Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (11 page)

It was a time for making new friends. Camus introduced Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Father Bruckberger, the FFI chaplain, whom they found in his white Dominican habit, smoking his pipe and drinking corrosive punch in the Rhumerie Martiniquaise. They also met the writer Romain Gary, and Lise Deharme, a poet whose salon was frequented by the rump of the Surrealist movement. Black American soldiers were greeted in Saint-Germain by Parisians starved of jazz, and the warmth of the welcome prompted a number of them to wonder whether to stay there instead of returning to the States.

It was a time of debate, ideas and conversation. Jean Cocteau and his friends held court in the bar of the Hotel Saint-Yves in the rue Jacob, where Cocteau, like Picasso, was famous for his monologues. For Cocteau, ‘the spoken word was his language and he used it with the virtuosity of an acrobat’.

It was also a period of feast and famine. Tobacco hunger, only partially assuaged by packets of Camel thrown from passing jeeps, was far more noticeable than a skinny ribcage. People dug out cigarette holders from the 1920s so as to be able to smoke their cigarettes down to the last drop of nicotine. Brassaï’s photograph of Picasso’s wartime muse, Dora Maar, shows the ash burning to within a millimetre of the holder. The black market boomed. At night the métro station of Strasbourg-Saint-Denis was ‘packed full of types who whispered out of the corner of the mouth as you passed: “Chocolate? Tobacco? Gauloises? English cigarettes?”’

In spite of the destruction of Les Halles des Vins, a miraculous supply of cheap alcohol somehow remained available, and a frenzy of parties followed the Liberation.
Les Lettres françaises,
the counter to the right-wing takeover of France’s great literary magazine,
La Nouvelle Revue française,
gave a cocktail party presided over by the Communist ‘royal couple’, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Éditions de Minuit, which had won such admiration by underground publication of books like
Le Silence de la mer
by Vercors and François Mauriac’s
Cahier noir,
gave a party at Versailles with a play by La Fontaine. Few guests were very smart, as much out of necessity as taste. Simone de Beauvoir had a single black suit for grand occasions, but Sartre seldom changed out of his worn lumber jacket.

For the GIs, however, the young women on bicycles with short skirts billowing were the most enduring memory of Paris. Galtier-Boissière noticed how ‘the short lampshade skirts generously uncovered pink thighs’. These short, loose dresses for bicycling were made out of patchwork, though even patchwork could differ in quality. Simone de Beauvoir observed that ‘
les élégantes
used luxury silk scarves; in Saint-Germain-des-Prés we made do with cotton prints’.

Long hair, piled high above the forehead, was one answer to the shortage of electricity. Constant power cuts made coiffeurs resort to a lot of back-combing. Lee Miller took a photograph of a pair of male cyclists furiously pedalling a tandem linked to a dynamo to provide current for the dryers upstairs. Most ingenious of all were the wooden-soled shoes with an articulated sole to avoid the rigidity of clogs. (The Germans had requisitioned all stocks of leather for the Wehrmacht.) The noise of those shoes clacking on pavements was one of the most evocative sounds of the war years. One of Maurice Chevalier’s songs was entitled ‘
La Symphonie des semelles de bois
’.

Maurice Chevalier put all his efforts at the Liberation into the song ‘
Fleur de Paris
’, an air of sentimental patriotism which he clearly hoped would help him ‘
se dédouaner
’ (get him through ‘customs’ in the form of purge committees) for having sung on the German-run Radio-Paris, among other accusations. Chevalier, Charles Trenet and the singing nightclub owner Suzy Solidor were all blacklisted, and Tino Rossi was locked up in Fresnes prison. Suzy Solidor went round to visit the editors of newspapers, claiming she had worked for the Resistance and that the only accusation against her was to have sung ‘Lili Marlene’ at a time when it was a great hit with British troops.

Even Edith Piaf was suspect for a moment, having, like Chevalier, gone to sing for French prisoners in Germany, but she had never supported the Pétainist régime; unlike Chevalier, who had taken off his boater and drunk a bottle of Vichy water as a show of loyalty to journalists – the most ill-judged photo-opportunity of his career.

