Seven Ages of Paris (65 page)

On 27 March 1942, the first of the deportations to Auschwitz took place. Out of 1,148 deportees, only 19 survived. Starting with the non-French Jews, themselves refugees from Nazi Europe, systematic rafles or round-ups had swept up the victims from all over Paris, herding them into temporary camps either at Drancy, a suburb close to Le Bourget, or inside the “Vél d’Hiv,” the huge cycling stadium inside the city on the Boulevard de Grenelle in the 15th arrondissement. Conditions were appalling in both. For the most part the French police and later the militia or milice, aiding the Gestapo in their dread work, acted with shocking brutality. A total of 76,000 Jews, possibly more unrecorded, were deported from France; the vast majority, some 67,000, passed via Drancy. Only about 2,500, or 3 per cent, survived.

THE TURN

By the winter of 1940–1 the Parisian honeymoon with the occupying Germans—insofar as there ever had been one—had begun to fade. In the world outside, the war continued. Britain had survived the Blitz, and in Egypt had severely mauled the Italian army. Churchill was defiant; de Gaulle was at his side, gradually rallying the Free French, who now began to seem like a serious force, even retaking from Vichy some of the French colonies in Africa. An incipient Resistance movement was raising its head in France, and even in Paris. In the capital that first bitter winter had shown the Nazis at their worst. In December the execution took place of the first Parisian, a harmless engineer called Jacques Bonsergent, involved in a minor scuffle with a drunken German soldier leaving a brasserie—in no way an act of resistance or of terrorism. Thrown into the prison of Cherche Midi he was sentenced to death, and executed at Vincennes on Christmas Eve. All Paris was profoundly shocked by the terse announcement of Bonsergent’s death.

Then, in June 1941, an earth-shaking event occurred which, as well as changing the course of the war, profoundly affected French attitudes to it. Hitler invaded Russia. Frenchmen with a sense of history recalled the events of 1812, and remembered where his invasion had led Napoleon and the Grande Armée. Most immediately, the powerful French Communist Party from being an ally of Hitler became a bitter enemy. Automatically the maquis and the FFI (Free French of the Interior), backed and supplied by SOE (Special Operations Executive) from London, began to form a potent arm of resistance at the back of the Wehrmacht.

The first real demonstration of resistance, feeble though it might have been in the face of such overwhelming power, came from students of the Sorbonne on Armistice Day 1940. Following the arrest of a popular left-wing professor of atomic physics, a group placed a wreath in front of the statue of Clemenceau, on the Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysées, accompanied by a visiting card bearing the name of de Gaulle. By the end of the afternoon they were joined by other students, moving up to the Etoile with wreaths, singing the Marseillaise and chanting, “De Gaulle! De Gaulle!” A number of the demonstrators were injured and 123 arrests made.

The first real réseau, or Resistance network, was formed among ethnologists in the Trocadéro’s Museum of Man. Inexperienced, imprudent and betrayed by délateurs (Frenchmen and women who denounced others to the German authorities), the réseau was tracked down before it could become much more effective than courageously producing an underground newspaper, Résistance. Between January and March 1941 eighteen arrests were made, one by one. The following February seven of the ethnologists were executed at Mont Valérien, the remainder deported.

The incredible courage and dedication required to set up and maintain a réseau in Paris should not be underestimated. Paris was not the maquis or the Massif Central, where members of the Resistance had at least some prospects of escape and regrouping. With no transportation, in the capital they had to rely almost exclusively on the Métro, always watched by the enemy. Under permanent surveillance and the ever present fear of délation by vigilant neighbours, constantly having to change their abode, and racked by hunger and fatigue, the agents lived their clandestine lives all too aware of what tortures awaited them if caught. Radio operators with their primitive and heavy apparatus were readily tracked down by sophisticated German detection vans. No less courageous, and especially vulnerable because of the immobility of their equipment, were the printers and photographers, who produced underground tracts as well as false documents by the million.

The invasion of Russia led, in April 1942, to the creation of the Communist-dominated FTP, or Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, which added a new ruthlessness to the savage cycle of assassination and sabotage against the German and Vichy French authorities, followed by the execution of innocent and uninvolved hostages taken at random. The Germans blamed everything on the Communists, hundreds of whom were executed at Mont Valérien, in the hopes that Parisians would become sickened by the killings. By the end of the war executions had reached 11,000, plus 5,000 (a third of them women) deported to the concentration camps.

