"Paris Martyred, Paris Freed"
We see them, as we stroll past the typical Parisian façades of buildings, along the boulevards, the plaques with dates of late August, 1944: “Here fell such and such for France” usually with an age so young as to bring tears to the eyes. And we wonder about them, that youth who gave their lives not knowing whether liberty could ever return to their beloved homeland.
For they never gave up, contrary to popular belief. We might ask ourselves too, how a nation that had lost 1,4 million to the war, over ten percent of its young men, might, twenty years later, have a chance to fight off the booted, Fascist menace of the Nazis?
This is how, one fine June day in 1940, the Wehrmacht army goose-stepped down the Champs Élysées. Paris began a four year long nightmare, which the French call The Years of Lead. Strict rationing was perhaps the least of it though many died of malnutrition. Forced Labor was another aspect. The worst, we know, as we knew even then, were the roundups of the Jewish population sending them to death and worse over the Rhine. Their pillaged belongings sat under the Gare d’Austerlitz. Vichy, the Collaborationist rump government, enthusiastically joined in, replacing “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” with “Work, Family, Fatherland."
And yet Paris resisted. Because of the part of the French populace whose moral compass stayed true, France’s Jewish population survived at a rate of 60-75%, an astonishingly high number compared to other Nazi occupied territories. Those who committed the crimes of helping them escape or hide -- for crimes they were considered by the authorities-- under the collaborationist puppet government of Vichy and its motto of Maréchal Pétain, Law and Order.
These were the Resistants, also known, as Terroristen by the Germans. French but also Spanish anarchists fleeing Franco, foremost among them. They risked all for a vision of a France that might never return, might never come to pass. Risking not only death but long weeks and months of torture too, they distributed pamphlets, they stole or blew up equipment and transport, they printed false papers, they put sand in the gears of the Fascist occupant wherever they could, up to and including murder.
The radio, commandeered by the Wehrmacht was pure propaganda meant to break spirits, the Germans also did what they could to jam the signal of the BBC with its broadcast to French. But the French listened in, faithfully, to the curious messages for that “army of shadows,” messages such as “Protocol is important to the chimpanzee, I repeat three times, Protocol is important to the chimpanzee” Straight out of no-context theater, these bizarreries were in fact dreamed up by Jewish humorist and Resistant, Pierre Dac, knowing that the codes themselves, when the populace could tune in, would lend a hard-earned smile and more importantly hope – Parisians knew that something afoot that could save France.
And it was.
Names like Jean Moulin, Pierre Brossolette and others are sacred in France, although many, many women also gave their lifesblood for the Resistant cause; Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac and a host of others joined their ranks from the beginning. One among them was America’s own Joséphine Baker, We hope in further blog entries to meet some whose names have come down to us. Many however are lost to time, such as the anonymous woman who kept rabbit hutches at the Opéra Garnier, since they reproduced so fast that the Germans could not keep track of them to ration. They could then nourish those in hiding without ticking off a ration card.
Jean Moulin par Marcel Bernard
Germaine Tillion, Service historique de la Défense à Vincennes1947-48
Lucie Aubrac, archives familiales
This dragged on, the slow death of France under the heel of the invincible Nazi Occupier, who had not a care in the world, for Lebensraum they needed, and Lebensraum they would have. Nothing could stop them. Or so it seemed.
Then on June 6, nearly four years to the day of Paris’s fall, Anglo-US-Canadian forces landed in Normandy. The Nazis were, for the first time perhaps, scared.
Hope in the sails of the Parisian boat symbol, by August, all hell began to break loose. Railwaymen refused to work and called for a general strike. The police soon followed. Factories and railways ground to a halt, hampering any kind of economic survival. Not to be intimidated, as collective punishment, the Nazis took 33 resistants and would-be resistants from 18-22 years old and put them in front of a firing squad. Instead of cowing the Parisians, this only fanned the flames of their will to fight. The Resistance had few arms, not tanks, not cannons, not machine guns, but they were ready to die for this.
On the 18th of August there appeared overnight as if by magic, all over the city, posters crying out: “Attack the enemy wherever his is to be found” along with instructions for attacking tanks, building barricades or mixing Molotov cocktails to toast that enemy with. And indeed barricades grew up as if overnight, the likes of which had not been seen since Revolutionary times. It seemed that Liberty Equality and Fraternity were once again the order of the day. The next day the Resistants were finally fighting openly, without the masks and codes that had been theirs now for years, armed only with courage and sniper fire. Skirmishes broke out all over the city but perhaps most fiercely at the Hôtel de Ville, where 3000 police officers joined the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité in civil dress, but armed with their service weapons. The Tricolor unfurled its blue, white, and red once more over Paris’s premier administrative edifice. It was now in the hands of a Free France.
Everyone awaited the Anglo-American forces on tenterhooks while, held up by bloody fighting south of the Capital, Général Leclerc had one of his planes fly over the Hôtel de Ville with one message: “Hold fast, We’re coming!”
And they did. On the 24th the first of the Allied tanks to roll in was the Nueve, named to honor the Spanish Anarchists that had fought so bravely in the resistance for so long. The Americans and British followed the French, jeeps and tanks full of them and they met a rejoicing Paris.
The people flooded the streets to welcome them, women climbed atop the vehicles throwing their arms around, kissing Parisian style cheeks or more movie-style. Children ran alongside them, and a populace that could not remember what it was to laugh, laughed again, in an unforgettable party of a lifetime, a party for generations to come. The soldiers themselves seemed almost in shock after what they themselves had survived to get there, one of them in front of a microphone, in halting French “The People of Paris are good – and pretty!”
Roger-Viollet
A 9:30 pm the bells of Notre Dame de Paris rang out in celebration.
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