© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/fh/crp071, available online at www.fh.oxfordjournals.org
Advance Access published on 2 November 2009
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’ ENTRIES AS
RECONCILIATIONS: FROM CHARLES VII
TO CHARLES DE GAULLE
MICHEL DE WAELE*
Abstract—The numerous conflicts that have punctuated the history of France have repeatedly
confronted political leaders with the challenge of bringing about national reconciliation. This
article will dwell on four periods that have been the theatre of ‘Franco-French’ rivalry, in
order to show how they may be seen as acts of reconciliation: the end of the Hundred Years
War; the Wars of Religion; the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic period; and the Second
World War. It will examine the entries made into Paris by Charles VII on 20 November 1437,
by Henri IV on 22 March 1594, by Louis XVIII on 3 May 1814 and by Charles de Gaulle on 26
August 1944. The article will also explain the differences between a reconciliatory entry and
a normal entry, while at the same time throwing light on the perennial character of the rituals
of reconciliation.
In August 1944, a month or so after they had landed in France, the Allied armies
were pushing back the German forces and heading towards the north-east.
Longing for peace, the French people were living in an oppressive atmosphere.
The militia intensified their atrocities, while the occupying forces attempted to
break popular resistance by resorting to blind reprisals, the Anglo-Americans
bombed the country and the maquisards inflicted increasing violence on their
enemies. According to a report sent to the Comité français de libération nationale
(CFNL), the country was in a state of ‘pre-civil war’.1 The complexity of the
crisis explains the dejected state of the French people after four years of
occupation. When General de Gaulle travelled through Normandy ten days after
the landings, reports suggested that the population appeared indifferent to his
presence. The diplomat Jean Chauvel wrote about it as follows: ‘I also learned
that the General’s collaborators had been surprised by the coolness of the
Norman reception, which had been one of curiosity about those people from
* Michel De Waele is Professeur et Directeur du Département d’histoire de l’Université Laval,
Québec. He may be contacted at [email protected] An earlier version of this article
was presented at the annual conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, held at Rutgers
University in April 2008 The author would like to thank Carl Bouchard, Andrée Courtemanche,
Bernard Lachaise and Martin Pâquet, as well as the journal’s anonymous referees, for their
comments on previous iterations of the text. The necessary research for the production of this
article was financed with the aid of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. The translation was undertaken by Roger McLure, who sadly died shortly after
completing it.
1 A. Kaspi, La Libération de la France: juin 1944-janvier 1946 (Paris, 2004), 24.
426
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
England rather than enthusiasm for a free France.’ Crane Brinton, who worked
at the time for the Office of Strategic Services, confirmed this impression: ‘there
seemed to be little spontaneous enthusiasm for the General’, he wrote on 23
August.2 In the light of this it is unsurprising that so few towns should have
taken action to free themselves.3 Among the few exceptions was Paris, which
took up arms against the occupier on 20 August. On the evening of 24 August,
General Leclerc’s first units entered the city, while the main body of the forces
arrived the following day. As for General de Gaulle, he prepared his entry into
the capital in characteristic fashion: ‘I myself settled in advance what I had to do
in the liberated capital’, he wrote in his memoirs: ‘It consisted of uniting souls
into a single national thrust, but also in immediately rendering visible the figure
of the authority of the state.’4
The challenge facing the General was complex. He had to reunite the French
people after four years of schisms and ensure they would start working together
in the near future, with a view to reconstructing France under the leadership of
a government whose legitimacy could be contested by no one. The laying aside
of arms would not by itself guarantee the future of the nation. The reestablishment
of peace could only be a stage on the road to the future development of the
country. If pacification was not going to be accompanied by reconciliation,
then the reconstruction of the country was doomed. For its success such a
process required the concrete commitment of as many people as possible. It
was not just that the state had to draw closer to the inhabitants, members of the
population had to accept working together again for the common good, despite
a factious past. Reconciliation is a mutual and consensual process carrying
strong religious connotations: as such it demands that people live together
again, rub shoulders and collaborate afresh in the aftermath of a crisis. This
presupposes that everyone involved in the process is capable of transforming
certain emotions and beliefs concerning the enemy. People have to shift from
an attitude of anger to one of fellowship; and the old enemy, who could not be
trusted to the point that elimination was required, has to become a partner in a
common project of development.5 General de Gaulle was obviously not the
only head of state to have to confront such a challenge in the immediate
aftermath of the Second World War, or later. Barbara F. Walter has estimated
that between 1942 and 1992 some seventy-two civil wars erupted throughout
the world, confronting national and international leaders with the problem of
reconciliation on each occasion.6
2 J. Chauvel, Commentaires, vol. 2: D’Alger à Rome (Paris, 1971), 38; C. Brinton, ‘Letters from
liberated France’, Fr Hist Stud, 2 (1961), 2–27.
