The Paris Game: Charles de Gaulle, the Liberation of Paris, and the Gamble that Won France

General Charles de Gaulle posed for Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh during an Ottawa visit, August 1944.

Karsh

Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!

— Charles de Gaulle, Paris, August 25, 1944

Contents

Epigraph

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

The Players

Chronology

I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

II

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Images I

III

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

IV

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Images II

V

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright

Foreword

Maurice Vaïsse

Writing a book about a historic figure, or a period in history, is somewhat like painting a portrait or a landscape. No two people will produce a work that looks exactly the same; we all project a little bit of ourselves into the work. The appeal of The Paris Game stems from the fact that its author reveals he is a lover of Paris and an admirer of Charles de Gaulle, and one can read these sentiments in every line. Every biographer of the Man of the 18th of June has chosen to emphasize a particular aspect of his character, and this is also the case for Ray Argyle.

I would first like to say why it was a pleasure to read him. He is an author who innovates and surprises, often resorting to lesser-known Canadian and American sources, alongside the better-known French documentation, such as Charles de Gaulle’s own Mémoires de guerre. The detailed Notes and Sources that Argyle has included are particularly useful, revealing his knowledge of the culture and the life of France.

Although the book is well-documented, it pleases me especially because to read it is to enjoy a refreshing change from academic histories. It is not cluttered with abstract references and considerations. Instead, it is distinguished by its practical approach and the liveliness of its depiction of the personalities. The author likes to portray people and things in their environment and in their everyday life; they are not mere abstract figures or intellectual entities. De Gaulle has a family, wife, children, and Argyle excels in giving them their proper place in the family environment.

The book places great importance on a variety of interesting figures, each of whom had a role in the liberation and recovery of France. They include such personalities as Jean Moulin, Elisabeth de Miribel, Philippe Leclerc, and de Gaulle’s son, Philippe, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Less attention is paid to ministers, administrators, diplomats, and military figures — those that may be referred to as de Gaulle’s entourage. Because we forget too often, it is worth remembering, as does the author, that de Gaulle did not transform France alone. He was aided by members of a supportive circle that extended from London to Algiers, and from de Gaulle’s home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the presidential suite at the Élysée Palace.

But men and women are not the only ones to play a role in this book. There is also the immortal Paris, which holds a place of prime importance. Paris is not merely the setting for the events described so well by the author, but a real actor in the story and the main stage on which General de Gaulle performed. As a lover and a connoisseur of the capital’s different neighbourhoods, the author describes the principal scenes in which Charles de Gaulle acted out his career. This is a book full of interesting portraits and little-known facts that hook the reader with a sense of action and life.

To paraphrase Pirandello, who wrote, To each his own truth, I could say, To each his own de Gaulle. Argyle has made his choice: he has chosen to put the Man of the 18th of June on the stage — the man who rallied the French to fight on. For my part, I would have appreciated it if Argyle had described the following years of de Gaulle’s career with the same precision he has applied to that era. But there you have it; it is his choice, which he illustrates by focusing on the period of the Second World War and the French Resistance (1939–1945), rather than on the presidency of General de Gaulle (1958–1969). In this sense, Argyle is in agreement with a majority of the French, for whom Charles de Gaulle remains the Man of the 18th of June and the man of legend.

Readers of The Paris Game will not find lengthy arguments on issues that continue to divide analysts: Was de Gaulle a republican or was he a Bonapartist — a man for the people or a would-be emperor? Was he a doctrinarian or was he a pragmatist? And if he was a doctrinarian, what was his doctrine? Was he a man attached to the nation-state, and as such, unable to understand the postwar world? Or was he a true European? Was he anti-American in the 1960s in reaction to his wartime experiences? Or was he merely enamoured of national independence and conscious of France’s need to remain close to the United States? Was de Gaulle determined to preserve France’s domination of its colonies and was his approach to decolonization thus a sham? Or did de Gaulle understand the new path that was opening up for France: the path to progress through co-operation? And what did the Gaullian call for the greatness of France really signify?

