Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

the Resistance awaited him.
    There, in the great hall, he made one of the most emotional speeches of his life: ‘Paris! Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, with the help of the whole of France, that is to say of the France which fights, the true France, eternal France.’
    Yet many members of the Resistance felt that in one way the General had not been emotional enough. ‘One would have liked more understanding,’ wrote one of them in his journal. ‘And this speech… short, authoritarian and spotless. Very good, perfect, but all the same, he should have said thank you to the CNR and to Alexandre [Parodi], who had given so much of themselves.’
    When de Gaulle had finished, Bidault asked him to proclaim theRepublic to the crowds waiting below, but de Gaulle refused. Largely as a result of his deliberate
hauteur,
this exchange has often been described as a cruel snub to Bidault and the leaders of the Resistance. Even Bidault himself later contributed to the myth of a great clash.
    In reality, de Gaulle simply wished to re-emphasize his view that Pétain’s regime had been an illegal aberration. René Brouillet, Bidault’s
chef de cabinet,
who was standing just behind the two men when the request was made, had a clear memory of the exchange. ‘The request of Georges Bidault was the request of a history professor who had a strong memory of the proclamation of the Republic from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, in 1848 and 1870. And as a result [he] asked General de Gaulle in the most natural way, and the General, in no less natural a way, replied, “But why should we proclaim the Republic? She has never ceased to exist.”’
    De Gaulle nevertheless agreed to make an appearance. The ‘balcony’ of the Hôtel de Ville is more of an imposing balustrade, adding to the importance of the principal window. De Gaulle got up on to the balustrade and raised those endless arms in a victory sign to the crowd below. The response was tumultuous.
    General Koenig, the new military governor of Paris, invited officers of the 2e DB to dinner at the Invalides. Before they went in, Koenig stopped Captain de Boissieu in the courtyard and made a sweeping gesture, saying: ‘Look, Boissieu, it is extraordinary to have liberated Paris without having destroyed its wonders; all the bridges, all the great buildings, all the artistic treasures of the capital are intact.’
    The last guest to arrive was Major Massu, still filthy in oil-stained battledress. He shook out his napkin, laid it carefully over the seventeenth-century tapestry seat and sat down to eat.
    All over central Paris, liberators were sitting down to celebration dinners. When Colonel David Bruce and Ernest Hemingway, followed by the private army, entered the Ritz lobby, the hotel appeared deserted, but soon Claude Auzello, the manager, appeared. He recognized both Hemingway and Bruce from pre-war days. The forty-six-year-old Bruce, a Princeton friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, had spent much of his youth in Europe: from military service in France at the end of the First World War until 1927, when he returned to the United States.
    The ‘imperturbable’ Monsieur Auzello asked what he could do for them. Hemingway and Bruce glanced back at the mob behind them for a rough head-count and answered that they would like fifty martini cocktails. The martinis ‘were not very good, as the bartender had disappeared,’ Bruce recorded in his diary, ‘but they were followed by a superb dinner’.
    For once in history, soldiers seem to have had a better time that night than their officers. What Simone de Beauvoir described as a ‘
débauche de fraternité
’ during the day became a
débauche tout court
after dark. Few soldiers were to sleep alone that night.
    Major Massu, on returning from the dinner at the Invalides to his battalion camped around the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, wrote later that he preferred to draw a veil over what he found there. In fact so widespread was the lovemaking that a Catholic group began distributing hastily run-off tracts addressed to the young women of Paris: ‘In the gaiety of the Liberation do not throw away your innocence. Think of your future family.’
    Not everybody, however, was out on the streets to savour a new era of freedom. Through an open widow, Pastor Boegner saw a neighbour, an old lady, sitting at her table playing patience, just as