabotage of Nazi occupation plans.”
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“Millions” is a strong exaggeration, but more important than the number is the idea that
most
French people had withstood the blandishments of the Vichy regime (which is mentioned only once, glancingly, in the brochure) and, more important, the propaganda and brutality of the Reich. Charles de Gaulle himself could not have written a better history. (Who knows? Maybe he did write it, since the “authors” of this document have remained anonymous, listed simply as the “War and Navy Departments, Washington, D.C.”)

For years after the Liberation, arguments over memorials, laws and edicts, reparations, and political representation would divide the political classes of France. The Communist Party of France would lead one of its largest propaganda campaigns in an attempt to accumulate as much recognition for the Liberation as they could. Former Vichy supporters, a resurgent Catholic Church, and former
résistants
with all sorts of ideologies—including those who had followed de Gaulle into exile and those who had stayed on the soil of France—would vie for the right to call themselves liberators of the City of Light and maneuver to capture for themselves the glorious residue of that great symbolic event.

All this commotion raises the question: Who
did
liberate Paris? The Allies, the Communists, the ragtag FFI, de Gaulle’s Free French troops, and even the insurgent citizens of Paris wanted a stake in the answer. As we have seen, even the German commander of
Gross Paris
wanted some recognition for his role in “liberating” the city. The liberation of Paris was made possible by an overlapping combination of events, military and political decisions by a formidable mix of personalities, and the spontaneous participation of a long-repressed population. Train and transport workers went on strike; the police gave up their loyalty
to the Vichy regime and its German supporters; armed irregulars of the FFI, strongly supported by the Communists but comprising many ideologies, united; Leclerc’s eager Second Armored Division fought bravely through German defenses to reach the crown jewel of French nationhood; and the massive support of the American army provided an invaluable backstop.
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For a few brief days, as one historian has pointed out, “La Marseillaise” and “The Internationale” were joined together as the liberated Parisians celebrated not only the departure of the Germans but also the end of the Vichy regime, and perhaps, just perhaps, a truly radical break with the past, one not unlike the great Revolution of 1789.
³⁷
Gertrude Stein described the euphoria:

Soon the optimism dissipated as the factionalism that had torn France apart for years, both preceding and during the war, began again to dominate. Most of the world, though, was unaware of these dissensions; what counted for all who loved Paris was that the city was back
in the hands of the French, who had risen up to wrest their capital from an evil empire. And, miraculously, the city on the Seine seemed to have suffered very little, especially when compared to the terrific desolation of so many of Europe’s capitals. What the world did not see was the economic, social, and psychological damage wrought by the Occupation, which would take years to repair.

The immediate responses to the liberation of Paris from its heavy-handed Occupiers were not pretty. At least temporarily, Parisians of all classes and political ideologies took on the same demeanor as their former oppressors. What happened during the few weeks following the hasty departure of the Germans does no honor to the liberators or to the liberated. The hysteria—there is no other term that comes to mind—that took over the crowds of Parisians as they saw the tanks, Jeeps, and uniforms, first of Leclerc’s Second Armored Division and then of the American divisions that followed them, was uncontrollable. Along with joyful release, there was a much darker side of uncontrolled mob behavior. Soon large cohorts of German soldiers, still in uniform, hands raised, were being paraded around the city. Protected by French irregulars, American troops, and French soldiers, they were still jeered at, spat on, targeted with rotten vegetables (though not many; Paris was still hungry), and harder objects. Suddenly, the excitement was invaded by a sense of paranoia and hatred that could not wait for the new
authorities to calm. For a few weeks, there was literally blood in the streets, as episodes of violence became more unpredictable, more public, and more arbitrary than they had even been while the Germans were running the city.

No one knows exactly how the disorganized violence began, but this much is clear: there was a convulsion, almost an orgasm (the word was used often to describe the phenomenon) of retribution that took over the city in those first few weeks of “freedom.” Again, estimates vary, but perhaps in the vicinity of ten thousand Parisians, mostly men and some women, were victims of rapid and frequently fatal justice in the year following the D-day invasion. These judgments and executions were carried out by members of the FFI, the official Resistance army, and members of the informal, self-appointed resistance as well as by vengeful neighbors and competitors. The last gasps of the Vichy Milice were responsible as well for sudden retributive murders until they were finally eradicated a few days after the Germans had escaped. Even before the last Germans had left the city, gangs of official and unofficial armed men began to knock on doors, seeking someone to punish—anyone—even, in a few cases, those who had themselves resisted the German Occupier.