After 1943, as the prospect of an Allied invasion of France grew closer, so—naturally—did the numbers of the Resistance swell, those joining late becoming sarcastically known as “Résistants de la dernière minute.” At the same time the two rival groups, Communist and Gaullist, found themselves in mounting conflict with each other as they planned their post-victory agendas for takeover in France. The deadly spiral of anti-German attentats followed by ever more brutal reprisals continued. Progressively the milice took over from the Germans the odious work of repression and deportation, as every spare soldier was now required on the eastern front. Eventually even Pétain, from his isolation in Vichy, was sparked to complain to Laval on 6 August 1944 of the milice’s “sinister action,” given that “proofs of collusion between the milice and the German police are daily provided.” Darnand, the milice boss, responded indignantly, “And today, because the Americans stand at the gates of Paris, you start to tell me that I shall be the stain on the history of France? It is something which might have been thought of earlier.”

Meanwhile, for the simple Parisian, from 1943 onwards living conditions steadily worsened. In September, no meat reached Paris. The average ration sank to approximately 1,000 calories. To this deterioration was added the shock—to which, unlike London, Paris had hitherto been unaccustomed—of air-raids. In March 1941, the RAF had pounded the Renault works (now producing tanks for the Wehrmacht) at Boulogne-Billancourt, leaving 400 dead and 15,000 Paris civilians wounded in one raid. In August 1943 the La Chapelle workers’ district in north-east Paris itself was hit, killing upwards of 4,000. The following month Renault was hit again; this time some of the targeting was so inaccurate that bombs fell in the 15th arrondissement, while only 10 per cent of the factory installations was destroyed. In sharp contrast to the acute anglophobia which the naval sinkings of Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 had unleashed, the strength of support for the Anglo-American raids, despite the initial shock, shook both Vichy and the Germans. Relations between occupier and occupied worsened as, after 1943, all the Germans wanted from the French was labour, whereas before it had been willing support they were after. Electricity and gas cuts paralysed the city. In these last of the années bleues (so named because of the blue black-out covering the station entrances), an anxious silence pervaded the city, broken chiefly by the clackety-clack on the boulevards of the wooden shoes (there was no leather any more) worn by even the chicest Parisienne.

LIBERATION

As part of the Allied preparations for D-Day, an area round Montmartre was heavily bombed in April 1944, bringing the aged Marshal Pétain—who had celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday just three days previously—on his one and only visit to the capital to console the wounded. There was an enormous turnout around the Hôtel de Ville to welcome him (possibly some of the same people who would return to greet de Gaulle there four months later). Pathetically the old man declared his hope “that I shall be able to come back soon to Paris, without being obliged to warn my guardians.” (In fact, on his next visit his “guardians” would be in the uniform of Gaullist policemen, and he would be on trial for his life.) Pétain’s adversary General de Gaulle was to write in his war memoirs:

For over four years, Paris had been on the conscience of the free world. Suddenly she became the loadstone as well. So long as the great city seemed to be asleep, captive and stupefied, everyone was agreed upon her formidable absence. But … Paris was about to reappear. How many things could change!

The great race to liberate Paris and preserve her from destruction was now on.

For the Jewish survivors there was certainly no time to lose. That March, as Jean Cocteau was attending a chic opera soirée in Paris, Convoy Number 69 was preparing to leave Drancy; out of 1,501 (of whom 178 were under eighteen years old) all but 20 were to die at Auschwitz. And the trains for the Final Solution would keep on running up to the very last moment. One of the last Parisians to die was the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, killed in Czechoslovakia in 1945 only days before his camp’s deliverance by the Allies. In Paris, in the grim cellars of Vincennes and Mont Valérien the executions of members of the Resistance and hostages went on apace. Under pressure from the Germans, in March 1944 alone the Paris police made 4,746 arrests. But nobody, nothing, was under greater threat than la ville lumière herself now that Hitler, facing his own Wagnerian Götterdämmerung, had determined that Paris should go down with him and his Thousand-Year German Reich. Specific orders for destruction were sent to the German Kommandant, General von Choltitz—a reluctant, vacillating man, but still a Prussian officer with a rigid code of obedience, and, following the failed 20 July bomb plot against Hitler, fearful for his own skin and the safety of his family.

