And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (58 page)

Galtier-Boissière, who walked his dog, Azor, amid the barricades, offered an eyewitness account of life during the insurrection. And since he lived on the place de la Sorbonne, beside the boulevard Saint-Michel, one of the combat zones, he was well placed to do so. He was also fed news by friends in other parts of the city. On August 23, he noted, “At two o’clock, Delattre telephoned me to say the Grand Palais was on fire. Since he seemed genuinely upset, I consoled by assuring him that this was not a major calamity.”
¹⁵
The following morning, he observed, “The barricades have held firm. Evidently tank shells are useless in urban warfare and produce more noise than damage.”
¹⁶
By midnight, the first small contingent of French troops reached the Hôtel de Ville and, somewhat prematurely, the bells of Notre-Dame began sounding the liberation. But it was only hours away. Early on Friday, August 25, Galtier-Boissière watched as tanks of Leclerc’s armored division rolled down the rue Saint-Jacques, one block from his home: “An excited crowd surrounds the French assault tanks, which are bristling with flags and sprinkled with flowers. On each tank, on each armored car, beside gunners wearing khaki jumpsuits and little rose-colored caps, there are clusters of girls, women, kids, FFIs with armbands.”
¹⁷
He followed the column to Notre-Dame and noted, “In all its charming confusion, this parade is one hundred times more moving than the solemn victory parade in 1919.”
¹⁸

The fighting, however, was not over. That very day, there were still some tank battles between French units and German troops holding out in the Luxembourg Gardens, near the École Militaire and around the city’s main railroad stations. The Hôtel Majestic, the Wehrmacht’s Paris headquarters, was set afire to drive out remaining soldiers.
“This was the job of the tanks of Leclerc, whom the Allies kindly allowed to cleanse the capital completely,” Galtier-Boissière wrote.
¹⁹

De Gaulle had achieved his objective. With the agreement of the American field commander, General Omar Bradley, French troops had entered Paris a few hours before those of the Americans. Further, while some fifteen hundred street fighters and innocent passersby died in the insurrection, General von Choltitz had ignored Hitler’s orders to leave Paris in ruins and, at three-thirty p.m. on August 25, he surrendered in a brief ceremony at the Préfecture de Police. Alongside his signature, the document carried that of General Leclerc and, to de Gaulle’s annoyance, above it, that of the resistance leader Colonel Rol-Tanguy. Soon German soldiers were being rounded up and taken to the Louvre’s main courtyard, where they were held for the next three days.

Later that afternoon, de Gaulle himself arrived in Paris and, standing in the main hall of the Hôtel de Ville, where Pétain had spoken four months earlier, he addressed a vast crowd. Matching the intense drama of the occasion, he hailed Parisians as if they and the French had alone heroically freed the city. And as de Gaulle embarked on rewriting the history of the occupation, he also signaled his determination to have France stand alongside the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union as victors in the war:

Why should we hide the emotion that consumes us all, men and women, who are here, in our home, in Paris, which stood up to liberate itself and has done so with its own hands? No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. These are minutes that go beyond each of our poor lives. Paris! Paris abused! 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! Well, then! Since the enemy that held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to its home. It returns bloody, but thoroughly determined. It returns there enlightened by the immense lesson, but more convinced than ever of its duties and of its rights. I speak of its duties first, and I will sum them all up by saying that, for now, they are the duties of war. The enemy staggers, but it is not vanquished yet. It remains on our territory. It will not even be enough for us to be satisfied that we have, with the help of our dear and admirable allies, chased it from our home. We want to enter its territory as is fitting, as victors.

The following day, accompanied by French troops, de Gaulle walked through cheering crowds down the Champs-Élysées, along a path that, for four years, Wehrmacht soldiers had marched daily. It was the first time Parisians had set eyes on this tall, solemn-looking man who had left France as an obscure tank officer and now returned as a national hero. He was still wearing the uniform of a two-star general, his rank in 1940, but from now on he would be known simply as
le général
. At Notre-Dame, there was a brief panic when shots were fired from nearby rooftops, but the snipers were silenced, and a thanksgiving mass went ahead. Cardinal Suhard, non grata for having led the funeral mass for Henriot two months earlier, was asked not to appear in the cathedral and was instead confined to his residence. V-E Day was still nearly nine months away, the horror of the gas chambers was not widely known and France still had to earn its place among the victorious Allies on the battlefields of eastern France and Germany. But for the moment, Parisians had ample reason for celebration.

*
Paradoxically, without German controls at the demarcation line, resistance groups were also freer to move around the country.

*
After the war, Barbie was one of many Nazis who fled to South America. In 1983, he was arrested in Bolivia and extradited to face trial in France. In July 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, notably for his deportation of forty-four Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu. He died in jail in Lyon in 1991.

*
Bonny, Lafont and six other gang members were executed on December 27, 1944.

*
After Sartre’s death, Beauvoir explicitly claimed coauthorship of the articles.

_·
CHAPTER 16
_·
Vengeance and Amnesia

EVEN AS PARISIANS
finally slept without fearing a knock on their front door, a purge of the past began. No one doubted that it was necessary. France had been betrayed, dreadful crimes had been committed and now, as part of the rite of passage from occupation to liberation, the rule of law should be seen to prevail. But before an appropriate legal structure could be put in place, vengeance erupted spontaneously. While ad hoc military tribunals were ordering the deaths of some seven hundred notorious traitors, in the main Gestapo informers,
miliciens
, police and some French soldiers who had fought alongside the Wehrmacht, there was a wave of extralegal killings, soon known as the
épuration sauvage
, the “savage purge.” As towns and villages were liberated, perhaps as many as nine thousand
miliciens
, collaborators and black marketers were summarily executed, both by furious individual citizens and by the resistance, now, at least theoretically, under the single banner of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI.