With the signs of liberation finally appearing, the desire to find scapegoats to remove the feelings of guilt and anger that had dominated the four years of Occupation and the five years of the nation’s military humiliation was too strong to repress. The first
public
victims of this effort to “recreate a patriotic virginity”
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were women suspected of having consorted in some inappropriately intimate way with German personnel. But men were vulnerable as well, for the newly dominant forces for order sought to exculpate themselves and their city from blame for their failure to expel the enemy over the course of four years. The difference was that men were often shot behind closed doors, or off in the woods, or even in their homes, while women had their heads shaved in public. The shaving of women’s heads—which was often accompanied by the defilement of their bodies—was immediately photographed and distributed by most of the world’s primary news organizations.

A generally held belief is that more than twenty thousand women throughout France, ages sixteen and older, were so “shorn” between late 1943 and early 1946 in retaliation for
collaboration horizontale
with members of the German forces. But recent studies have corrected this assumption; archival research has revealed that only about 47 percent of the punished were specifically accused of sleeping with the enemy. The rest were women betrayed, more often than not, by their female peers because they had worked with or served the Germans, because they had ended the war a bit better off than their compatriots, or because they had in other ways insulted common mores, affective and otherwise. Local jealousies and attempts at redirecting attention from some who were guiltier were often behind accusations of lack of fidelity to imprisoned husbands and other excuses for punishment.

Scapegoats.
(Bundesarchiv)

Women and girls were dragged from their homes and places of work; sometimes a “trial” would be held, but generally crowd justice was immediately inflicted. Rarely did relatives try to stop the violence to their aunts, cousins, sisters, and even mothers. Frequently children
would be made to stand by as their mothers were shorn and branded (generally with ink or charcoal, but occasionally actual torture was used to make them pay for their purported crimes, e.g.,
all
body hair would be cut or even burned off). After being shorn, they were marched through the streets of their communities, some even carrying the babies that might have been the result of their
collaboration horizontale.
We should remember that hairstyles in those days featured long tresses, not bobbed cuts; the sight of piles of hair lying at the feet of women who had had no defenders was the result.

The furor of a hysterical and still apprehensive population did not waste time or energy on details. On the gates leading to the city hall of the 18th arrondissement, dozens of “scalps” were hung, sending a message to all who might have even thought about collaborating that their turn might be next. Of course, “collaboration” was then and would remain a nebulous designator; where did “accommodation” end and “collaboration” begin? As we have seen, men suffered as well but were not as publicly humiliated. (One writer has suggested that the shorn women should not have complained: better to have your hair cut off than to be shot in the back in a dark alley.)

Women may have been denounced for the most part by other women, but it was mainly men who did the “shearing” (though women did participate here and there).
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There is no record of a man having been publicly shaved. No one has ever cited a case of a man who slept with one of the
souris grises,
the German women who had accompanied the Occupation bureaucracy. That most of these punishments were done in public spoke to the community’s felt need to exorcise the
souillure
(filthy stain) that had besmirched French honor. In fact it was the very publicity of the event that was a major desideratum of those who were doing the punishing. Thousands of photographs were taken, posted, printed in newly liberated newspapers, and shared among friends. One cannot but think of similar publications and postcards of
the lynchings that took place in the United States, especially in the South, in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.

