So said Gen De Gaulle 60 years ago next week. And Parisians are getting ready to celebrate again, reports Lara Marlowe.
The German occupation of Paris that started on June 14th 1940 and ended on August 25th 1944 was the darkest chapter in the city's existence. It followed the deaths of 92,000 French soldiers in the German blitzkrieg and the taking of one million French prisoners of war.
Every day for 50 months, German soldiers in jack-boots and steel helmets marched down the Champs-Élysées. The red and black swastika flag flew over the Opera, the Majestic, Crillon, Meurice and Lutetia hotels. Neighbours of the Gestapo's torture chambers at 74 Avenue Foch and 9 Rue des Saussaies could not sleep at night for the sound of screaming. Only 3 per cent of the 76,000 French Jews who were deported by the Vichy government survived.
The Germans plundered Paris to feed their army, so food was rationed. Parisians made ersatz coffee from barley, acorns and chick-peas and raised rabbits in their apartments to eat. There was the constant danger of being killed in an RAF bombing raid, or of being taken hostage and shot by the Germans in retaliation for an attack by the Resistance. The occupation force and their allies in the French Milice killed 30,000 French people.
The liberation of Paris was a breath-taking, heart-stopping race to save the capital from the devastation only recently suffered by Warsaw, where the Germans killed 166,000 Poles to punish them for rising against their occupiers. By August 22nd, when US Gen Dwight Eisenhower finally agreed to send the French 2nd Division and the US 4th Division into the capital, Paris was on the verge of starvation and the Resistance fighters who held the Préfecture de Police and other key government buildings were running out of ammunition. Most of their weapons were rifles or Mauser machine guns seized from the Germans.
"Paris must be reduced to a pile of rubble," Hitler ordered Gen Dietrich von Choltitz, the commander of "Gross Paris". In René Clément's classic film, Is Paris Burning?, von Choltitz is a man of reason who realises that Hitler has gone mad and that Germany will lose the war. Though he had Paris's bridges, the National Assembly, the Eiffel Tower and other public buildings mined with naval torpedoes, von Choltitz never gave the order to detonate them. The French attribute von Choltitz's failure to obey Hitler to self- preservation.
"Gen Leclerc sent von Choltitz a message that he'd be considered a war criminal if he destroyed the city," says Francois Melchiori, the producer and director in charge of the official 60th anniversary ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville next Wednesday. "Leclerc also threatened to fire a tank shell at von Choltitz; it was very persuasive."
Rarely have tragedy and joy, the comical, the surreal and the deeply moving been so intensely interwoven as between August 19th and 27th 1944 in Paris. French girls made love with GIs in tanks; gangsters freed in a prison break put on the FFI (Free French of the Interior) armbands worn by the Resistance to commit robberies. In one week, more than 900 Resistance fighters, 582 civilians, 130 French soldiers and 3,200 Germans were killed, many of them shot by snipers from rooftops.
The battle continued sporadically for two days after the German surrender on August 25th. When the Luftwaffe killed more than 200 Parisians in a last-gasp bombing raid on the night of the 27th, not one anti-aircraft artillery fired because the city was too busy celebrating.
Madeleine Riffaud was a 20-year-old member of the Resistance when she was arrested by the Germans for killing a Nazi officer in July 1944. Riffaud did not talk under torture, and was condemned to death. Miraculously, she was one of 3,000 French prisoners whose freedom was obtained by the Swedish consul, Raoul Nordling, on August 17th.
Riffaud found her comrades building a barricade in the 19th arrondissement. Parisians felled trees and dragged sandbags, beds, mattresses, iron grates and bathtubs to construct 600 of the makeshift barriers against German panzers. People came out of apartment buildings to bring the fighters food and "coffee" made from barley. The eldest in Riffaud's group was 22 years old.
"It was a battlefield, but the mood was of intense joy and personal deliverance," Riffaud says. Her most powerful memory is of a street urchin, a boy aged 10 or 11, who kept asking the fighters for a weapon. They refused, but he somehow obtained a hand grenade.