In his conclusion, Argyle briefly evokes some of these aspects. He insists precisely on the construction of the de Gaulle legend — the fruit of both dramatic events and of the general’s own actions. He also sweeps aside the idea that Charles de Gaulle would have been something other than a democrat, or that he was merely a vain and prideful man in search of glory. Argyle has a sympathetic view of the man of whom he paints a rather favourable portrait. An exception comes in his discussion of the general’s trip to Quebec in 1967. There is an implicit condemnation by the author of de Gaulle’s verbal gaffe in his summoning, from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall, the image of an independent Quebec through his use of the expression, Vive le Québec libre.

The title of this book, The Paris Game, at first surprised me. Argyle explains his choice by his reference to the Great Game played out on the borders of India and Afghanistan by the Russians and the British in the nineteenth century. This is a logical comparison, but one should not lose sight of the fact that in this very personal and lively book, there are two heroes: Charles de Gaulle and Paris.

Maurice Vaïsse

Sciences Po, University of Paris

Maurice Vaïsse is professor emeritus at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), University of Paris, where he has specialized in the history of international relations. He is the author of fourteen books, including La Grandeur: Politique étrangère du général de Gaulle (1958–1969). Professor Vaïsse has been a counsellor to the Charles de Gaulle Foundation and is the recipient of many honours. He is an Officer of the Ordre national du Mérite and a Knight of the Légion d’honneur.

Introduction

The air is sultry and the sky threatens rain as we reach the square in front of l’Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris, for the ceremonies commemorating the liberation of the world’s most celebrated city. Every year since 1944, Paris has paused on the 25th of August to remember the day that its citizens, having risen against their Nazi German occupiers, revelled in the arrival of their liberators, the Fighting French 2nd Armoured Division and the United States 4th Infantry Division. Parisians celebrated joyfully as tanks and armoured cars clattered across the bridges of the Seine, bringing to an end four years and four months of oppression, humiliation, and betrayal.

Many of the liberating soldiers of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army — it included black colonials from French Equatorial Africa and haggard veterans of the Spanish Civil War — had never before set eyes on Paris. The city shimmered before them in the midsummer sun of that long-ago day, their presence a fulfillment of a fiercely held dream. That they were here was due in great measure to the towering arrogance and grandiose sense of self of one man, a man who had refused to bow to defeat after the catastrophic Battle of France in 1940. All the rivalries, divisions, and contradictions that would arise in Charles de Gaulle’s long life — the rebellious soldier who brought discipline to a fractious army; the arch-conservative who launched the French welfare state; and the Empire loyalist who set free France’s richest colony, Algeria — are now but postscripts to a legendary life. His memory is forever interred in the national myth he bestowed on his country — one that will be reaffirmed today — of France as a nation of resisters, a people capable of surviving gigantic trials and emerging to resume their march toward their destiny.

All my life I have come to Paris at every opportunity, either on assignment or simply for the joy of being here. This time I have arrived from Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, a village in eastern France where Deborah and I spent a week visiting La Boisserie, the general’s country home, and the Charles de Gaulle Memorial Museum, with its huge Cross of Lorraine, high above the Marne countryside. My purpose in returning to Paris is to reassemble the story of the occupation, liberation, and rebirth of this great city — one of the most dramatic episodes of the Second World War, played out in a high-stakes game reminiscent of the Great Game between Russia and Britain for influence in Central Asia in the nineteenth century.

The game for Paris would prove even more critical, its outcome shaping national honour, personal glory, and the destiny of Western Europe. The players: Winston Churchill, faced with perilous odds but enthusiastic for de Gaulle’s playing of the card of France, a card now called de Gaulle; President Franklin Roosevelt, suspicious of de Gaulle and wanting to put Paris under American military rule; General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who wanted to bypass Paris in the Allied plunge toward Nazi Germany; the once-heroic Marshall Philippe Pétain, who wanted Paris as the capital of a New France partnered with Germany; Adolf Hitler, who wanted Paris burned; and Charles de Gaulle, determined to see Paris liberated by the French, an act that would restore the honour of France in the eyes of his countrymen and the world.

