The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks of the French 2nd armoured division (the famous Deuxième Division Blindée – 2eDB) to lead a diversion into the city, backed by American infantry. De Gaulle claimed that he was concerned to avoid the danger of a bloody insurrection led by the communist Resistance. His real concern was less about bloodshed than his future political control of France.
Since Paris was the first of the great European cities to be freed intact, with the loss of relatively little human life, it was naturally an occasion for heavy media coverage. It was a moment of intense national joy, reaching its climax with de Gaulle’s extraordinary speech at the Hotel de Ville when he laid the foundations of the Gaullist myth of a country that had ‘liberated itself’.
In Paris ’44, Patrick Bishop retells the familiar story but in an original form, since the first eight chapters are concerned with events in Paris, or other parts of France, in the ten years preceding D-Day. This section includes excursions into the politics of the extreme right in France in the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War – the latter introducing the absurd figure of ‘Papa’ Hemingway, who pops up at regular intervals throughout the book. Papa’s reappearance in Normandy, after apparently directing the landings on Omaha Beach, is redeemed by his chance meeting with a US infantry sergeant called Jerry (J.D.) Salinger, aged 25, who had landed in the second wave and was actually doing the fighting which Hemingway was boasting about.
Paris ’44 is lightly sourced, and mainly from published work, but Bishop has done a prodigious amount of reading around the subject. His account is brightened up with colourful anecdotes and characters that have some peripheral relevance to the main theme, as well as memories of Bishop’s own time in Paris with the Daily Telegraph. Occasionally the story threatens to turn into a huge party, including everyone who was anyone: Picasso, Bob Capa, the two Ernsts – Jünger and Hemingway – Cocteau, Arletty and Maurice Chevalier. The only celebrity missing, fortunately, is the figure of a rival warrior fantasist, André Malraux. Papa and Malraux eventually met up in the bar of the Ritz hotel, both dressed in military uniforms they were not entitled to wear, boasting competitively about the number of imaginary men they had under their command.
Bishop is clearly moved by the joy of 25 August, which was, as he notes, ‘the day the war should have ended’. It is now seen as the symbolic termination of the most shameful episode in French history. And the book gives a vivid impression of what it might have been like to be there on that wonderful day. Whether it is still possible to write accurate history in this mood 80 years on is not so clear. Some time has passed since we first saw the Battle of Normandy through the thoughtful and disabused eyes of Corporal Richard Cobb, whose tent outside Bayeux was overturned by an angry cow, shortly before he was put under close arrest for something he had written in the regimental newssheet.
De Gaulle’s speech laid the foundations of the myth of
a country that had ‘liberated itself’
We have also been able to read the memoirs of Marguerite Duras, with her repulsive description of torturing an elderly garçon de café, ‘captured’ by her communist mini-group, tormented, stripped naked and beaten for hours, for no clear reason then or later. And we are surely able, if we are going to mention the writer and collaborator Robert Brasillach at all, to take some interest in what turned ‘one of the most brilliant minds of his generation’ into the man who approved of the deportation of Jewish children. It is not enough to mention that we condemn his lethal opinions. Many of the collaborators who were shot after the war died bravely, shouting: ‘Vive la France.’ But Brasillach died with a joke on his lips. As the firing squad took aim, he shouted: ‘Vive la France… quand même.’
In his discussion of Brasillach’s trial, Bishop quotes a coarse précis by an earlier polemicist of a passage from one of the novelist’s finest wartime essays. Early in 1944, when German defeat was only a matter of time, Brasillach had written:
It seems to me that I’ve contracted a liaison with German genius, one that I will never forget…Frenchmen given to reflection during these years will have more or less slept with Germany… and the memory will remain sweet.
As a summary of France’s tragic war, it rings far truer than the voyeuristic memories of Duras, or the vainglorious communist Resistance chants of ‘à chacun son Boche’, or yet another observation that we do not approve of a dangerous anti-Semite like Brasillach. At some point, history has to become an essay in understanding rather than one more ‘three cheers for victory’.
But for those who prefer their history to be romantic, this book is the one. It’s all here – the cancelled communist insurrection, the tense negotiations with de Gaulle’s emissaries, the dubious record of ‘the man who saved Paris’, the German garrison commander Dietrich von Choltitz – in full Technicolor, told at a blistering pace and lightly covering every conceivable angle. Papa would certainly have approved, although I doubt if Sergeant Salinger would have been so keen.
In an interesting passage, Bishop quotes from a short story Salinger wrote before he left New York to join the US 4th Infantry Division: ‘I believe it’s the moral duty of all the men who have fought… to keep our mouths shut, once it’s over, never mention it again.’
August 1944, in Paris, was quite untypical of France’s general experience of liberation. Salinger remained notoriously reticent throughout his post-war life. There may be a clue to that silence on the war memorial of Ouistreham, the seaside town whose beaches were renamed ‘Juno’ and ‘Sword’ for D-Day. The names of the civilians from that one small Normandy port killed in the Royal Naval bombardments of 6 June equal the town’s military casualties in both world wars.
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