It was a question of whether the Allies could reach Paris before Choltitz and his SS underlings were compelled to begin pressing the plungers. The original plan of General Eisenhower, the Allied Commander-in-Chief, following the break-out from Normandy in early August was to bypass Paris, just as the Manstein Plan had done in 1940, and head full speed for Germany. It was a question of time, and petrol—Montgomery’s and Patton’s columns being severely limited by shortage of supplies, all of which still had to come ashore over the beaches of Normandy. Repeatedly de Gaulle begged Eisenhower to detach a column to liberate Paris. It was not just the destruction of the capital that de Gaulle feared. Echoing Weygand’s obsession of June 1940 and even that of Adolphe Thiers seventy years previously, he was also deeply alarmed by the prospect of the Communists establishing a Red Commune in a destroyed city. His own FFI inside Paris were outmatched by the Communists, who he rightly feared had acquired predominance in all the organs of the Resistance. By now they were the best organized and often the most courageous troops on the inside. The danger was extreme, it being only a matter of weeks since the horrifying example of Warsaw, when General Bor-Komorowski’s heroic Poles had risen in anticipation of the arrival of the Red Army. Warsaw had been viciously and systematically destroyed and 166,000 Poles slaughtered. The Red Army, halted on the wrong side of the Vistula, did not arrive till far too late. In the minds of all those planning the Liberation of Paris was the fate of Warsaw.

On 13 August Parisians heard the first sounds of distant gunfire to the west. Within a matter of days, a spontaneous uprising had begun in the city—beyond the control of either de Gaulle’s headquarters in London or the approaching Allies. In command of the Communist forces was a thirty-six-year-old firebrand, “Colonel Rol,” Henri Tanguy, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Alarmingly he declared that “Paris is worth 200,000 dead.” On the 15th the Communists brought the Paris railway workers out on strike. One strike followed another in lightning succession, effectively paralysing the city. For the first time during the whole period of German occupation the Métro stopped; electricity and gas failed; the cinemas closed—though, bizarrely, the theatres went on performing to the very last moment, by candlelight. Just as in 1871 euphoric young Parisians set to erecting hundreds of barricades throughout the city, though they would hardly be a match for Panzers.

Under constant pressure from Hitler in his East Prussian “Wolf’s Lair” (one of the Führer’s last communications being the famous exhortation “Is Paris burning?”), Choltitz reluctantly but methodically began to prepare the demolition charges in such buildings as the Opéra and the Luxembourg. Trucks laden with naval torpedoes containing twelve tonnes of explosive crossed the city. Helpfully a local Luftwaffe general came to Choltitz offering to destroy the north-eastern end of the city, from Montmartre to the Buttes-Chaumont, in one long night of shuttle-bombing from Le Bourget airfield eight kilometres away. From the far reaches of the Reich a terrifying artillery piece, “Karl,” a giant 600mm mortar, was sent on its way by Hitler to join in the destruction of the city, and the Führer talked of deluging the city with V-1 flying bombs.

On the 19th the police went on strike, allowing the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité to be taken over by the FFI, who turned it into a fortress. For the first time since 1940, Parisians saw the tricolore flutter above it. For the next five days the Prefecture held out as a focus of resistance as the Germans attacked it with every weapon in their arsenal. From his headquarters across the river in the Marais, de Gaulle’s representative Alexandre Parodi, haunted by the image of a ravaged Warsaw, watched in alarm as Rol unleashed his premature uprising. Urgently he radioed de Gaulle to persuade Eisenhower to send troops to Paris immediately. Finally de Gaulle’s entreaties won. Reluctantly, and with a superb sense of diplomatic imperatives, Eisenhower ordered General Bradley to despatch the French Second Armoured Division, under his subordinate General Leclerc, forthwith for Paris. Bradley was to have a back-up of units of the veteran U.S. Fourth Division following close alongside Leclerc, just in case things went wrong or got out of hand. De Gaulle had meanwhile arrived at the recently liberated Château de Rambouillet, some fifty-five kilometres south-west of Paris. According to an aide, as he awaited Leclerc he took down from the library bookshelves a copy of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, to steady his nerves. To Leclerc he gave the order to move, adding, “Go fast. We cannot have another Commune.”