To reach l’Hôtel de Ville this day, we have walked across Pont Royal from our apartment on Quai Voltaire and taken coffee on the rue de Rivoli near the Hôtel Meurice, wartime headquarters of General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Gross Paris. The anniversary ceremony has drawn a crowd of several thousand, small by Parisian standards, but it includes many young people curious to witness this renewal of their history. People chat quietly, content with their presence at what is the largest of several remembrances held on this day. Earlier, citizens had gathered at Gare de l’Est before a memorial etched into the wall of the station commemorating the deportation of Jews and others to German concentration camps. In front of Gare Montparnasse, at a statute of General Jacques Leclerc, commander of the 2nd Armoured Division, a ceremony recalled his taking the surrender of the German Occupation forces. It was at Gare Montparnasse that Charles de Gaulle had on that fateful day made his first stop in Paris.

Hundreds of chairs have been set out for veterans of the uprising and soldiers — anciens combattants — who took part in the liberation, as well as for military and political officials and their families. They arrive bearing invitations from the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, and take their seats in front of a stage behind which has been erected a giant screen, flanked by French flags and a single American Stars and Stripes. There is no obvious sign of security in the square, no apparent presence of armed soldiers carrying assault guns as we’d seen on patrol near Notre Dame the evening before.

This year’s ceremony — "Memoire d’une insurrection — Hommage au Peuple de Paris" — pays tribute to the men and women of the Paris uprising. It begins with police and firemen parading in honour of the Régiment de marche du Tchad, the infantry regiment of the 2nd Armoured Division. The crowd stands and sings pridefully when La Marseillaise is played.

The big screen shows close-ups of men and women present today, now aged and grey, who fought and saw their comrades die in the liberation of Paris. In a whispered aside, one helps his neighbour remember an incident of that long-ago day. It is no mere history they are recalling, but the mainstream of their lives, a remembrance of the most important thing they ever saw or did, no matter what has happened to them since. The Gaullist myth of a nation united against its occupiers has of course long since faded, dissolved in the hard truths testified to by survivors and recounted in films and books. The résistants who are being honoured today, however, are among that brave band of Parisians who dared to rise against their occupiers, and in so doing cleared the way for their Fighting French and American liberators.

Black-and-white images fill the screen, bearing dates and events of the uprising. We see the barricading of the streets, young men and women firing at German soldiers from open windows, and we hear the ringing of church bells that tell Parisians their city has been freed. Finally, the epochal scenes of Charles de Gaulle addressing members of the Resistance in l’Hôtel de Ville, declaring that while Paris had been outraged and martyred, Paris has now been liberated, by itself, and with the support of eternal France.

Next comes a solemn presentation of pictures of men and women of the Resistance who have died during the past year. The images serve as reminders that we will not much longer have among us those who bear personal witness to the events of August 1944. The voice of a young soprano fills the air, Le Chant des Partisans, evoking the courage of those French who defied their German conquerors, unwilling to meekly accept the conquest of their homeland.

It is then that I meet Angela Irving, an elegant English woman who mistakes me for a Parisian and addresses me in impeccable French. I explain why I am here, and we talk. Her presence is a tribute to the universality of Paris. Elderly now, she has come in remembrance of her friend Pierre, a lieutenant in the Free French Army who helped liberate Paris. She draws a silk handkerchief from her purse and dabs at her eyes as she speaks of him. I wonder if they were lovers.

My thoughts of what it must have been like for Pierre and his comrades blur with the images before my eyes. I think of Captain Raymond Dronne of the 9th Company of the Regiment of Chad, whose reconnaissance squad of three tanks and nine armoured cars had entered this square late in the evening of August 24, 1944, the first liberators into Paris. Others of the Free French 2nd Armoured Division followed shortly after dawn, to find the Tricolour already flying over l’Hôtel de Ville.