We have seen throughout this work how prominent Parisiennes were in daily life during the Occupation of their city. Throughout it all, many of them had tried to maintain an aura of self-possession in their dress and comportment. Germans remarked on the style these citizens maintained, even amid shortages of fabric, leather, and other fashion material. Shortages in chemicals meant that the exquisite attention they had given to their hair was also limited, so many began wearing turbans, with a few locks showing, in order to cover the listless tresses that shortages had forced on them. Then the poor women who had their heads shorn began to wear turbans, too, and that more benign fashion statement quickly disappeared from the streets of Europe’s fashion capital. But a terrible coincidence soon occurred: women returning from Ravensbrück and other detention camps, or from work in Germany, appeared with
their
heads shaved, a common remedy for removing typhus-carrying lice. Soon they adopted the turban, not knowing at first that the headpiece had become the sign of a “shorn” woman. Many, many incidents of misidentification further confused the Parisians as they tried to put upright a world that had been turned upside down and inside out. (One person who kept wearing the turban as a fashion statement was Simone de Beauvoir, but we do not know whether she did so in solidarity with her sisters or for convenience.) Women had worked bravely in the Resistance; they had kept the home front in some sort of order; they, for the most part, had stayed faithful to their imprisoned husbands and lovers. But none of these activities was enough to protect many from a blindly vengeful public during the impossibly chaotic months after the liberation of their city and their nation.

To add insult to injury, prostitutes who had provided their services to the Germans were not, in most cases, shorn. Another piece of masculine sophistry protected them: they were, after all, only doing what they were intended to do. Prostitution was legal in France, and during the Occupation there were more than thirty bordellos designated for Germans; it is further estimated that there were about one hundred
thousand “underground” women and girls who regularly sold their favors to French and to Germans, the aura of commerce protecting them from accusation and retribution.
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They had not “betrayed” French men. This sort of ethical parsing defined the events, along with a sense that some sort of spectacle, of communal bonding, was needed immediately to end the potential civil war that threatened France. The fact that this bonding had to occur around the humiliation of women continues to embarrass French collective memory.

Without delving too deeply into communal psychology, one can venture that these events were definitely aimed at putting women “back in their place.” The Vichy government had tried imposing a system of “family values” on French women, but without much success, given the need the country had for female labor and ingenuity during the Occupation. True, as the war wound down, Colonel Rol had offered that without women in the Resistance as many as half its accomplishments would have been impossible. His adjutant, Albert Ouzoulias, wrote in his history of the
Bataillons de la jeunesse
that “during the insurrection, just as during much of the Resistance, [women] played an irreplaceable role.”
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They were brilliant administrators and exceptional liaisons between separated groups; they rode bicycles for hundreds of kilometers, often under fire. They helped build barricades, worked as nurses, and coordinated efforts to assist those who were fighting.

The FFI itself tried to stop the
tontes,
calling them illegal. Yet France needed to reassume, and quickly, its virility, and the most symbolic way of doing that was to remind everyone that the disasters it had undergone had been the fault of women who had had sexual relations with the Occupier. Paris, the center of fashion, feminine style, and beauty, became for a brief period a center of misogynist scapegoating.

American, Canadian, and British soldiers, especially, found the practice repugnant, and at times they would interfere to protect the victims; we have reports, letters, and interviews with them in which they show how much respect they had lost for the French. All this soon pushed the practice and its recording onto a back burner as the French tried to regain the moral upper hand by reminding the world that Paris was free and was putting itself back together with special attention to a resuscitated joie de vivre. The vehemence that had appeared in newspaper reports, gleefully accompanied by photographs of embarrassed women, began to fade into a general list of excuses, a common response during those chaotic days. Once the visceral need for some sort of justice had been sated, there generally followed an immediate feeling of guilt or embarrassment.

Despite de Gaulle’s very serious efforts to bring order quickly to the city, chaos was unavoidable, for the civil war that had been smoldering persistently just below the surface of the French polity needed only a spark to become a conflagration. Numbers are contradictory, but we know that hundreds of summary executions were carried out in Paris, while the same sort of denunciations that had peppered the years of the Occupation continued. Based often on surmise, or personal jealousy, or bad information, these accusations nonetheless served to bring many French men and women to “justice” before kangaroo courts that were set up on street corners, on truck beds, on specially built platforms, in public gardens, in cafés, in back rooms, and in quickly emptied offices throughout the city. No one knows exactly how many were involved in these countless expressions of repressed anger, guilt, and a deep
belief that justice must be had. The effects of this period of
épuration
(purification), which had begun in October of 1943 in Corsica, the first French
département
to be liberated, still resonate in Parisian memory. Memoirs, fiction, and essays that appeared right after the Liberation often describe a disoriented population caught up in the social and political dislocation that defines any postwar society.