When Paris Went Dark (42 page)

That this urge to rehabilitate French virility and honor was visited on the bodies of women has been much studied by sociologists and historians. Despite the successes the Free French forces enjoyed on the battlefield up until the final defeat of Germany, and despite their participation in the liberation of Paris and other towns, many who had lived through the debacle of 1940 had not forgotten their army’s pathetic defeat. More than a million French soldiers were still in the hands of the Germans, and though they would begin trickling home soon, their neutralization by a more powerful army still rankled. One historian has referred to these embarrassing events as a “rite of passage,” necessary when a society moves violently from a period of forced quiescence to find itself immediately free to express years of repressed anger.
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Yet it was only around the turn of the twenty-first century that major analyses of the events began to correct hoary assumptions—assumptions that tended to protect those who acted illegally, vindictively, and spontaneously after the evacuation of the Germans from French cities and eventually from French soil.

One of the earliest rumors that took hold in Paris while the tanks were rolling in to liberate the city was that members of the Vichy Milice and die-hard German defenders were firing on civilians as well as on armed troops from the rooftops. Looking for marksmen, the city’s eyes were turned to the typically low and uneven roofs and high windows of apartment houses. Though there were definitely examples of such activity,
la guerre des toits
(the rooftop war) became a formidable myth that persisted for a month after the liberation of the city. The first civilians targeted by vengeful “liberators” were often those suspected of being on the rooftops taking shots at the celebrants. There are a few eyewitness accounts of what happened at first to those who, for whatever reason, were seen as having not been celebratory enough in
welcoming the city’s liberators or who had the misfortune to live on one of a building’s top floors, especially in southern Paris, where the first French soldiers were welcomed.

A witness tells a tale that matches in horror all that had happened in the city during the Occupation: an innocent man went to his balcony with a telescope to look across the rooftops and down at the victorious Allied troops. All of a sudden, someone in the street looked up and yelled: “There’s one of them, with a rifle. He’s shooting at us!” Quickly, young armed men, wearing their FFI armbands, rushed up to the building’s top floor, burst in, but found no weapons. No matter. They forced the bystander down the stairs; he, and some of his neighbors, pleaded with the gang, telling them that he had hidden Jews as well as downed pilots and had been active in his neighborhood resistance, but the lust to find enemies to bring to justice prevailed. When the group reached the street, other neighbors and bystanders grabbed the poor man, lifted him, and threw him under the treads of the advancing Sherman tanks. The smear of his carcass on the pavement caused a combination of revulsion and a perverse sense of retribution. Embarrassed, the crowd turned and walked away.

The Conseil national de la Résistance, under the general standard of the loosely Gaullist FFI, had been coordinating resistance activities since mid-1943. Coordination was the order of the day. The Communist militant Henri Tanguy (Colonel Rol) was in fact the commander of the FFI in the
département
of the Seine, which included Paris and its immediate environs.
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He had been selected by the Gaullist forces to lead the Parisian secret army because of his extensive combat experience in Spain and during the war. A leader respected by all sides, he nonetheless could not stop the freewheeling, unpredictable, and violent acts of retribution that took over the city for about a month after the Liberation. What made his job more difficult was that many young hoodlums, looters, and even pro-fascists had taken on the aura of being “freedom fighters.” Gangs quickly formed all over the city, and for a variety of often contradictory reasons—ideological, personal,
pecuniary, and to create camouflage for previous sins of collaboration—there was “blood in the city” for the two months following the departure of the Germans.
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Among the first to “purify” their ranks were the police, who used accusations, quick judgments, and executions—as well as frequent attempts at hiding their own members’ histories of cooperation and collaboration—as acts of retribution. Soon the camaraderie that had defined the Resistance began to fray, then tear, as Communists, Gaullists, and even some former Vichy supporters began to struggle for power in the new government. Not only did these groups quarrel with each other, they often had internecine disputes as everyone sought political purity. Communist turned on Communist; former Vichy bureaucrats denounced each other; and Gaullists who had spent the war abroad nervously watched those who had been fighting on French soil. The FFI and Gaullist leadership immediately tried to compel these groups to cooperate, to surrender arms, to stop the arbitrary arrests, punishments, and executions. But they were initially unsuccessful, and the “false FFI” men continued to engage in blackmail, armed robbery, swindles, and other “normal” crimes.