More profoundly, the liberation marked a climactic date in Charles de Gaulle’s enormous gamble to transform France from a defeated and dispirited nation into an equal among conquering Allies. As an American soldier told playwright Irwin Shaw while dodging shells from a tank battle on the rue de Rivoli, the liberation of Paris deserved to be remembered as the day the war should end.[1] And why not? With the freeing of Paris in the west and the onward surge of the Red Army in the east, everyone knew the war could have but one outcome.

Paris was no Stalingrad, fought over from house to house, nor was it the victim, like London, of merciless aerial attack. It stood as a symbol of culture and freedom — of what had been lost to the Nazis and what must be regained for the world. From its subjugation by the Romans who gave it the name Lutétia, the history of this settlement founded on an island in the Seine by the Parisi, an ancient Celtic tribe, is filled with momentous occasions: its sacking by Viking raiders in 845; the laying of the foundation stone of Notre Dame in 1163; the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, that set off the French Revolution; Napoleon’s seizure of power ten years later; the city’s surrender to the Prussian army on January 28, 1871; the brief but bloody life of the Paris Commune of that year; the belle époque of high art and culture of the years before the First World War; and the dreadful losses of that conflict that bequeathed France "une génération perdue," a term borrowed by North Americans such as Ernest Hemingway who saw themselves as members of that forsaken generation.

Of the legion of books about the Second World War, most provide only a partial understanding of the ordeal that France endured through defeat, occupation, and finally liberation. General de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre, as might be expected, offer a perspective shrewdly tailored to support his life’s mission to render France some signal service. Our vantage point three-quarters of a century later allows us to present a more clearly etched picture of a man who on three occasions intervened decisively in his country’s affairs: to save the honour of a defeated nation in 1940; to prevent its slippage into the Communist arc between 1944 and 1946; and to forestall civil war and military dictatorship between 1958 and 1962.

Because of the emphasis historians have placed on the particularities of de Gaulle’s personality and their focus on such traits as vanity and arrogance, his significance as a transformative figure of the twentieth century has not been fully recognized. The British-born academic Niall Ferguson fails to mention de Gaulle in his massive (746-page) The War of the World. Ferguson credits his countryman Liddell Hart with developing the theories of mechanized warfare practised so successfully by the Germans, although de Gaulle had called, as early as 1934, for the use of tanks and planes in coordinated attack, a lesson Hitler said he learned from having de Gaulle’s book, Vers l’Armée de Metier (The Army of the Future) read to him.

Because most of the commentary dealing with de Gaulle’s actions and policies during and after the Second World War reflects a dominant Anglo-American bias, a more nuanced global perspective of his strategies and thinking has not always been offered. As I will show, for example, it took the forceful presence and persistent obstinacy of Charles de Gaulle, coupled with the realization by the Allies that he had the support of an overwhelming majority of the French people, to dissuade General Eisenhower from implementing President Roosevelt’s ill-advised scheme to impose an American military government on liberated France. Trading one form of occupation for another could only have provided the Communist Party, then the country’s largest political party, with a grievance it would have cleverly ridden to power — with shattering consequences for the future of Europe and the peace of the world.

De Gaulle again rescued France from catastrophe when he assumed power for the second time, in 1958. His actions as president of the Fifth Republic prevented the outbreak of a civil war over Algeria; he later saved France from a secret army plot to put the country under military dictatorship. Internationally, de Gaulle achieved reconciliation with Germany, creating a relationship that would become the bedrock for peace in Europe. He played a pre-eminent role in assembling the forerunner of today’s European Union and launched France on an independent course on the world stage. His rejection of American supremacy — symbolized by France’s withdrawal from NATO and the creation of its own nuclear force de frappe — raised the curtain on an era of robust diplomacy by middle powers, a state of affairs to which the world has become accustomed since the end of the Cold War.