"Early in the morning, a German truck drove towards our barricade," Riffaud recalls. "We were ready to fire. The kid grabbed his grenade, pulled the pin and was about to throw it when suddenly the people in the truck waved French flags out the windows. They were on our side! The kid had only a few seconds to get rid of the grenade. Whichever way he threw it, he would have killed his own people. He rolled himself into a ball and the grenade exploded. He sacrificed himself to protect us. We didn't have time to cry; the enemy was attacking."
It is often forgotten that 80 per cent of the first company of Allied soldiers to enter Paris, on the evening of August 24th, were Spanish Republicans whom Franco had banished to Morocco, where they were recruited by Gen Leclerc. When "la Nueve", led by Captain Raymond Dronne, arrived, church bells pealed throughout the city. Earlier in the day, a Piper-cub reconnaissance aircraft dropped a message over the embattled Hôtel de Ville: "Hang on! We're on our way!"
In recognition of the Spaniards' heroism, Jérôme Savary, one of France's best-known theatre directors and the organiser of a street party for 300,000 people next Wednesday night, has invited the singer Paco Ibáñez to sing Republican songs.
The advance of Gen Leclerc's forces was slowed by crowds of euphoric Parisians.
"The welcome was delirious," recalls Robert Lauga, now aged 83, who arrived with a tactical group at the Porte de Saint Cloud. "I was easily accessible on my jeep," he recalls. "People grabbed on to me to embrace me. My face was covered with lipstick. We were trying to get to the Place de l'Étoile, to liberate that sector. The further we advanced, the more the crowd thinned out, and then suddenly there was no one. That's when we realised it was dangerous."
The liberation of Paris was the defining moment of post-second World War French history. Gaullists have ruled France for most of the 60 years since, so there's a tendency to forget that the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), under the command of Col Rol, a steel worker and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, whose real name was Henri Tanguy, launched the insurrection and did most of the fighting.
Charles de Gaulle was haunted by the spectre of French revolutions in 1830, 1848 and especially 1871. "Go fast," he told Gen Leclerc. "We cannot have another Commune," he added, alluding to the left-wing revolt in which tens of thousands of Parisians were killed in the wake of France's defeat by Prussia. By arriving at the Hôtel de Ville on the afternoon of the 25th and delivering an impassioned speech, de Gaulle effectively stole the credit from the Communists.
"Paris! Paris outraged! Paris shattered! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated," de Gaulle intoned in words memorised by every French school child. "Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, in concurrence with the armies of France, with the support and concurrence of the whole of France, of fighting France, the only France, the true France, eternal France." The following day, De Gaulle laid a wreath of red gladioli at the tomb of the unknown soldier and re-lit the flame. Ignoring German sniper fire, he was cheered by hundreds of thousands of Parisians as he walked down the Champs-Élysées and all the way to Notre Dame Cathedrale for a Te Deum.
Twice the crowd came under fire, on the Place de la Concorde and in the cathedral. While everyone else dived for cover, de Gaulle stood ramrod straight. Malcom Muggeridge, then a British intelligence officer, was there. "The huge congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces," Muggeridge wrote decades later. "There was a single exception; one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, de Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him - towering and alone; the rest, prostrate." De Gaulle did not invite Gen Barton's 4th Infantry Division to the informal parade down the Champs-Élysées, and declined Gen Eisenhower's request for Leclerc's division to re-join the march eastward. By arriving so quickly in Paris and installing the provisional government he'd formed in Algiers, de Gaulle made it impossible for the US to set up the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) as they'd planned.
This historical legacy - or more recent Franco-American tensions - may explain why no high-ranking US officials will attend the official 60th anniversary ceremony. The US will be represented by the Chargé d'Affaires from the US embassy in Paris.