Many communities also turned on women accused of
collaboration
horizontale
—they had slept with the enemy. Thousands had their heads shaved in public, while some were stripped naked and paraded through yelling crowds. It was not a pretty sight. “I saw a group of thugs who were pushing and kicking a woman with a shorn head,” Michel Francini recalled. “She was naked and a swastika had been painted on her breasts. They were drunk.”
¹
Some of these women were prostitutes, but others had had more stable relationships. And this brought complications. Less than a year later, when the two million or so Frenchmen imprisoned or working in Germany began returning home, some found a new baby in the family.
^*

Because of their renown, artists, writers and journalists who had either supported Vichy or collaborated with the Germans were soon in the spotlight. There were more opportunists than outright criminals among them, but many had been denounced by name on Radio-Londres, the condemnations occasionally even accompanied by death threats. And it was no secret that, thanks to their ties to the occupying power, they had enjoyed privileges denied to most other French citizens.

Two celebrities in particular had a penchant for drawing attention to themselves. Their contrasting experiences at the liberation were early signs of the capriciousness that would come to characterize much of the
épuration
. One was Cocteau, an artist, poet, playwright and a frequent guest at cultural and social events organized by the German Institute. In his journal entry for August 25, 1944, liberation day itself, he worried about how his friendship with Arno Breker would be viewed, above all about his 1942 article in
Comoedia
praising the German sculptor: “What counts is Breker, the Breker article, the Breker friendship, the only act that can be used to hang me.” While looking to Éluard and Sartre to protect him, he wallowed in self-pity, asking, “Why should the destiny of a poet change? My realm is not of this world and the world resents me for not following its rules. I will always suffer the same injustice. People are always thrusting me into scandals, which I hate and which they accuse me of liking and instigating.”
²

At one point on August 25, as Paris celebrated, Cocteau sought the protection of the family of the actress Elina Labourdette, on the
Île de la Cité. Elina promptly called over her friend Claude Anglès, a young doctor at the nearby Hôtel-Dieu hospital. “I saw a man sitting in the corner looking very shocked,” Claude recalled. “It was Cocteau, and he was frightened to death. He thought he was going to have to answer for his ties to the Germans. But he didn’t. Cocteau belonged to a group that protected him, while Sacha Guitry, who did one hundred times less than Cocteau, had lots of enemies.”
³
In reality, what probably saved Cocteau was that his partner, the dashing young actor Jean Marais, joined the FFI during the insurrection. A few hours later, Cocteau left the Labourdette apartment and was never asked to explain himself.

In contrast, two days earlier, five young FFI members arrived at Guitry’s mansion beside the Eiffel Tower and accused him of “intelligence with the enemy,” the catchall charge against collaborators. Wearing lime-colored pajamas below a tweed jacket, with a Panama hat on his head, the ever-dapper Guitry was taken on foot to the town hall of the 7th arrondissement, on the rue de Grenelle. Word of his arrest quickly spread and, by good fortune, Alain Decaux,
^*
one of Guitry’s young admirers and a new FFI recruit, obtained permission to protect the playwright’s home from looters. Guitry himself was then taken to a succession of detention centers that, only days earlier, had held Jews and political prisoners: the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the stadium where thousands of Jews were first held after the July 1942 roundups; Drancy, the main transit camp for Jewish deportees; and the fortress at Fresnes, which usually housed
résistants
.

Tristan Bernard, a Jewish playwright, testified that he was freed from Drancy in 1943 thanks to Guitry, but Guitry’s enemies said this only proved his good relations with the Germans. “Is it ‘collaboration’ to exercise one’s profession under the eye of the occupier during an armistice?” he asked in frustration. Yet if Guitry felt deeply wronged, a poll carried out in September showed that 56 percent of those questioned approved of his arrest, with only 12 percent opposed and the rest offering no opinion.

Finally, on October 20, after spending “Sixty Days in Prison” (“Soixante jours de prison”), as he titled his published account of the experience, Guitry was freed on grounds of poor health. But the case against him dragged on for another thirty-four months, focused less
on his professional life than on his good relations with German officialdom. Guitry became increasingly embittered, complaining, “What I am paying for today is not my activity over four years, but for the success and happiness of 40 years, for which I am not forgiven.” Indeed, jealousy may have been a factor: he was an actor, playwright, movie director, theater owner—and rich. When the case was dropped on August 8, 1947, the ruling attributed his behavior to narcissism. It concluded: “Thus his need, like oxygen, of a public; and off-stage, of the adulation and favors of the world and its powerful. He has only known a life of exhibiting himself. It is that which explains and measures his relations with the occupier.”
⁴

At the time of Guitry’s arrest, many of the gun-toting young men roaming Paris were themselves fresh to the resistance. “Heroes have multiplied,” Galtier-Boissière observed. “The number of last-minute resisters, armed head to foot, wearing ammunition belts in the style of Mexicans, is considerable. Some heroines, too, revolvers in their belts.”
⁵
At the end of August, however, the provisional government gave FFI members the choice of surrendering their weapons or continuing the war against Germany by joining the French army. Then, from mid-September, it began creating a legal structure to handle the
épuration
. The task was immense: initially, some 900,000 people were arrested, often for only a few days; in the end, 124,613 people answered in court for their activities during the occupation.