One singer whose Resistance credentials were impeccable was Josephine Baker. General de Gaulle even wrote the preface to the book about her exploits by Commandant Jacques Abtey,
La Guerre secrète de Josephine Baker
. De Gaulle also attended her first concert in Paris after the Liberation. Josephine Baker had returned to France with General de Lattre’s 1st Army and came up to Paris to see old friends and prove that the reports of her death were premature. She gave a gala concert for the French air force charity at the Paramount in November, when she sang ‘
Paris chéri
’, one of the last songs written for her by Vincent Scotto. Jo Bouillon’s orchestra provided the music and, soon afterwards, she married him.

Malcolm Muggeridge went in uniform with a brother officer to a very different cabaret on the Left Bank, packed out and thick with tobacco smoke. ‘There were only flickering candles to light the tiny stage, where a man, completely bald, with a large, sad clown’s face, was intoning a soliloquy, in which he recalled all the terrible things that had happened to him since the Germans came to Paris. “
Et maintenant,
” he concluded, with an expression of infinite woe, through which he struggled to break into a wry smile – “
Et maintenant, nous sommes libérés!
” The audience roared their approval, looking quizzically at Trevor and me. Somehow it seemed the most perfect comment on the situation.’

The resounding acclaim which greeted de Gaulle at the Liberation helped create the impression that Vichy’s version of France had evaporated, almost as if it had never really existed. This was the fairy-tale finish to a disturbing story. It helped soothe the deep wounds in national pride and aided the notion of Republican legitimacy.

The lingering death of Pétain’s regime was the grotesque fruition of its self-deceit. Patriots who had supported the old Marshal in 1940 found by 1944 that his ‘path of collaboration’ had been the path of dishonour and humiliation at the hands of the occupying power; while the feuding Germanophile factions – those of Pierre Laval, Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and Joseph Darnand, the head of the Milice – finally discovered that they were far from equal allies in the New European Order. The Nazis had despised them, simply using them for their own ends. As the Allied armies broke out of Normandy, the exodus of those vulnerable to Resistance reprisals matched the departure of German officials on 17 August. The collaborationist newspaper
Je suis partout
became known as
Je suis parti
.

The mutual hatreds and suspicions on the extreme right, both French and German, became more poisonous as the defeat of Nazi Germany approached. One of the first victims was Eugène Deloncle, the head of the pre-war Cagoule. On 7 January 1944, the Gestapo arrived at his apartment to arrest him. Deloncle assumed they were Resistance ‘terrorists’ who had come to assassinate him. He fired at them and the Gestapo gunned him down immediately; then, while some looted the apartment, others arrested his family. One son was beaten into a coma. Deloncle’s wife and his daughter Claude were driven off to Fresnes prison, to be locked up with members of the Resistance.

In August 1944, Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice, ordered his scattered groups of
miliciens
to withdraw eastwards. In Paris, Jean Galtier-Boissière watched the
miliciens
leave the Lycée Saint-Louis in a convoy of lorries.

Fearing reprisals,
miliciens
from many parts of France fled towards an increasingly embattled Germany with their wives and families. Those from the south-west had to cross a large stretch of hostile territory in small, vulnerable groups.

The old Marshal formally protested at the order for him to leave Vichy. He was escorted by Otto Abetz’s deputy, the minister von Renthe-Fink, to Belfort on France’s eastern frontier; then, on 7 September, he reached Sigmaringen, the castle and small town designated by Hitler as the capital of France in exile.

The castle of Sigmaringen on the Danube was supposedly the cradle of the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the setting for the
Götterdämmerung
of French fascism, its position, history and even quasi-Wagnerian name seem fittingly ironic. But the reality was far from grand opera. If anything, the claustrophobic squabbling sounded more like a parody of the antechamber of hell in Sartre’s play
Huis clos,
which had opened in Paris some ten days before D-Day. That brilliantly crazed writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with his unfailing eye for the grotesque, was the perfect chronicler of Sigmaringen. In
D’un Château à l’autre,
he described the vain rivalries as ‘
un ballet de crabes
’.

Pétain was a privileged prisoner. He benefited from special menus – the Germans allotted him sixteen ration cards – and escorted walks in the countryside. His suite was on the seventh floor. The hierarchy, as Henry Rousso describes in his book
Un Château en Allemagne,
descended floor by floor. On the sixth floor, Laval and other ministers were lodged. Laval complained about his four-poster bed – ‘
Je suis un paysan, moi!
’ He spent the first part of each morning in a study lined in blue silk, preparing and practising his defence for the day of temporal judgement, when he would face de Gaulle’s new Haute Cour de Justice on charges of treason. Laval had brought out 20 million francs of the government’s petty cash, but German banks refused to change it.