Personal reminiscences, official records, books, letters, and diaries — from de Gaulle himself, but also from members of his family, those who knew him and who worked for him or against him, writers and diarists, as well as ordinary people — all these I have drawn on for insights into the personal experiences and intimate perceptions of those who were witness to these tumultuous times. The narrative follows the arc of de Gaulle’s life through his hurried departure from a besieged Paris as the newly minted one-star general and undersecretary of defense of the French government, to his occupancy of the Élysée Palace as president of the Fifth Republic, an organism of his creation. It is then we hear him exult, I have played my cards well. I’ve won![2]

I am conscious of the fact that France, one of the two European nations in which my country, Canada, is deeply rooted, holds an exceptional place in the history of Europe and the world. I hope this book will give the general reader a fuller understanding and a greater appreciation of the dramatic and profoundly important role that Charles de Gaulle has played in shaping the twentieth-century narrative that stands as his legacy.

Ray Argyle

Kingston, Ontario, 2014

The Players

Free French/Fighting French

General Charles de Gaulle: Undersecretary of national defense, June 1940; thereafter, leader of the Free French/Fighting French throughout Second World War; head of Provisional French Government, 1946; premier of Fourth Republic, 1958; president of Fifth Republic, 1959–69.

Geoffroy de Courcel: Aide-de-camp and private secretary to General de Gaulle, 1940–41; later deputy chef du cabinet, ambassador to London.

Elisabeth de Miribel: Volunteer and aide to General de Gaulle 1940–49; member Carmelite Order 1949–58; later a French diplomat.

General Marie-Pierre Koenig: Commander-in-chief, Free French Forces; later marshall of France.

General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque: Commander, 2nd Armoured Division 1944–45; liberator of Paris.

Jean Moulin: Delegate-General to the French Resistance.

Henri Georges René Tanguy (Colonel Rol-Tanguy): Communist leader of the Resistance in Paris.

Georges Bidault: President, Comité National de la Resistance.

General Jacques Chaban-Delmas: Fighting French military delegate to the Resistance, 1944–45.

Government of France (1940)

Édouard Daladier: Premier and minister of defense.

Paul Reynaud: Premier, March–June 1940.

Albert Lebrun: President, 1932–40.

Vichy France (1940–44)

Marshall Philippe Pétain: First World War hero; surrendered France to Germany in Second World War; chief of state, 1940–44.

Pierre Laval: Premier during German occupation.

General Maxime Weygand: Minister of defense.

Admiral François Darlan: Minister for interior, defense, and foreign affairs, 1941–42; high commissioner in North Africa, 1942.

United Kingdom

Winston Churchill: Prime minister 1940–45, 1951–55.

Anthony Eden: Secretary of state for war, 1940–45; prime minister during 1956 Suez crisis.

Major-General Edward Spears: Personal representative of Winston Churchill to France, 1940.

United States

Franklin D. Roosevelt: President, 1933–45.

Cordell Hull: Secretary of State, 1933–44.

Robert Murphy: Chargé d’affaires, Vichy, 1940; special mission, Algeria, 1941–43.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower: Commander-in-chief, Allied forces in Europe, 1943–45; president 1953–61.

Admiral William D. Leahy: Ambassador to Vichy France, 1941–42.

William C. Bullitt: Ambassador to France, 1935–40.

Canada

William Lyon Mackenzie King: Prime minister 1935–48.

Major Georges Vanier: Ambassador to France 1940, 1944–53; governor general, 1959–67.

Jean Dupuy: Ambassador to Vichy France, 1941–42, later head of Expo ’67, Montreal.

Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler: Führer, head of Nazi Party, commander-in-chief of armed forces, 1933–45.

General Dietrich von Choltitz: Military governor of Paris, August 1944.

Otto Abetz: Nazi ambassador to France, 1940–44.

