Home > 60 years of memory: Paris of myth, Paris of reality
Mary Blume
Was it really possible to be that happy and to believe you would be that happy again and again? In Paris, on the 25th day of a pleasantly hot August 60 years ago, the answer was an exuberant yes: the Germans were gone and the city was again free. "Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!" General Charles de Gaulle proclaimed that evening in the Hôtel de Ville.
Everyone was in the streets, laughing, shouting, crying, embracing, plunging to the ground as gunshots continued to ring out the next day, even while de Gaulle walked through what he called a sea of faces on the Champs-Élysées and joined the Te Deum at Notre-Dame. He stood erect, a secular spire, while the rest of the congregation cowered and later he said he thought the firing was just from trigger-happy Resistance fighters taking potshots at phantom enemies, while other sources reported several wounded and dead.
All the accounts of that day are full of contradictions: Who can make sense of mass delight, or wish to? While, for example, it seems certain that the first French officer to arrive in Paris was Captain Raymond Dronne, the name of the first enlisted man is variously given as Pillien, Pirlien or Pillian, and accounts differ as to how many died in the weeklong battle for Paris and whether it was a lone Paris fireman or six who hoisted the tricolor flag to the top of the Eiffel Tower for the first time in four years.
It doesn’t matter: Analyzing the event is like taking apart a birthday cake. What does matter is the emotion Albert Camus described in the Resistance paper Combat: "This huge Paris, all dark and warm in the summer night, with a storm of bombers overhead and a storm of snipers in the streets, seems to us more brightly lighted than the City of Light the whole world used to envy. It is bursting with the fires of hope and suffering, it has the flame of lucid courage and the glow, not only of liberation but of tomorrow’s liberty."
In the days following Aug. 25 the GIs arrived with their candies and cigarettes, but the Day of Liberation was strictly a French affair, the Allies having allowed French troops to enter the city first because - again accounts disagree - they were polite, because de Gaulle manipulated them, or because they knew that the Germans would not put up much of a fight, preferring to save their strength for the Battle of the Rhine, and the Allies needed to do the same. Tomorrow’s liberty, VE Day, was nine months and many deaths away.
But that August the tricolor flew in the Arc de Triomphe, and the Marseillaise was sung there for the first time since Bastille Day, 1939. The years of occupation had been bad, not as frightful as, say, in Athens or Amsterdam, but bad enough. Years later, when questioned about the occupation Parisians seemed only to remember the food shortages as if they encapsulated and somehow eradicated the dreariness and shame. There were heroes, not many because by definition heroes are rare, and mostly there was silence and a moral dubiety as gray as the city and the occupants’ uniforms. The past, with its defeatist generals and complaisant Parliament who voted Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain to power by a great majority, was unthinkable, the future unimaginable. "I calmed down and lived wholly in the present," Simone de Beauvoir wrote. The present meant seeking heat in the Café de Flore and cooking up her infamous turnip sauerkraut. "But previously the present had meant a happy proliferation of new schemes in which the future bulked large; reduced to itself alone, it crumbled away into dust. Not only time but space had contracted."
Already by July and early August 1944, space was shifting. German reprisals became more erratic and cruel while at the same time many officers fled with their mistresses and loot. Schismatic Resistance groups were gathering under the leadership of Henri Tanguy, known today as Colonel Rol-Tanguy, a Spanish Civil War veteran and Communist whose headquarters were under the statue of the Belfort lion in the Place Denfert-Rochereau.
The largest group of street fighters were the FFI, Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or "fifis," a ragtag bunch of mostly very young and very brave young men, not all of them French, with brush haircuts and white armbands. Alan Moorehead, who arrived with the French liberators, met a fellow Australian in the FFI who was fighting with Spaniards, Dutch, Portuguese and Poles.
Days before Rol called for an insurrection on Aug. 19, the German and collaborationist press had fled, and civil servants went on wildcat strikes. The major strike was by the Paris police, whom the Germans had just disarmed. Whether the strikers wanted their arms to fight the Germans or the Parisians who had suffered from the many collaborators among them is not clear. It was the police who had rounded up 13,000 Paris Jews, including 4,000 children whom even the Nazis were ready to spare, and sent them in open buses and trucks across Paris to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and death, a journey that no Parisian seems to have witnessed, though it occurred by day.
In his lab at the Collège de France the scientist Frédéric Joliet-Curie was making Molotov cocktails, and at the Maubert-Mutualité Métro a man sold tricolor rosettes out of an open umbrella, closing up shop when a German approached.
