When Paris Went Dark (43 page)

In April of 1945, a well-dressed middle-aged woman was sitting comfortably on a bus when she looked up to see a startling apparition: a walking skeleton had just mounted the steps to board. The other passengers were silent, some staring, others looking away. The man, whose age was difficult to determine, was wearing clean clothes, but they swallowed him. What passengers noticed first were his shaved head and his baleful eyes, staring into the middle distance. Moving with caution, holding on to the bus’s poles, he shuffled rather than walked. Immediately the woman rose to offer him her seat, which he took with a slight smile and a
merci.
Prisoners of war were making their way back home. As well those who had been deported for political, racial, or economic reasons were, almost overnight, revisiting liberated Paris. Now explanations had to be heard, excuses given, dramas relived, and lives begun again.

On a corner opposite the Gare de Lyon, as trains and trucks dropped off hundreds of returning Parisians and other French citizens, crowds would gather to gape. Janet Flanner (writing as Genêt), the inimitable Paris correspondent for
The New Yorker,
described in a cable dated April 1945 one especially moving arrival:

One of those waiting was Marguerite Duras, the novelist (Americans know her best as the author of
The Lover
) and member of the Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, had been arrested by the Gestapo in a trap from which she had escaped with the help of her resistance group’s leader, François Mitterrand, future president of France. Antelme had been deported to Buchenwald, then Dachau, and she had heard no word of him. Her memoir,
La Douleur
(Painful Sorrow), recounts the anxiety that had taken over the City of Light as the deported began coming back. Surviving Jews, political prisoners, captured soldiers (most of whom had been in prison since surrendering in the spring of 1940), and other men and women were being dropped off at railroad stations, such as the Gare de Lyon or d’Orsay, and especially at the Lutétia (still the only major grand hotel on the Left Bank), the just-vacated site of the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service. Like Duras, many had waited days and weeks and months to see who had come back, bearing photographs of missing relatives, begging for information. When they did find their loved ones, they were often unrecognizable, for their trauma had lasted for so long. The city offered little solace to the waiting. Writes Duras in her memoir:

She wandered in melancholy from train station to train station, from the Lutétia back to her apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés; she was regularly phoned or stopped on the street by friends who asked, “Any news?” And she returned compulsively to the Gare d’Orsay to watch
in apprehension and pity as “old men” were helped off trains and trucks by Boy Scouts. But they were not old; they were exhausted, ill, starved. Many were still in their twenties, and many of those would die before they got home, weakened irreparably. No matter how hungry Paris had been, there had been no scenes like this in its streets; for the first time, Parisians had an inkling of how fortunate they had been, in their bubble, as the rest of Europe had turned into a charnel house. The scenes were emotionally draining as well as morally agonizing: How could humans do this to one another? How could the French have supported this Nazi insanity?

Duras was disgusted with Charles de Gaulle’s haste to forgive and forget. Forgiveness accompanied a refusal to know, to remember:

De Gaulle was far from alone in feeling a sense of ownership of the tragedy; many groups claimed their story in the resolution of and the costs of the war and of the Occupation. But Duras touches on perhaps a major legacy of the Occupation and the war, namely, that institutions, no matter how much they will try, cannot forgive, forget, or remember on behalf of affected populations: only those who suffered have that right.

In one of the most remarkable stories that come from this period, François Mitterrand was visiting officially the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp when, from a pile of cadavers and dying inmates, he heard a weak “François, François, c’est moi!” The voice was that of Robert Antelme, ill with typhus, starved, and dying. Quickly, Mitterrand had him transported home to Paris, expecting at any moment that he would pass away before Marguerite Duras saw him. Telephoned by
another friend with this news, she waited at the apartment door to see the man for whom she had been waiting, searching, and dreaming of for months. She rushed down the stairs and witnessed Robert being helped to the first landing. “I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.”
¹²
I know of no more devastating scene as the imagined world of war’s horrors confronts the actual. Duras had studied photographs and had watched as “old men” arrived at the train stations; she knew what to expect. But when looking directly into the eyes of her husband, then at his ravished body, she had to let all imagined horrors be replaced by a very intimate one. Such reactions were occurring daily in Paris after August of 1944 and, especially, after the end of the European war, in May of 1945, as those coming home were suddenly, insistently there, or as the idea sank in that others would never be returning. The joy of the Liberation had been replaced by, or at least had to stand side by side with, the reality of a still barely perceived Holocaust.

In her descriptions of the anticipated legacies of the war and the Occupation on her beloved city, Duras envisioned a mass grave, a “black ditch” that had inscribed itself on the Paris cityscape. “Beside the ditch is the parapet of the Pont des Arts, the Seine. To be exact, it’s to the right of the ditch. They’re separated by the dark. Nothing in the world belongs to me now except that corpse [of my missing husband] in a ditch,” she wrote. Later: “No one can know my struggle against visions of the black ditch.”
¹³
A personal image, yes, but a powerful one for the city of Paris itself as it crawled out from under the devastations of the Occupation. It is as if there were a dark line drawn across the memory of the city, separating
gai
Paris (if it ever were truly so) from a metropolis hollowed out by fear, guilt, regrets, and anger. The events that had immediately followed the departure of the Germans would mark the city and its residents as indelibly as had the black years of the Occupation itself.

Paris had been made a martyr, had been crushed, and had, against all odds, risen to liberate itself both militarily and morally from the Nazi yoke and Vichy ignominy. France was once again a whole nation, ready to reassume its position as one of the great powers. In perhaps the most significant speech he ever made, at least in terms of its historical resonance, Charles de Gaulle established the myths that would define the Occupation of Paris and the resistance of Parisians for the next quarter of a century.

