The parade on the Champs-Élysées

On Saturday 26 August 1944, the day after the liberation of Paris, General Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, and from there drove to the Hôtel de Ville and on to Notre-Dame Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the route – around a million by common estimates, and even more according to some accounts. It was the first great victory procession in liberated Europe and at the same time a political act: the head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic was showing the French, the Allies and his own Resistance who now held power in France.

The ceremony did not pass off peacefully. When the head of the procession reached the Place de la Concorde, shots were fired from nearby rooftops and windows and the crowd scattered. Another burst of firing broke out outside the cathedral and inside it during the service. Who was shooting has never been conclusively established. Popular chronologies describe the procession as taking place “under sniper fire” – a description consistent with what participants saw, although sources differ on whether the shots came from German stragglers, French collaborators, or, in many cases, from jittery armed volunteers themselves.

The day after the surrender

On 25 August General Dietrich von Choltitz’s German garrison had surrendered to General Philippe Leclerc, and in the evening de Gaulle had addressed the Resistance leaders at the Hôtel de Ville. The fighting in the city had not entirely died down, however. In the northern suburbs, at Le Bourget and towards the forest of Montmorency, units of the German 47th Infantry Division were trying to hold up the Allies, and in Paris itself there were still reports of gunmen hidden on the rooftops. The disarming of more than ten thousand German prisoners and the occupation of public buildings were still going on. Some of the police officers and members of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) who had fought for a week in the Paris uprising were still roaming the streets with their weapons.

It was in these conditions that de Gaulle decided to hold a procession. His intention was plain, and he described it himself in his memoirs: he wanted the people of Paris to see him and recognise him as their leader, and for that recognition to take place before the eyes of the whole world. Since June 1940, when he had made his appeal to the French from London, most of his compatriots had known him only as a voice on the radio. Now he was to stand before them in person, in a brigadier general’s uniform, without the Allies as intermediaries.

The Americans considered the plan risky. General Leonard T. Gerow, commander of the American V Corps, to which Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division formally belonged, wanted the division to move against the Germans north of the city the next day, and feared that the crowds would become a target for gunfire. De Gaulle, however, took the view that a French division in the French capital answered first and foremost to him. Leclerc carried out his instructions: part of the division lined the route of the procession, while part covered the city to the north. According to the American official history, when shots were later fired de Gaulle expressed his regret, and General Marie-Pierre Kœnig, who had been appointed military governor of Paris, undertook to cooperate with the American command.

From the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde

At around 3 p.m. de Gaulle arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, paid his respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and inspected the tanks of the 2nd Armoured Division drawn up there. Then he set off on foot down the avenue. Just behind and beside him walked Generals Leclerc, Kœnig and Alphonse Juin; the government’s Delegate General in occupied France, Alexandre Parodi; the national military delegate, Brigadier General Jacques Chaban-Delmas; the Commissioner for the Liberated Territories, André Le Troquer; and the chairman of the National Council of the Resistance, Georges Bidault, with members of the Council and of the Paris Liberation Committee. A cordon of police, soldiers and volunteers struggled to hold back the crowd, and several aircraft flew overhead.

In his War Memoirs de Gaulle described the sight in a single sentence: “Ah! It is the sea!” People stood on the pavements, at windows, on balconies and on rooftops, and climbed lamp posts and flagpoles. The general walked bareheaded, acknowledging the crowd with gestures of his arms and stopping every so often. According to a frequently repeated anecdote, when Bidault drew level with him, de Gaulle asked him to stay a little behind. Whether those were his exact words is hard to verify, but the order of the procession matched his intention: the head of government went in front, the Resistance behind him. The crowd cheered de Gaulle and sang the “Marseillaise”, and beside the tricolours flew the Free French flags with the Cross of Lorraine.

The procession was also the work of film-makers. Cameramen from the French newsreels and Allied film crews filmed it from rooftops and cars, and the pictures from the Champs-Élysées quickly went round the world. For many French people who had never seen de Gaulle before, it was these images that made him the face of the liberation.

Shots on the Place de la Concorde and in Notre-Dame

Shortly after 4 p.m. de Gaulle reached the Place de la Concorde and got into a car to drive to the Hôtel de Ville. At that moment shots rang out – according to accounts, from the vicinity of the Hôtel de Crillon and from buildings on the rue de Rivoli. People threw themselves onto the cobbles or took cover behind tanks, and soldiers and volunteers returned fire towards the roofs and windows. The shooting spread to other parts of the city. According to contemporary accounts there were wounded and also dead, although the figures given in different sources vary.

After a brief stop at the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle arrived in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. As he got out of the car, shots rang out again, and then inside the building too, from the galleries beneath the vault. The congregation lay down on the floor or took cover behind the pillars. De Gaulle walked up the nave upright, without quickening his pace, and took his place before the altar. The BBC reporter Robert Reid was recording a report at the time, which has survived: in it the shots can be heard, along with his description of the general walking down the middle of the cathedral. Because of the confusion, the shorter Magnificat was sung instead of a solemn Te Deum, without the organ.

