The Paris uprising

On Saturday 19 August 1944, at around seven in the morning, nearly two thousand Paris police officers in civilian clothes entered the Prefecture of Police on the Île de la Cité, opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral. The tricolour was raised over the building – the first to fly over a public office in the centre of the capital for four years. In the course of the day units of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) began firing on German patrols, vehicles and posts in many districts. So began the Paris uprising: six days of street fighting that ended with the surrender of the German garrison.

The insurgents were counting on the Allies being close. They were only partly right. That same day the American 79th Infantry Division of General George Patton’s Third Army reached the Seine at Mantes, some 50 kilometres west of Paris, and crossed the river during the night of 19–20 August. The Allied high command, however, had no intention at that point of entering the capital.

Paris in August 1944

Paris had been occupied since June 1940, when the Germans took the city without a fight. In the summer of 1944 the front drew nearer week by week. After the breakthrough at Saint-Lô in Operation Cobra the American armoured divisions broke out into open country, and from 14 August the Falaise pocket was closing, destroying what remained of two German armies. General Dwight Eisenhower’s plan was to bypass Paris on both sides and pursue the Germans towards the frontier of the Reich. Street fighting in a city of several million threatened heavy losses and delay, and feeding the inhabitants after liberation would fall on Allied supply lines that were already stretched.

Since 7 August the commandant of Greater Paris had been General of Infantry Dietrich von Choltitz. Adolf Hitler had chosen him as a hard officer who had fought at Sevastopol in June 1942 and had commanded a corps in Normandy. Estimates of the garrison’s strength range from 16,000 to 20,000 men, most of them from rear-echelon and guard units, with a few dozen tanks. In August sappers of the 813th Company began laying charges under the Seine bridges and in important buildings. On 17 August Choltitz received an order from Field Marshal Günther von Kluge to prepare the “neutralisation and destruction” of designated targets in the city.

By then the occupation administration was already packing up. Officials burned documents, and lorries loaded with offices and loot headed east. On 17 August the Germans took Prime Minister Pierre Laval from Paris to Belfort, and on 20 August they removed Marshal Philippe Pétain from Vichy as well. Yet the occupation remained brutal to the very end. On 15 August the last large transport of prisoners to the camps in the Reich left Pantin, just outside Paris, and on 16 August the Germans shot 35 young members of the Resistance in the Bois de Boulogne, where they had been lured by a Gestapo informer.

The strikes

The uprising was preceded by a wave of strikes. On 10 August the railwaymen stopped work, cutting the city off from coal deliveries and, in consequence, from electricity and gas. On 15 August the Métro workers, gendarmes and police went on strike – the police at the call of three clandestine police organisations, which feared that the Germans would disarm the entire force. The next day postal and telegraph workers joined in. The occupier thus lost the French services on which it had relied for four years to keep order in the city.

On 18 August the Paris Liberation Committee (CPL), chaired by the communist André Tollet, and the FFI commander for the Île-de-France region, Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, had posters put up calling for a general strike and a general mobilisation of men aged 18 to 50. They were signed “Regional Chief Colonel Rol”.

Two underground movements

The Paris Resistance was not united. Much of its striking power came from the communists. Rol-Tanguy, a metalworker by trade and a veteran of the International Brigades in Spain, came from the French Communist Party and its Francs-Tireurs et Partisans units, and the communists held a strong position in the CPL and in the Military Action Committee (COMAC) of the National Council of the Resistance. On the other side stood the representatives of General Charles de Gaulle and his Provisional Government of the French Republic: the Delegate General, Alexandre Parodi, and the 29-year-old military delegate, Brigadier General Jacques Chaban-Delmas.

Both sides wanted Paris liberated, but they disagreed over when and how. The communists held that the nation had to free itself through insurrection, and invoked the programme of the National Council of the Resistance, which had called for a “national insurrection”. The Gaullists feared a premature rising, German reprisals, and the prospect that once the fighting was over power in the capital would pass to committees dominated by the communists. Chaban-Delmas, just back from London, argued that the Allies would not arrive quickly and, like Parodi, tried to delay the uprising. Some historians, following de Gaulle’s own accounts, attribute to the communists an intention to seize power in the city; others, including the authors of more recent studies, believe that the party wanted above all to earn credit and influence in the future republic rather than to stage a coup. In the background was Warsaw: news of the uprising there, which had been fighting without outside help since 1 August, was cited as a warning in the Paris debates.