Yet Jérôme Savary insists that his lavish production - re-enactments of the arrival of Allied columns, a show and ball on the place de la Bastille - is in homage to the Americans as well as the French who liberated Paris. "The truth is the Americans had the courtesy to let the French enter the city first, to keep Gen de Gaulle happy," Savary says. "The Americans provided all the matériel: the tanks, jeeps, machine guns, and the artillery and air support." Neither collaboration nor ÉPURATION (the vengeful purging of former collaborators), the twin shames that marred the liberation, will be mentioned during the 60th anniversary celebrations. "We're going to avoid talking about it," says Francois Melchiori, the director of the Hôtel de Ville ceremony. "Everybody knows about it, like the death camps." Gen de Gaulle's speech on August 25th was the beginning of the myth that "the whole of France, fighting France" resisted occupation. It wasn't until the 1970s that research by the US academic Robert Paxton proved otherwise. As the French historian Fernand Braudel warned, it is difficult to maintain a distance from "this still burning history, as it was felt by those who described it, lived through it... It has the dimension of their anger, of their dreams and their illusions."
Liberation of Paris Events
Jérôme Savary, the director of the Paris Opéra Comique, is organising a giant street party in the Place de la Bastille on the evening of August 25th , for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris.
"The biggest challenge is getting people to wear 1940s costume and enter into the spirit of the evening," says Savary. His 45-minute "Liberté-Liberty" show begins on an open-air stage at 8.30 pm. Based on Savary's musical "Zazou", the show will feature American jazz, swing and boogie-woogie, as well as more traditional French tunes. A crowd of 300,000 is expected, and dancing will continue until 12.30 am.
Official ceremonies will begin at 9 am on the 25th, at the tomb of Marshal Leclerc, whose 2nd armoured division (2e DB) liberated Paris. An homage to the firemen who raised the tricolour on the Eiffel Tower follows at 10 am. The French defence ministry will re-enact the convergence of French and US columns on the Place de la Concorde at 11 am.
From 2 pm until 7 pm, two military columns of vintage tanks and military vehicles representing the 2e DB and the US 4th infantry division will repeat the itineraries of August 25th, 1944.
The French Senate, where fighting was fierce, will hold its own commemoration at 5 pm, followed by a bal populaire.
The main official ceremony will take place at the Hôtel de Ville, where Gen Charles de Gaulle made his famous "Paris liberated" speech, between 7 and 8.15 pm.
Film from the summer of 1944 will be projected on giant screens. Children will read descriptions of the liberation written by French pupils in September 1944. President Jacques Chirac will decorate veterans, and the military convoys will disgorge actors disguised as armed members of the Resistance in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Parisians will walk alongside the parked convoys in the rue de Rivoli and the rue Saint-Antoine to reach the party in the Place de la Bastille.
Getting into the 1940s spirit
How Parisians will celebrate
Jérôme Savary, the director of the Paris Opéra Comique, is organising a giant street party in the Place de la Bastille on the evening of August 25th , for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris.
"The biggest challenge is getting people to wear 1940s costume and enter into the spirit of the evening," says Savary. His 45-minute "Liberté-Liberty" show begins on an open-air stage at 8.30 pm. Based on Savary's musical "Zazou", the show will feature American jazz, swing and boogie-woogie, as well as more traditional French tunes. A crowd of 300,000 is expected, and dancing will continue until 12.30 am.
Official ceremonies will begin at 9 am on the 25th, at the tomb of Marshal Leclerc, whose 2nd armoured division (2e DB) liberated Paris. An homage to the firemen who raised the tricolour on the Eiffel Tower follows at 10 am. The French defence ministry will re-enact the convergence of French and US columns on the Place de la Concorde at 11 am.
From 2 pm until 7 pm, two military columns of vintage tanks and military vehicles representing the 2e DB and the US 4th infantry division will repeat the itineraries of August 25th, 1944.
The French Senate, where fighting was fierce, will hold its own commemoration at 5 pm, followed by a BAL POPULAIRE (italics).
The main official ceremony will take place at the Hôtel de Ville, where Gen Charles de Gaulle made his famous "Paris liberated" speech, between 7 and 8.15 pm.
Film from the summer of 1944 will be projected on giant screens. Children will read descriptions of the liberation written by French pupils in September 1944. President Jacques Chirac will decorate veterans, and the military convoys will disgorge actors disguised as armed members of the Resistance in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Parisians will walk alongside the parked convoys in the rue de Rivoli and the rue Saint-Antoine to reach the party in the Place de la Bastille.