Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [31]
If the day of liberation had belonged to the FFI and Leclerc’s men, Saturday, 26 August, was to be de Gaulle’s triumph.
A discordant note was struck by General Gerow, Leclerc’s American superior. Still furious at the way the French had ignored his orders over the last few days, Gerow sent an instruction forbidding the 2e DB to take part in any victory celebrations. But with the city not yet fully clear of the enemy, de Gaulle needed Leclerc’s men to provide security and preserve public order. Vichy miliciens were not covered by General von Choltiz’s ceasefire, and there was always the possibility that other German forces might counter-attack from the north.
In the early afternoon, huge crowds converged on the centre of Paris. Many came on foot from the outer suburbs, having covered a dozen kilometres or more. Well over a million people gathered in the sunshine on both sides of the route from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame.* To obtain better views, people crowded at the windows of buildings overlooking the route, and the young climbed trees or lampposts. There were even people lining the rooftops. Paris had never seen such crowds. Many carried home-made tricolours.
At three, de Gaulle arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, where all the principal figures awaited him: Parodi, Luizet, Chaban-Delmas, Bidault and the other members of the National Council of the Resistance, Admiral d’Argenlieu and, of course, Generals Juin, Koenig and Leclerc.
The leader of the provisional government took the salute of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad, standing in their vehicles drawn up across the Place de l’Étoile. Under the Arc de Triomphe, he relit the flame over the tomb of the unknown soldier which had been extinguished in June 1940, when the Germans marched into the city. Then, preceded by four of Leclerc’s Shermans, he set off on foot down the Champs-Élysées towards the Place de la Concorde.
Behind the official party, swelled by numerous offcials who wished to establish their credentials, came a throng of FFI militia and onlookers who decided to join in, singing and embracing as they went.
From time to time, de Gaulle raised his arms to acknowledge the cheering, which at a distance sounded like the roar and booming of a sea crashing on rocks. ‘There took place at that moment,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘one of those miracles of national conscience, one of those gestures of France herself, which occasionally, down the centuries, come to illuminate our history.’
Not everyone, however, was yelling for de Gaulle the man. There must have been Pétainists cheering in the crowd; there had certainly been enough people cheering the Marshal only four months before. Meanwhile, Communists could not resist the odd ‘Vive Maurice!’ in honour of Maurice Thorez, still in Moscow, where he had remained ever since deserting from the French army on Stalin’s orders at the start of the war.
Simone de Beauvoir, who had gone to the Arc de Triomphe with Michel Leiris, was later careful in the way she described her approbation that day. ‘Mixed in the immense crowd, we acclaimed not a military parade, but a popular carnival, disorganized and magnificent.’ Jean-Paul Sartre was waiting much further down the route to watch from a balcony of the Hotel du Louvre.
With police cars well in front, then the four tanks, de Gaulle’s escort increased with largely self-appointed groups of FFI. At the Place de la Concorde, a platoon of the ‘Jewish army’ Resistance group joined in, wearing captured Milice uniforms (their provenance countered with tricolour armbands). Shortly after de Gaulle had climbed into an open car to drive the last two kilometres to Notre-Dame, shooting broke out. To this day, nobody knows whether this was a serious assassination attempt, a provocation or simply the result of too many tense and inexperienced people with weapons.
In the Place de la Concorde and the rue de Rivoli, the crowds threw themselves flat on the ground or sheltered behind