The service was not conducted by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard. The Provisional Government did not want him present, because in April 1944 he had presided over a requiem for the collaborationist propaganda minister Philippe Henriot, shot by the Resistance, and had earlier welcomed Marshal Pétain to the cathedral. The cardinal remained in his residence.

Who was shooting?

That evening and in the days that followed many people suspected of shooting from rooftops were arrested in Paris, but those responsible for the shots on the Place de la Concorde and in the cathedral were never conclusively identified. Some witnesses and later writers blamed German soldiers who had not yet surrendered, others members of the collaborationist Milice. Historians point out, however, that most of the Milice had left Paris before the uprising: their commander, Joseph Darnand, told the Germans that he had left some 200 men in the city, which the French historian Michèle Cointet regards as a boast rather than reliable information. Many of the shots may have been fired by armed volunteers and soldiers themselves, who in the confusion mistook others who were firing for snipers.

In his War Memoirs de Gaulle suggested that the shooting might have been deliberately provoked – to maintain an atmosphere of danger in the city and to justify the continued existence of armed formations independent of the government. He did not name the culprits outright, but his readers understood that he had the communists in mind among others. This version has not been confirmed by any documents and remains above all evidence of his distrust at the time.

The political meaning of the procession

The question of the shots was in any case secondary to what de Gaulle wanted to achieve. In August 1944 power in Paris was not yet settled. The National Council of the Resistance, which had published its programme in March, regarded itself as the representative of fighting France inside the country. Its Military Action Committee (COMAC) and the FFI command for the Paris region under Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy were under strong communist influence, and in the first days the Paris Liberation Committee was running the districts and town halls. The Resistance leaders expected to have a say in the new government.

De Gaulle rejected any such sharing of power. As early as 25 August he had refused Bidault’s request to proclaim the Republic from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville because, as he maintained, the Republic had never ceased to exist. The procession of 26 August was a gesture of the same kind. The Resistance leaders walked behind the head of government, not beside him, and it was above all him that the crowd applauded. The general’s supporters saw this as the natural recognition of a leader who had embodied resistance since 1940. His critics, especially on the left, spoke of the appropriation of a victory won in Paris by the insurgents. One thing is beyond doubt: in a single afternoon de Gaulle acquired a legitimacy that neither Allied recognition nor decrees from Algiers could have given him.

The procession also had a foreign audience. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt still did not formally recognise the Provisional Government and kept repeating that the question of who would govern France would be decided by elections. Pictures of a million Parisians cheering de Gaulle were an argument hard to brush aside. General Dwight Eisenhower, who visited the general in Paris on 27 August, was already talking to him as the head of the French state.

The air raid of 26–27 August

On the evening of 26 August, shortly before midnight, German bombers appeared over Paris. It was the last and heaviest German air raid on the city of the war. High-explosive and incendiary bombs fell mainly on the northern and eastern districts, and suburban communes such as Bagneux were also hit. According to French studies between about 190 and 200 people were killed and several hundred injured. Numerous fires broke out. The raid was widely regarded as the Luftwaffe’s revenge for the loss of Paris. For Parisians it was a painful reminder that the war, though it had moved away from their streets, was not yet over.

Place in the war

The days that followed showed how consistently de Gaulle exploited 26 August. On 28 August he received the leaders of the Paris FFI at the Ministry of War, thanked them and announced that their staffs would be dissolved and the volunteers incorporated into the regular army. That same day General Gerow handed command of the city over to Kœnig in writing. Kœnig replied that he had already assumed it on 25 August and that since the liberation Paris had been administered solely by the French authorities. On 29 August, at de Gaulle’s request, the American 28th Infantry Division marched through the city on its way to the front – a show of strength intended to bolster the government’s position. At the end of August the remaining members of the Provisional Government moved from Algiers to Paris, and on 9 September de Gaulle formed a government of “national unanimity” that included figures from the Resistance at home, among them two communists. Leclerc’s division returned to the fighting on 8 September and in November liberated Strasbourg.

The parade of 26 August became one of the founding images of post-war France, and its route – from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées – the setting for later victory parades, including that of 1945. It also cemented the conviction that de Gaulle had expressed the day before at the Hôtel de Ville: that Paris had liberated itself, above all, with the help of the French army. The part played by the American 4th Infantry Division, and the role of the Allies, without whom the uprising could not have succeeded, receded into the background of this narrative. The procession had no military significance for the course of the war, but its political significance was enormous: it settled that liberated France would be governed by de Gaulle’s government, and not by Allied civil affairs officers or by rival Resistance committees.