De Gaulle had multiple goals in mind, and in this short speech, he addressed them all. Films of the remarks show a self-assured, uniformed general towering over those around him, speaking fluently and confidently. Obviously, he wanted to anticipate others’ definitions of the French reaction to the Occupation, especially that of the Communists, who were already describing themselves as the “party of the executed seventy-five thousand.”
^*
He wanted to end the civil war—which was
still going on, and threatening to escalate—by uniting the French in a common cause: the total defeat of Nazi Germany. He sought to renew confidence in the French armed forces, deeply diminished since May of 1940, and to ask for wide support of their efforts. He reminded the French that the war was not over, that their sacrifices would have to continue for months more. Cleverly, he wanted to build the myth that the French alone had liberated Paris, though with essential aid from the Allies, to whom he only glancingly refers. Finally, he intended to ensure that the Vichy experiment would soon be forgotten (he refused to declare a new republic, because, he argued, the old republic had not ended—though it had, and legally) and, perhaps most cynically, that the Resistance, courageous as it had been, was no longer essential to the liberation of France.

Parisians and the rest of France accepted these myths immediately and with some confidence. Fortunately for de Gaulle and this version of history, the État français, the Pétainist government, had remained in Vichy, in the middle of the provinces, during the Occupation and had not established residence in Paris or even in Versailles, for which Pétain had petitioned. Paris had thus remained “pure” though occupied, unsullied by the Vichy experiment.

Most of those watching the joyous newsreels, especially the Americans, could not fathom the complications of French politics, but everyone knew that the liberation of the world’s most famous city meant an almost fatal blow to the Third Reich’s control of the rest of Europe. Warsaw had been razed, twice; a besieged Leningrad had been bombed and shelled for three years; Budapest would be stubbornly defended by the Germans and severely damaged; Vienna and Berlin, especially, had been regularly and mercilessly bombed; but Paris, the jewel of the continent, had remained whole, effectively untouched (though it did not totally escape paying the costs of warfare). The Germans had not succeeded in leveling it—if they had ever had that intention, Hitler’s apocryphal “Is Paris burning?” notwithstanding—and the French (with a bit of help) had liberated it with little damage to its monuments and landmarks. An aura of optimism about the impending end of a terrible war spread across continents, and Charles de Gaulle’s speech
cemented this optimism to his own plan to control post-Occupation France.

De Gaulle was as sensitive to the symbolism of memorials, national celebrations, and public sites as he was to language. In the year and a half he would spend as head of the provisional government (from August of 1944 to January of 1946), he would steadily reappropriate the sites that the Vichy government and the Germans had used to impose their legitimacy—for example, the gold-painted bronze statue of an equestrian Joan of Arc on the Rue de Rivoli, at its intersection with the Rue des Pyramides. The deeply Catholic young woman who had fought the perfidious English, and who had been tortured and burned by them, was a perfect symbol for the Anglophobic, hyper-Catholic, militaristic État français and had been given exemplary attention by the Vichy government. Groups of Vichy supporters and other rightists had gathered at the statue to express their nativist confidence in a resurgent France. (The statue remains today a rallying point for right-wing groups in Paris.) But Joan of Arc had been born in a village in Lorraine, in eastern France, and de Gaulle had adopted the Cross of Lorraine as the emblem of the Free French. It had been scribbled on walls of occupied France for more than four years. On May 16, 1945, de Gaulle organized a massive event around the statue, taking her back, so to speak, reclaiming her as a symbol of the resolve, courage, and liberty of the true France: “By paying homage to Joan, de Gaulle recovered a heroine whose vibrant patriotism, deep faith, and humble origin could at bottom sum up the Gaullism of the war, while playing on two symbols, ‘the birth in Lorraine of one and the Croix de Lorraine of the other.’ ”
²
This process of recuperating sites of collective French memory continued—often with ferocious opposition from the Communists, who had their own sites of memory—well after de Gaulle left the government in 1946.

De Gaulle returned to power in 1958, called to address the horrible mess that the Algerian revolution was creating for the Fourth Republic. After being the midwife for a new, Fifth Republic, one that made the presidency of France much more than an honorific position, he continued to impose his memory of the Occupation and its precedents
on French history. With the rhetorical help of his comrade in arms André Malraux—the novelist, Resistance figure, and French army officer who was then his minister of culture—he made a major decision that would, he hoped, close and seal the book of memory: the transfer in 1964 of the remains of Jean Moulin to the Panthéon, the national mausoleum that sits atop the tallest hill in the Latin Quarter. Here the
grands hommes
of France (and Marie Curie) are interred in honor of their service to
la France éternelle.
^*

Jean Moulin had been de Gaulle’s emissary, charged with uniting the fractious resistance groups that had formed the
armée secrète
that had so worried the general. Moulin succeeded in his mission in mid-1943. But betrayed by still-unknown colleagues, he was tortured so severely that he died on a Gestapo prison train taking him to Germany. In choosing to honor Moulin, de Gaulle hoped, in an ironic move, to put the ashes of the Resistance to rest permanently as well. And, by choosing his own man to represent the Resistance (and not a Communist, of course, or any non- or anti-Gaullist), he also appropriated the Resistance as part of the great Gaullist initiative that had saved France. In a magnificent oration, Malraux powerfully augmented this narrative of the Resistance. Referring to Moulin as the leader of “a people of the night” and “the people of the shadows,” he repeatedly invoked nocturnal and supernatural images not only to remind his audience of the glories of the Resistance two decades after the events of these sacrifices but also to recall that it had been General Charles de Gaulle—now president—who had enabled their successes.

But it is not easy to assign new causes to events repressed in collective memory, nor are their effects so easily controlled. For the next fifty years de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic would find itself continuously addressing the legacies of France’s unique World War II history, and much of this debate would occur in Paris, where so many efforts were made to invoke the city’s history in various claims of authenticity.