With the Liberation, the most innocuous places in Paris became, as they had under the Occupation, sinister. A commandeered dental school in a lower-middle-class arrondissement is one example. There, for about two weeks, the Franc-tireurs et partisans (FTP), an armed branch of the Communist Party, mirrored what the Gestapo had done for the previous four years. Individuals were arrested—or, rather, rounded up—for a variety of unclear reasons: being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being suspected collaborators (whatever that meant at the time), being on the wrong side of the Communist Party, or being on the wrong side
within
the party. Whatever. A further manifestation of the scapegoating was even more violent, though it remains one of the least understood events in histories of the period after the Liberation. No photographs were taken; public humiliation was not part of the terror; all was done in private, and the evidence, the cadavers of the
victims, was thrown into the Seine, which threw them back on shore over the course of the following two months.

The Institut dentaire George-Eastman, in the 13th arrondissement, had served as a German hospital for the entire Occupation. Once evacuated by Hitler’s troops, it provided an excellent, well-protected building in which acts of retribution against one’s enemies could be carried out without public knowledge. FTP members tied the hands of each victim with the same type of cord they used to hang a large limestone cobblestone around the murdered victim’s neck before disposing of them in the Seine. It turns out that these stones would not be heavy enough to keep the corpses under water; most of the cadavers, fished from the Seine by the police, had signs of having been tortured before being shot. At first officials thought these were among the final victims of the Gestapo, furious at having to give up Paris. But soon the word spread that they were considered to be enemies of the Communist Party. Old scores had been settled; retributive vengeance had been imposed; an appropriation of judgment had given the party members a sense of ethical superiority over those who were already negotiating with collaborators to remake the city. Up until late December of 1944, bodies would be found, with the signature method of disposal, as if those who did the deed wanted their actions to be recognized and thought about. The whole story is still not known, though recently historians have provided us with much more information about this month of terror: dozens of individuals were picked up, brought to the Institut dentaire, and tortured. More than two dozen of them were so murdered.
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The victims seemed to have been chosen at random—subjects of rumor, envy, personal grudges, and differing views of what constituted collaboration. Concierges who had been seen scrubbing off anti-Vichy and anti-German graffiti (which they were required to do), café owners and waiters who some thought too close to the Occupier, anti-Communists, pacifists, reputed mistresses of Germans: no one seemed safe once the attention of a vengeful FTP eye was turned on him or her.
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One of the most touching stories concerns a park monitor in late middle age who had been caught up in an FTP assassination attempt a year earlier. In August of 1943, an FTP team had plotted to kill an important German officer in the Parc Monceau, beautifully situated in the heart of the luxurious 8th arrondissement. A partisan fired and hit the major in the thigh, who immediately started to yell in excellent French that he had been attacked. A fifty-one-year-old park guard, Gustave Trabis, having use of only his left hand because of a World War I injury, ran to the wounded German’s aid and grabbed at the assailant’s bicycle; the shooter managed to escape without having finished the job of killing the major. Sadly for the unfortunate park monitor, the Vichy-controlled press made a big deal of his effort, something he later regretted when he learned that a Paris resistance group had carried out the attack. Nevertheless, he was arrested a year later by the outlier group of
résistants,
tortured, and killed with a blow to the head. His body, like those of the others, was thrown into the Seine. The FTP and other groups were especially diligent at finding Parisians who had impeded
résistants
while carrying out their missions. Instinctively, many bystanders would help police officers apprehend those whom they thought were common thieves. But their names were often written down, and many paid with severe punishments during this interregnum of terror that besmirched the exultation and relief of the Liberation.