Paris life surged out of the entrapped present tense as civilians, except for those who were packing or hiding, took hope from savage street fighting, remembered now in the stone plaques scattered throughout the city to mark fallen Resistance fighters and decorated sometimes with dried flowers or a rare bouquet. This spring a book came out, "Ici est tombé...," attempting to learn the stories of these heroes, and its author, Philippe Castetbon, succeeded in tracing only 26 out of more than 300.
One of the untraced is Fred Palacio, who fell at the corner of the boulevard St. Germain and the rue de Buci on Aug. 19, although the heavy fighting in that zone did not occur until a day or two later. He was 21 years old: That is all one can say.
"It was over for us," Simone Signoret wrote. "It wasn’t over for those still in the camps. It was just the beginning for the collaborators. And it was long over for those who had lost their lives." In time memory would be congealed into commemoration; at that moment when invoked it was raw, and so it was best not invoked.
No resistant, dead or alive, was mentioned by de Gaulle in his Aug. 25 speech at the Hôtel de Ville where, fearful of Communist takeover by Colonel Rol, he declared that the broken city had risen to free itself, sparked by la France éternelle. Throughout his career, de Gaulle’s greatness would be bolstered by his useful gift for denial; he was a one-man show, and at that moment, as Alan Moorehead wrote, he filled an immense void.
The city was ready to move from a frozen present tense into the American optative mood, and when the GIs were allowed to arrive on Aug. 26 the welcome was so joyous that they quickly became rather choosy about whose embraces they sought, preferring the prettier girls. Jean Genet contempuously described them as big-toothed costumed civilians, and indeed they did not resemble the "correct" - the word that is always used - stiff-backed German occupants.
The French physicist Albert Libchaber, then a child hiding near Marseille, remembers that the GIs seemed more like children than soldiers - "they gave us oranges and played with us, we hadn’t seen soldiers like that" - and his wife, Irene, saw them jumping into the fountain at the Place de la Concorde. When the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant came to Paris in 1950, she said you could still recognize Americans because they strode while the French shuffled.
Liberated Paris, with its morning-after blues, was gray, literally; its facades would be cleaned under Culture Minister André Malraux in the 1960s. Food shortages grew as the black market collapsed. People were vengeful and wary. "There was a terrible discretion between friends, after the years of separation, not knowing what the friends had thought or done, or where they had been," Martha Gellhorn wrote.
French women, as always, looked amazing but also weird. "Their silhouette was very queer and fascinating to me after utility and austerity England," reported Lee Miller. "Full floating skirts, tiny waistlines." Thick wooden-soled wedgies changed Parisiennes’ gait, Miller said, from the bouncing buttocks and mincing steps of prewar, and they wore pompadours or elegantly twisted turbans because only one hairdresser in Paris had functioning hairdryers, powered by young men on stationary bicycles in the basement. Hideous perhaps, but a sign of defiance to the Vichy regime, claimed Christian Dior, then working for the house of Le-$ Long. He was to reward the women’s patriotism with his New Look.
Along with Parisians, the world celebrated. Church bells rang in Mexico City and in London, where they had been silenced for fear that they might drown out the approach of dreaded silent doodlebug bombs.
Actually, because of a mistaken broadcast by CBS picked up by the BBC, London celebrated the liberation two days before it happened, as did New York, where crowds gathered in Rockefeller Plaza and the French soprano Lily Pons, "tiny in her USO uniform," said The New York Times, sang the Marseillaise.
The writer Sybille Bedford, who quit France at the start of war, heard the news by word of mouth in Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard: "It was an enormous shock and joy." The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, then a student in his native neutral Sweden, felt that a window had been opened, that one could finally get out. He had read Sartre and knew the songs of Maurice Chevalier but he was longing to taste pommes frites, which he did at a sidewalk stall in Paris in 1947.
Mavis Gallant was working as a reporter in Montreal. "To everybody it seemed as if from then on it was going to be easy. The pictures of girls on bicycles with their thick soles and that great puffy hair- we didn’t think they looked marvelous but we felt they looked marvelous."
Peter Adam, a half-Jewish German in hiding among his country’s ruins, marveled that Paris had emerged from the war intact. Its people may have looked shattered but the city did not, and this was important both to them and to the world, Moorehead says. "It would have been different if they had destroyed Paris. But Paris was still the loveliest inhabitable place on earth. One had forgotten how beautiful it was."
That Paris survived mostly undamaged explains in part the immense importance given to the Liberation, an importance far outweighing its military significance. The weeklong battle of Paris was not as strategic as Stalingrad or as tragic as the hopeless Warsaw uprising, fiercely going on as Paris was freed. Some 20,000 members of the Polish underground died after holding out for 63 days, almost twice as long as the 1940 battle for France.