West Germany

Konrad Adenhauer: Chancellor, Federal Republic of West Germany, 1949–63.

Chronology

I

Days of Darkness: The Hand Is Dealt

We do not yet know what will happen in France.… However matters may go, we will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, and freedom shall be restored to all.

— Winston Churchill

London, May 10, 1940

CHAPTER 1

The Débacle of Paris

The Battle of France has begun. The order is to defend our positions without thought of retreat.… May the thought of our wounded country inspire in you an unshakable resolution to hold where you are.

— General Maxime Weygand

Commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in France

Order of the Day, June 5, 1940

In Paris that spring the lilac and wisteria bloomed early. Along the Champs-Élysées, the chestnut trees blossomed gloriously but briefly, their white flowers fading too soon before falling to the pavement. The newspapers were filled with optimistic accounts of the war, and the premier, Paul Reynaud, went on the radio to give assurances that France was calm and stood strong in the face of the enemy. Crowds flocked to theatres and cinemas. Polish émigré Alexandre Ryder premiered his anti-German docudrama, Après Mein Kampf, mes crimes, at the Olympia, but Goodbye Mr. Chips , showing at Le Triomphe, played to far larger audiences. Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker entranced visitors at the Casino de Paris. Shoppers in chic outfits sunned themselves at sidewalk cafés. French couturier Lucien Lelong linked high fashion to patriotism: The more French women remain elegant, the more our country will show foreigners it is not afraid. [1] In the Bois de Boulogne, the stands were filled at Auteuil racetrack for the annual spring meet. Some lucky winners enjoyed a celebratory dinner at the elegant Pré-Catalan café, first pausing to admire the elephant-skinned beech tree that stood nearby, said to have been planted before the French Revolution.

On the Left Bank, writers and artists gathered at such favoured cafés as the Dome, La Rotonde, and Café de Flore, debating whether to support the war. Simone de Beauvoir — her paramour Jean-Paul Sartre having been conscripted into the army — confessed her attachment to these places in a passage in her diary: I feel as if I’m home with my family and that protects me against anguish.[2]

In the poor outer regions of Paris — later to be called the Red Belt — workers with families jammed into tiny walk-up apartments grumbled at again having to work six days a week, the forty-hour week introduced during the brief regime of the leftist Popular Front now all but forgotten. Communists in factories and foundries, and they were many, hewed to the party line that the war was a conspiracy among imperialist powers, undeserving of working-class support. Union members paraded as usual in the traditional May Day celebration of labour, but festivities were subdued. A front-page editorial in Le Figaro noted that employers and workers were each marking the day on their own terms, in the interests of the national solidarity of France at war.

The diversions and labours of the citizens of Paris acquired a sudden urgency on Friday, May 10, 1940, when the German Wehrmacht unleashed a fearful armed attack — the blitzkrieg, or lightning war — across Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and into France. A month later, Paris had suffered its first air raid, units of the German 9th Division were at the Seine River sixty kilometres below Paris, and, for the second time in the lives of many of its citizens, the capital became a besieged city. Sandbags were hastily piled up around Paris monuments. It was a city beset by rumours — that German parachutists had landed in the Tuileries Gardens and that poisoned chocolates had been dropped by air over Gare d’Austerlitz, with at least one child having died from eating them. Parisians who had not already fled were startled by the pall of acrid smoke and fumes that hung over the city, detritus from the burning of tons of government documents. Knots of retreating soldiers, some drunk, their rifles lost or thrown aside, clustered around felled trees and overturned buses and trucks, meagre barricades against oncoming German panzer tanks.