On the morning of 19 August the decision slipped out of the hands of both delegates. Once the police had taken the Prefecture, Parodi accepted the fait accompli, placed the uprising under the authority of the Provisional Government and took charge of it, and a new Prefect of Police appointed by de Gaulle, Charles Luizet, moved into the Prefecture. Rol-Tanguy came to the building to confirm the orders to the police. In the afternoon the Germans attacked it with tanks and infantry. The defenders, armed mainly with pistols, rifles and petrol bombs, held out, but by evening they were running short of ammunition.

Nordling’s truce

On the evening of 19 August Choltitz was approached by the Swedish Consul General, Raoul Nordling, who had already mediated in the release of political prisoners. He secured a ceasefire around the Prefecture and, the following day, a truce across the whole city. In return the Germans were to be assured of safe passage for the columns retreating eastwards through Paris, while the insurgents would keep the buildings they held and avoid an assault they had no strength to withstand.

The truce was fragile from the start. On the morning of 20 August a group of insurgents occupied the Hôtel de Ville, and later that day a German patrol detained Parodi and two of his aides. At Nordling’s request Choltitz received Parodi and released him – a rare gesture in those days, which the general later used in his own version of events. Rol-Tanguy did not recognise the truce: “as long as the Germans are in Paris, it is our duty to fight them”. Many FFI commanders followed him. For two days contradictory orders circulated, and in different districts some fighters were shooting while others observed the ceasefire. On 21 August the National Council of the Resistance, chaired by Georges Bidault, voted after a stormy session to break the truce.

The barricades

On 22 August Colonel Rol’s appeal appeared on the walls: “Everyone to the barricades!” Within a day and a half Parisians had built more than 600 barricades out of paving slabs, overturned cars, furniture and trees, most of them in the eastern districts and the Latin Quarter. Some were solid; others would have been knocked over by the first tank, but the Germans could not tell which were which. The FFI – about 20,000 men by common estimates, only a small fraction of whom had firearms – captured one town hall, police station and public office after another. The fighting peaked on 22 and 23 August around the Prefecture, the Hôtel de Ville, the Luxembourg Palace – the seat of the Senate, which the Germans had turned into a strongpoint – and the Grand Palais, which burned down under German fire on 23 August. The garrison held a dozen or so fortified points and the main thoroughfares, while the rest of the city slipped from its grasp.

The events that mattered most for the fate of the uprising, however, took place outside Paris. On 20 August Rol’s chief of staff, Major Roger Cocteau, known as “Gallois”, made his way through the German lines with the news that half the city was in insurgent hands but that they were short of ammunition. He reached Patton and then the headquarters of General Omar Bradley. At the same time de Gaulle was pressing Eisenhower, warning that if there were any delay he would send General Philippe Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division to Paris on his own authority. Chaban-Delmas asked General Marie-Pierre Kœnig, the FFI commander in London, to persuade the Allies to take the city quickly, fearing that Paris would become “a second Warsaw”. On the evening of 22 August Eisenhower changed his plan and agreed that the French should enter Paris, with American support.

Choltitz’s position

Choltitz had the strength to inflict heavy losses on the insurgents if necessary, but not to control the whole city. From above he received orders to defend Paris to the last and to prepare demolitions, yet his troops were too weak and too scattered to do either. The truce suited him: it gave him time to let through the units falling back from the Seine and spared him a fight for every street. After the war the general presented his talks with Nordling as proof that he had wanted to spare the city. Historians who have worked through the French and German archives over the past two decades are more cautious about his motives, stressing that he had lost control of the city and lacked the means to carry out the orders from Hitler’s headquarters. Despite the truce the repression continued: the Germans shot captured insurgents, among other places in the Bois de Boulogne and at Vincennes.

The fighting went on until 25 August, when Leclerc’s division and the American 4th Infantry Division entered the centre and Choltitz signed the surrender of the garrison.

Significance

The Paris uprising was the largest urban rising of the French Resistance. It forced the Allies to change their plan and ensured that the capital was liberated to a large extent by the French themselves – a fact de Gaulle used to build the authority of the Provisional Government and to avoid an Allied military administration in France. The dispute between Gaullists and communists over the truce and the leadership of the uprising foreshadowed a rivalry that continued through the first years of the post-war republic. Insurgent and civilian losses in the whole battle for Paris are put at no fewer than several hundred FFI dead and several hundred civilians killed; French historians give differing figures, from around 1,500 to more than 3,000 French dead in total. Comparisons with Warsaw, where the uprising had broken out three weeks earlier, were already being made in August 1944: in Paris an allied army arrived after six days, while in Warsaw the fighting went on for more than a month longer.