Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

death and guillotined a week later in the courtyard of the Santé prison. Pierre Pucheu, Vichy’s Minister of the Interior, who rejected their appeal, was regarded as the organizer of this violent repression.
    Not long afterwards, another German officer was shot in the streets of Nantes. Twenty-seven Communists were executed on 27 October and twenty-one were shot at Châteaubriant the following day. On 15 December, the Germans shot a Communist member of the National Assembly, Gabriel Péri. In his last letter he wrote that Communism represented the youth of the world and it was preparing ‘
des lendemains qui chantent
’ – ‘tomorrows full of song’. His execution prompted the party’s poet laureate, Louis Aragon, to write a fifteen-verse ballad. Péri became one of the leading martyrs of the party, and the phrase ‘
les lendemains qui chantent
’ came to symbolize all the revolutionary hopes that the day of liberation promised.

3
    The Resistance of the Interior and the Men of London
    Acts of resistance achieved little for as long as the German occupation and the Vichy regime appeared unshakeable. But perceptions began to change dramatically around the end of 1942, when the battle of El Alamein was followed by Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, and then by the psychologically decisive battle of Stalingrad. The myth of Axis invincibility was broken.
    The landings in Algeria and Morocco proved a double blow to Pétain’s regime. Vichy lost the North African colonies, while the German invasion of the southern zone destroyed the basis of the Montoire agreement with Hitler. The Marshal’s justification for having taken the ‘path of collaboration’ lay in ruins. Even most of his supporters expected the old man to escape his deceiver by fleeing to North Africa, but he swallowed the humiliation. This lost him the trust and respect of many who had followed him faithfully until then. The only senior officer who attempted to oppose the German takeover was General de Lattre de Tassigny. He had to go into hiding and was later picked up by a Hudson aircraft and flown out to England. Vichy’s ‘army of the armistice’, as it had been known, was disbanded. Many of its officers and men joined the Resistance.
    Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Operation Torch was that it managed to achieve a measure of surprise. For several months the whole project had been the subject of numerous overtures to Vichy loyalists within the unoccupied zone and in North Africa. Yet, to his fury, de Gaulle and his followers were allowed no part in it.
    De Gaulle’s relations with Churchill had started to deteriorate rapidly after the ill-fated expedition to seize Dakar from Vichy in September 1940. The British were said to have accused the French in London of loose talk, but in fact they knew that the real problem came from the refusal of de Gaulle’s headquarters to adopt a modern code system for their signal traffic. French officers refused to believe that the Germans were breaking their codes with ease. Not until 1944, when a British officer broke their code in front of their eyes, did they finally switch to one-time pads. The result was that the British and Americans avoided warning de Gaulle’s headquarters of any operations, including those involving French territory. The American government feared that the French colonial army in North Africa might resist the Torch landings, and was keen to prevent this happening. Robert Murphy, Roosevelt’s personal representative, had therefore been seeking a leader who would be acceptable to the mainly pro-Vichy officers stationed there. Various figures, including General Weygand, were considered and approaches made, but with little success. Then an apparently ideal candidate appeared in the form of General Henri Giraud.
    Giraud had become a hero in France after escaping from the prison fortress of Königstein in Germany. A good soldier, he proceeded to Vichy to report to Marshal Pétain, but this represented an embarrassment for Vichy’s relations with the Germans. The Americans recruited him and he was brought out by submarine.
    Admiral Darlan, the commander-in-chief of all Vichy forces, then entered the scene. After being ousted from the premiership by Laval on 17 April 1942, he had made cautious approaches to the Resistance and the American authorities. (The veteran politician Édouard Herriot had said of Darlan just after the armistice: ‘This Admiral knows how