Parisians who had cars and could obtain gasoline clogged the roads to the south. Thousands shuffled in lines for hours at Gare Lyon and other stations, desperate for tickets on the last departing trains. Refugees from regions already overrun pushed carts and bicycles filled with pitiful belongings. A barge filled with fleeing civilians was seen making its way up the Seine. Government officials were in the forefront of those fleeing Paris. Yann Fouéré, an official with the Ministry of Information who took part in the evacuation, wrote of the panic on the routes leading out of the capital:

The scene along the roads was staggering. The whole population was in full flight, on foot, on bicycles, by car and in carts. Most of the cars had mattresses on the roof. Having lost their regiments, a number of soldiers mingled with the crowds and fled with them. Struggles were breaking out around the petrol stations. Grocery shops and bakeries of villages along the way could no longer cope. Some people slept, exhausted, in the ditches. A massive exodus from Paris had begun as soon as the government’s departure had been officially announced on the evening of the 10th of June. Why them and not us? If they are fleeing, we must also flee. At the time, it was estimated that there were ten million people on the roads. Paris was fleeing, distraught, causing the rest of the country insoluble problems.[3]

The literary icons of France also took note. Paul Valéry, poet, author, and a member of Académie française wrote of the flight of refugees in his journal, the Cahiers: The impression of living, poignant disorder. Every possible conveyance, carts stuffed with children in the straw. They don’t know, nobody knows, where they are going.[4]

Out of five million Parisians, fewer than one million remained in the capital. The evacuation — l’exode — went on hour after hour, spurred by conflicting declarations from General Maxime Weygand: first, that there must be no retreat; then, his sudden pronouncement that Paris was an open city. French bureaucrats, recalling the chaos of 1914, when Paris emptied out in the face of a German advance, had made careful plans to manage the evacuation. It soon became a case of every man for himself. At the Ministry of War, housed in an eighteenth-century stone hôtel particulier on rue Saint-Dominique, a short distance north of the complex of military museums that make up Les Invalides and a kilometre east of another Paris landmark, the Eiffel Tower, officers debated who should leave first. The newly appointed undersecretary for defense, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, found an office filled with noise and confusion when he arrived to take up his charge on June 6. In a room filled with medieval armour, he called together his staff and, standing in front of a wall covered with a large map, gave a clear and honest account of the situation. His blunt presentation seemed to calm his listeners, even if it did not give them cause for optimism.

De Gaulle’s arrival at the War Ministry came in answer to a summons he had received while leading the French 4th Armoured Division in a series of counterattacks northeast of Paris. Filled with a sense of fury that the war was beginning so badly, he had hurled his three tank battalions against the oncoming German panzer brigades, the only time during the Battle of France that the Wehrmacht had been forced to retreat. The French High Command, insistent on a strategy of defensive warfare, had failed to grasp the awesome offensive power of tanks. Their powerfully armed Renault, Hotchkiss, and FCM machines were the equal of, if not superior to, Germany’s Mark I and II tanks. But rather than deploying them in forward-attack brigades, French commanders dispersed their tanks among regular divisions, rendering them largely ineffective for offensive purposes. De Gaulle had railed against this blindness in a stream of papers, memos, and books that argued the urgent need for France to master the new strategies of mechanized warfare.

Not everyone at the War Ministry approved of this ungainly figure with his imperious ways, who, at the age of forty-nine, was still relatively young as senior French officers went. De Gaulle was accustomed to ridicule and bullying, brought on as much by his unusual height — 1.9 metres (six feet, five inches) — and a face dominated by high cheeks and an enormous nose that led detractors to call him the Great Asparagus, as by his behaviour. He smoked incessantly and you could see nicotine stains on his fingers and teeth.

Premier Reynaud had summoned de Gaulle to the Cabinet during a frantic reshaping of French leadership that saw two revered First World War leaders, General Weygand and Marshall Philippe Pétain, called back to service. Pétain, who had agreed to become vice-premier, was eighty-four years old when Reynaud summoned him from Madrid, where he had been ambassador to Spain. Weygand, seventy-four, was brought out of retirement to replace the disgraced General Maurice Gamelin, who had presided over the retreats and routs of eight hundred thousand Allied soldiers — French, British, Dutch, and Belgian — in the first days of the blitzkrieg.