Amid the destruction, the City of Light became a beacon of hope. In Virginia, the French-American writer Julien Green toasted the Liberation with a friend who said, "We must speak not of the fall of Paris, but rather of the rise of Paris."
If the city had survived so, people believed, had the civilization it embodied, the ideas that had informed the Western world for almost two centuries. The lessons learned from the recent past would ensure a better future.
Like most futures it didn’t turn out as expected, but even today the fabric of the city remains remarkably unchanged compared to other capitals. Fred Palacio, if he were with us, could still find a bench to sit on and murmur his old man’s memories of August 1944.
Paris, like most mythic places, had perhaps always represented more than it was, and foreigners these days dismiss it as outdated while at the same time hunting out its latest bistros and boutiques. The foreigners say Paris isn’t what it used to be, and Parisians say Paris sera toujours Paris - Paris will always be Paris. The two clichés finally balance each other and perhaps cancel each other out. As Sybille Bedford says, maybe Paris represents more than it is, but it is still a great deal.
The Harvard historian Patrice Higonnet traces what he calls the mythic status of Paris to about 1830 and says that by 1860 it was commonplace to view Paris as the world capital of modernity, science, liberty, the center of sensual pleasure and the arts. The puissant image remains, a permanent show easier to decipher, Higonnet maintains, than, say, London, Moscow or Berlin.
If foreigners look wonderingly at Paris, Paris also looks adoringly at herself. Any movie that shows a lovely Paris scene will get the same gasps of admiration from those in the audience who live in its midst as it would in Peoria, Illinois. In the 1937 film "Pépé le Moko" there is a wonderfully erotic scene in which the homesick gangster Jean Gabin, holed up in Algiers’s casbah, is visited by a glamourous Parisienne who is slumming. Seated head to head, they simply murmur to each other the names of Paris Métro stations - La Gare du Nord! l’Opéra! La Chapelle! - reaching a climax with the words La Place Blanche, although the actual subway stop of that name is rather drab.
If everyone has his or her own Paris, arguably the city is most important to Americans who, unlike older civilizations, came to it unlumbered by history, tradition or fancy lifestyles of their own. Even Ben Franklin took up flirting in Paris in order to be à la mode; others studied science or political theory, wrote books or just loafed, moving eastward, as Malcolm Cowley wrote, into new prairies of the mind.
It cannot be claimed that Paris welcomes foreigners, distrusting the Other as it does, but in ignoring them it tolerates them; it is accommodating in its indifference.
"I have a feeling that there’s a voice saying take it or leave it, kid," said Mavis Gallant, who has gladly taken it. "I have lived half my life in Paris," Gertrude Stein said. "Not the half that made me, but the half in which I made what I made."
One thing Americans liked from the start about Paris was that while they fully enjoyed its sensual pleasures they felt they had retained their native virtue. "We have not as much refinement, but more of everything that is good," a New Yorker wrote to his son in the mid-19th century.
This moral self-satisfaction persists. Parisians, for the most part, don’t think a lot about high-minded ideas, these having been resolved by the heavy thinkers memorized in the lycée. Americans trumpet moral views and find them, especially to their cost today, hard to enact. Americans want to do the right thing, not realizing it can be plural. Parisians want to do things the right way; that is, with precision and style. This can require more discipline than many realize: being Parisian is not a free ticket to indulgence.
The Parisian is deeply superficial, the American superficially profound. This should balance out, but the French are more complicated than we are, as Henry James noted in a letter telling a friend not to be put off "by what I might call the superficial and external aspect of the superficial and external aspect of Paris."
New Yorkers are merely self-absorbed but Parisians are world-class narcissists. This is a city made for preening, and the endless public grandstanding, physical and intellectual, may shock Americans, but in our innermost hearts wouldn’t we love to gaze at ourselves in the mirror with unabashed delight and let fall from our lips a well-timed and irresistible mot juste?
The differences are endless, the similarities often more than skin-deep. Maybe we all need a Paris. What Paris is, and not just for Americans, is wishful thinking come true, whatever the wish.
Sixty years ago, the wishes ranged from the most basic (more meat) to the most lofty (peace forever). Many agreed that the thing they had most missed was the freedom to speak. "Paris is fighting today so that France may speak up tomorrow," Camus said. Speaking up meant daring to hope out loud. "Peace," Camus said "will return to this disemboweled earth and to those hearts tortured by hope and memories....Happiness, tenderness will have their moment." He was surely speaking to the dead as to the living.
Salut, Fred.