Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [20]
Thirty-five young resistants fell headlong into a trap when they were promised a consignment of weapons by an agent provocateur working for the Gestapo. When they arrived at the rendezvous they were rounded up, brutally interrogated at Gestapo headquarters in the rue des Saussaies, and executed.
Yet Colonel Rol-Tanguy was unimpressed by calls for caution. That day the FTP gave the order to seize vehicles and prepare them with armour-plating, as if Paris in 1944 was comparable to Madrid or Barcelona in July 1936. The following day, flyposters across the city called for a general strike and ‘l’insurrection libératrice’.
On 17 August, Charles Luizet, de Gaulle’s appointee as Prefect of Police, arrived in secret. He became part of the skeleton team of administrators, of whom Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s delegate general, was the most senior.
That day also saw the exodus of Germans and collaborators in increasing numbers – what the inimitable diarist Jean Galtier-Boissière described as ‘la grande fuite des Fritz’. The immensely tall Galtier-Boissière, with his military moustache from the First World War, straw hat in the style of a Victorian traveller and ivory-handled umbrella, was a curious figure, full of contradictions. A funny and endearing anarchist of the grande bourgeoisie, he had started his satirical publication Le Crapouillot (the slang for a trench-mortar) as a corporal in the front line. Now he noted the traffic jams of departing vehicles directed by German Feldgendarmerie with their discs on sticks: ‘Along the rue Lafayette, coming from the luxury hotels around the Étoile, sparkling torpedoes pass by containing purple-faced generals, accompanied by elegant blonde women, who look as if they are off to some fashionable resort.’
Overruling the objections of Pierre Laval, the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, ordered the evacuation of the Vichy administration to Belfort, a few miles from the German border. Laval’s attempts over the last few days to convene parliamentarians, such as Édouard Herriot, the President of the National Assembly, had only managed to enrage General Oberg, the chief of the SS in France.
The Germans, preparing to leave, were stared at openly and scornfully by groups of Parisians who, for the last four years, had pretended not to see them. But when a detachment of soldiers on the Boulevard Saint-Michel was mocked – Sylvia Beach, the founder of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, described the Parisians cheerfully waving lavatory brushes at them – they opened fire into the crowd.
In many cases, packing up included some last-minute looting. The Gestapo broke into the apartment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on the rue Christine. A neighbour rang the police and twenty appeared. Backed up by half the population of the street, they demanded to see the Gestapo’s authorization. The Gestapo officials, uttering threats, were forced to leave.
A group of soldiers, probably on the order of a senior officer, loaded the contents of the wine cellar of the Cercle Interallié, a large private club, on to lorries. Other military and civilian vehicles, including even ambulances and a hearse, were piled with anything which might be of value: Louis XVI furniture, medicines, works of art, pieces of machinery, bicycles, rolls of carpet and food.
Odd bursts of firing seemed to break out on all sides on Friday, 18 August, after Communist posters had appeared. The next day, the tricolour reappeared on several public buildings, most notably the Prefecture of Police on the Île de la Cité. Since seven in the morning, policemen on strike over the German move to disarm them began to arrive in ever-increasing numbers following a summons by their Resistance committees. Passing through the city, Colonel Rol-Tanguy had been surprised to hear the Marseillaise being sung inside: 2,000 police resisters had occupied the building and arrested Amédée Bussières, Vichy’s Prefect of Police. He was replaced by the Gaullist Charles Luizet,