De Gaulle’s first meeting with Weygand after his appointment to the Cabinet had not gone well. He’d taken a room at the Hôtel Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail and had himself driven to the office of the commander-in-chief at Château de Montry, the army headquarters on the outskirts of Paris.

It took only a few words from Weygand to convince de Gaulle that the commander was resigned to defeat. When I’ve been beaten here, Weygand told him, England won’t wait a week before negotiating with the Reich. He added despairingly: Ah! If only I were sure the Germans would leave me the forces necessary for maintaining order![5]

Weygand was not the only voice of despair in the French capital that week. Marshall Pétain, revered for saving the French army in the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, also was ready to throw in his hand. He had made it clear in a letter to Premier Reynaud that France was left with no choice but to ask for an armistice.

To hear these sentiments from the men charged with protecting the Republic was excruciatingly painful to de Gaulle. He was in favour of defending the capital, no matter the risk, and he clung to the hope that the French army could yet be rallied to resist the German tide, either in a closely defended redoubt in Brittany, or, if necessary, from bases in French North Africa. How could the nation live with itself if it had not done everything possible to save its most sacred precincts from the enemy? Officers de Gaulle talked to, however, were not so certain. To a man, they appeared convinced that in the upper echelons of the High Command the game was considered lost. The surrender of Paris, these exasperated men reasoned, might offer the only means of saving it.[6]

The idea of capitulation was repugnant to de Gaulle. When he joined the army as a nineteen-year-old officer cadet in 1909 — 119th out of 221 candidates who wrote exams to enter Saint-Cyr that year — he had been swept up in an enormous sense of the grandeur of France. To be a soldier was one of the greatest things in the world, he would write in his Mémoires de guerre.[7] Living in Paris as a young man, nothing struck him more forcefully than the symbols of our glories; night falling over Notre Dame, the majesty of evening at Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe in the sun, conquered colours shuddering in the vault of the Invalides. Now that everything that meant so much to him was under threat, he could conceive of no other course than to exert every ounce of strength in the defence of these precious symbols.

In the early months of 1940, the symbols of the Third Republic were being challenged from within as well as without. The year had barely begun when all 294 members of the Senate, in a rare act of unanimity, voted to strip the seventy-two Communist members of the Chamber of Deputies of their parliamentary immunity. Vice-premier Camille Chautemps called the decision a link in the chain against terrorism. It was one of a series of actions expressing France’s revulsion at the German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in August 1939, an accord that left Hitler free to make war as he chose, knowing his eastern flank was secure. The premier of the day, Édouard Daladier — head of one of forty-two French governments to play out their cards in the 1930s — immediately banned L’Humanité and other Communist newspapers. The party itself was outlawed and hundreds of its members were interned. The moves were generally applauded. After the German-Soviet pact, French Communists had indicated their strong support for the Moscow line, becoming vocal critics of the war. Some were said to have carried out acts of sabotage. After several warplanes blew up mysteriously shortly after takeoff, the young Communist Roger Ramband was accused of tampering with seventeen of them. His puncturing of gas lines was said to have allowed fuel to drip onto red-hot exhaust pipes, causing explosions.

At the opposite end of the political pole stood forces of the right. Hating what they saw as the moral decadence of the Third Republic and preferring fascist dictatorship to either liberal democracy or dictatorship of the proletariat, they were equally opposed to vigorous prosecution of the war. They drew their strength from the wealthiest segments of France’s grande bourgeois class made up of industrialists, property owners, bankers, senior civil servants, and the larger patronats. Their abhorrence of Communism was often accompanied by a generous mixture of anti-Semitism, long a powerful force in France, with a dash of Anglophobia thrown in.[8] One of the most vicious anti-Semites, Charles Maurras, warned in his L’Action Française that the French people must not allow themselves to be slaughtered unsuspectingly and vainly at the will of forces that are English-speaking Jews, or at the will of their French slaves.

Adding to the increasingly bitter social atmosphere