But those actions against those seen to have collaborated with, or at least cooperated with, the Occupier were carried out haphazardly. Marcel Jouhandeau was a minor author and a minor collaborator who had written a few anti-Semitic pieces and one pro-Vichy article early in the war. He left a diary that describes the anxiety with which he lived for about six months after the Liberation. Jouhandeau, like many others considered to have been too cozy with the Occupiers (and we must keep in mind that the French had not yet decided exactly what
collaboration entailed, so almost any interaction with the Germans could have been so designated), had already received little coffins in the mail as well as ominous telephone calls (“We know who you are and where you live”). His wife, Elise, was always on the verge of hysteria, and these insistent reminders that they had been perhaps living too well during the Occupation only added to the couple’s fright. The Jouhandeaus did live in one of the most chic quarters, the 17th arrondissement, near the Bois de Boulogne and the Porte Maillot, a major German strongpoint. As the citizens of Paris became more emboldened, and as the Germans were obviously abandoning the city, Jouhandeau noticed that he was being watched more and more by passersby. He had friends in the literary world who were in the Resistance, and many promised to protect him, but on a day-by-day basis he felt increasingly vulnerable.

One morning during the Liberation, he learned that his name had been put on a list of collaborators who were to be rounded up. For more than thirty days after the Germans had left, Jouhandeau and his wife moved from friend to friend, from acquaintance to acquaintance, only occasionally sneaking back to their apartment. They kept waiting for a knock at the door, especially since friends were telling them repeatedly that they had been inquired about. They had to learn which concierges they could trust, which ones they should ignore. There seemed to be a fever of counter-denunciation going on in Paris; for every denunciation of a Jew or a Gaullist that took place during the Occupation there appeared to be a corresponding denunciation of a collaborator after the Liberation—even someone who had done something as innocuous as talk with a German. One day, as he was crossing a busy street, a car marked with the large white letters FFI stopped beside him. A young man called out: “Professor Jouhandeau.” It was one of his mediocre students, who remembered him well and who offered to take care of him during this period of retribution. Did he now need such help? Were they that close to arresting him? Jouhandeau’s fears were enhanced when he heard that many political prisoners were being held and being mistreated at Drancy by the FFI. Another source told him about the acts of humiliation being visited on
women who had fraternized with Germans and on
collabos
who had looked down their noses at the Occupied: they were being beaten, tattooed, shorn, and otherwise tormented. One young man, in Jouhandeau’s presence, asked a member of the literary resistance if there was any newspaper that would publish his article about how political prisoners were being treated by the FFI. “None,” answered the sympathetic publisher. “But it’s just as it was before,” said the debutant journalist. “Yes,” answered the publisher, “just backwards.” Jouhandeau soon began to whine—to himself, to others, to his readers—that he was like Christ, a persecuted but innocent man. He refused to admit that the opinions of those who found him repulsive might have had any validity whatsoever. “After the Liberation,” he brilliantly observed, “formalities are infinitely more complex than under the Occupation.”
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Well, yes.… Jouhandeau ultimately escaped any chastisement for his happy cooperation with the Germans after the war, except for his panic during those months. His case was closed, and he continued to teach in Paris.
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These and other recollections of the way justice was arbitrarily assigned in the months after the Liberation use the same metaphors and images of those who recall what it was like to live under the Germans and their Vichy servants: stomachs knotting when a heavy tread is heard on the stairs; doorbells ringing at odd hours; suspicion of one’s neighbors; anonymous letters appearing in one’s mailbox, threatening some violent action; clandestine phone calls to friends to find out the latest news; reading with apprehension the newspapers to see who had been arrested and for what; fear of any interaction with official authority—the syndrome of fearful anticipation did not disappear with the disappearance of the Occupier. Almost like a mirror reflection, behavior was the same, only the objects of punishment had changed. If
the Occupation affected Parisians, if the memory of their own and others’ actions haunted them, the same could be said for the immediate period following those events. For years, decisions made and actions taken during those terrible months would have the same befuddling impact on Parisian collective memory as had the Occupation itself.