The nominal leader of Sigmaringen’s equally nominal administration was Fernand de Brinon, a failed aristocrat whose Jewish wife had been made an ‘honorary Aryan’. Brinon had been Vichy’s ambassador to Paris, an extraordinary yet significant paradox for Pétain’s French State. The tricolour was raised over Sigmaringen to a roll of German drums and a
milicien
guard of honour presenting arms. The French State exchanged ambassadors with that other puppet-theatre of the absurd, Mussolini’s Salo republic.

General Bridoux, the equivalent of Minister of War, was put in charge of recruiting French prisoners to fight in the SS. The ‘Minister of Information’ was Jean Luchaire, a newspaper magnate, who was accompanied by several mistresses and his three daughters, one of whom was the film star Corinne Luchaire. In the library, intellectuals of the arch-right such as Alphonse de Châteaubriant and Lucien Rebatet met and squabbled. Céline managed to avoid them. He had found lodgings down in the town with his wife, Lucette, and there he reverted to his profession of doctor.

News of the Ardennes offensive in December produced an outburst of almost hysterical optimism in the castle. Some people declared that they would follow the German army back into Paris by the New Year, not knowing that Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s tanks had run out of fuel. When the scope of the disaster was finally revealed, the only hope left was the promise of Hitler’s secret weapons. For the more realistic, their nightmare was of falling into the hands of French colonial troops, the Senegalese or
goums
. Céline, despising all around him, set off northwards with his wife, a journey through the terrifying death throes of Nazi Germany, until they reached Denmark, where he was imprisoned.

As for the wives and children of the
miliciens
who had sought refuge in Germany, their fate was little better. Far from being treated as allies, they were locked up in conditions comparable to the worst internment camps. At Siessen, sixty children died of malnutrition. The least fit of the men were transported for forced labour. The remaining 2,500 were transferred to the grandly designated Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS. In March 1945, this formed part of Himmler’s Army Group Vistula, and was smashed in Pomerania when Marshal Zhukov’s tank armies cleared his Baltic flank before the assault on Berlin. Fewer than 1,000 of them managed to slip westwards, trudging through snow-covered pine forests in the rear of the Russian advance.

The remnants of the Charlemagne Division were transferred to an SS training camp north of Berlin to recover. And it was there, in April 1945, that 100 volunteers commanded by Captain Henri Fenet accompanied General Krukenberg through the Soviet encirclement of Berlin to take part in the final battle for the Reich capital. With the suicidal bravery of the damned, they stalked Soviet tanks with Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons amid the ruins. Along with some Danes and Norwegians from the SS Nordland Division, they faced the Red Army’s final assault in the barely recognizable landscape of what had been the government district around the Reich Chancellery. On 29 April, the eve of Hitler’s suicide, a brief candlelit ceremony took place in an underground station while the battle still raged overhead. SS General Krukenberg presented the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross to former
milicien
Eugène Vaulot for having destroyed six Soviet armoured vehicles. Few of these last defenders of the New Europe returned to their homes.

The British, not having suffered the divisive effects of occupation, had few traitors to deal with. One of the most famous was in Paris in August 1944. John Amery, the son of Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India and Burma, had developed an infatuation for the Nazi regime. He had made broadcasts from Berlin urging Britons to fight for Hitler, and the Nazis used him to lead the Legion of St George, the British contribution to the New Europe. Only sixty-six volunteers emerged, which did not make a centuria, let alone a cohort or a legion. Amery, arrested in Paris at the Liberation, was flown back to London for trial. He was hanged on 19 December 1945.

The other Englishman in Paris whom the British authorities wished to interview was not so much a traitor as a victim of his own political naïvety. One of the first jobs given to Major Malcolm Muggeridge on his arrival in Paris was to keep an eye on P. G. Wodehouse, who was still at the Hotel Bristol, where he had been installed by the Germans. Arrested with his wife at their villa at Le Touquet in 1940, he had been interned in the Silesian lunatic asylum of Tost. Released shortly before his sixtieth birthday, he was asked by the Berlin representative of CBS to make a broadcast to the United States. Not realizing that this would be used by German radio for their own purposes, Wodehouse made the broadcast in his typically jolly way, making light of his imprisonment and giving the impression that life under German domination was not too bad.