Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [36]
Malcolm Muggeridge went in uniform with a brother officer to a very different cabaret on the Left Bank, packed out and thick with tobacco smoke. ‘There were only flickering candles to light the tiny stage, where a man, completely bald, with a large, sad clown’s face, was intoning a soliloquy, in which he recalled all the terrible things that had happened to him since the Germans came to Paris. “Et maintenant,” he concluded, with an expression of infinite woe, through which he struggled to break into a wry smile – “Et maintenant, nous sommes libérés!” The audience roared their approval, looking quizzically at Trevor and me. Somehow it seemed the most perfect comment on the situation.’
6
The Passage of Exiles
The resounding acclaim which greeted de Gaulle at the Liberation helped create the impression that Vichy’s version of France had evaporated, almost as if it had never really existed. This was the fairy-tale finish to a disturbing story. It helped soothe the deep wounds in national pride and aided the notion of Republican legitimacy.
The lingering death of Pétain’s regime was the grotesque fruition of its self-deceit. Patriots who had supported the old Marshal in 1940 found by 1944 that his ‘path of collaboration’ had been the path of dishonour and humiliation at the hands of the occupying power; while the feuding Germanophile factions – those of Pierre Laval, Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and Joseph Darnand, the head of the Milice – finally discovered that they were far from equal allies in the New European Order. The Nazis had despised them, simply using them for their own ends. As the Allied armies broke out of Normandy, the exodus of those vulnerable to Resistance reprisals matched the departure of German officials on 17 August. The collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout became known as Je suis parti.
The mutual hatreds and suspicions on the extreme right, both French and German, became more poisonous as the defeat of Nazi Germany approached. One of the first victims was Eugène Deloncle, the head of the pre-war Cagoule. On 7 January 1944, the Gestapo arrived at his apartment to arrest him. Deloncle assumed they were Resistance ‘terrorists’ who had come to assassinate him. He fired at them and the Gestapo gunned him down immediately; then, while some looted the apartment, others arrested his family. One son was beaten into a coma. Deloncle’s wife and his daughter Claude were driven off to Fresnes prison, to be locked up with members of the Resistance.
In August 1944, Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice, ordered his scattered groups of miliciens to withdraw eastwards. In Paris, Jean Galtier-Boissière watched the miliciens leave the Lycée Saint-Louis in a convoy of lorries.
Fearing reprisals, miliciens from many parts of France fled towards an increasingly embattled Germany with their wives and families. Those from the south-west had to cross a large stretch of hostile territory in small, vulnerable groups.
The old Marshal formally protested at the order for him to leave Vichy. He was escorted by Otto Abetz’s deputy, the minister von Renthe-Fink, to Belfort on France’s eastern frontier; then, on 7 September, he reached Sigmaringen, the castle and small town designated by Hitler as the capital of France in exile.
The castle of Sigmaringen on the Danube was supposedly the cradle of the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the setting for the Götterdämmerung of French fascism, its position, history and even quasi-Wagnerian name seem fittingly ironic. But the reality was far from grand opera. If anything, the claustrophobic squabbling sounded more like a parody of the antechamber of hell in Sartre’s play Huis clos, which had opened in Paris some ten days before D-Day. That brilliantly crazed writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with his unfailing eye for the grotesque, was the perfect chronicler of Sigmaringen. In D’un Château à l’autre, he described the vain rivalries as ‘un ballet de crabes’.
Pétain was a privileged prisoner. He benefited from special menus – the Germans allotted