3 Buton, ‘La France atomisée’, in La France des années noires, ed. J.-Azéma and F. Bédarida
(Paris, 2000), 450.
4 C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre (Paris, 1994), 576.
5 W. J. Long and P. Brecke, War and Reconciliation. Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution (Cambridge, 2003), 4; Y. Bar-Siman-Tov, ‘Introduction: why reconciliation?’, in From Conflict
Resolution to Reconciliation, ed. Y. Bar-Siman Tov (Oxford, 2004).
6 B. F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, 2002),
169–70.
MICHEL DE WAELE
427
The explosion of political violence during the second half of the twentieth
century has engendered a new field of study, namely that of conflict resolution,
which impinges on political theory, ethics, human rights, law, criminology,
moral philosophy and history.7 Peace gradually became a field of study for the
discipline of history during the twentieth-century interwar period, in response
to both the horrors produced by the First World War and the hopes generated
by the setting up of international organizations entrusted with the task of
promoting peaceful coexistence between nations. The chaos of the 1960s,
marked by the wars punctuating the end of the European colonial period, and
by the opposition (especially in the United States) to the Vietnam War, led ever
more historians to look into the problematics of peace.8 Such work, however,
has dwelt primarily on contemporary events and situations. With only a few
exceptions, the results achieved by research into conflict resolution, or the
lines of enquiry thrown up by that research, are seldom if ever exploited to
analyse events that are remote in time. Almost an exception that proves the rule
is the work of Howard Brown, who has taken an interest in transitional justice—
one of the important concepts to have emerged from the new interest in conflict
resolution—during the French Revolution.9 The study of reconciliatory
processes is nevertheless gaining in popularity among historians. The studies of
these processes made in the work of Jacqueline de Romilly, Nicole Loraux and
T. C. Loening on Greek antiquity have suggested lines of enquiry that beg to be
exploited in connection with other periods.10 Likewise, ever more researchers
are looking into the matter with regard to the medieval period and the end of
the sixteenth century.11 The reign of Louis-Philippe has been studied from the
perspective of reconciliation by Jean-Claude Caron, while for his part Stéphane
Gacon has investigated the Third French Republic from the standpoint of
amnesty.12
7 This list of disciplines is based on two texts: J. Zalaquet, ‘Truth, justice, and reconciliation:
lessons for the international community’, in Comparative Peace Processes in South America, ed.
C. J. Arson (Washington and Stanford, 1999), 341; R. A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge, 2001), xviii.
8 Van Den Dungen and L. S. Wittner, ‘Peace history: an introduction’, J Peace Research, 40
(2003), 363–75.
9 H. Brown, ‘The French Revolution and transitional justice’, in Democratic Institutions Performance: Research and Policy Perspectives, ed. E. R. McMahon and T. A. Sinclair (Oxford, 2002),
77–95.
10 J. de Romilly, La douceur dans la pensée grecque (Paris, 1995); N. Loraux, La Cité divisée:
l’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris, 1997); T. C. Loening, The Reconciliation Agreement of
403/402 B.C. in Athens: Its Content and Application (Stuttgart, 1987).
11 G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France
(Ithaca, NY, 1992); K. Petrov, The Kiss of Peace. Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late
Medieval West (Leiden, 2003); R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca,
NY, 2003); M. De Waele, ‘Entre concorde et intolérance: Alexandre Farnèse et la pacification des
Pays-Bas’, in De Michel de l’Hospital à l’Édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux Églises, ed.
T. Wanegffelen (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002), 51–70; J. Foa, ‘Making peace: the commissions for enforcing the pacification edicts in the reign of Charles IX (1560–1574)’, Fr Hist, 18 (2004), 256–74.
12 J.-C. Caron, ‘Louis-Philippe face à l’opinion publique, ou l’impossible réconciliation des
Français, 1830–1835’, Fr Hist Stud, 30 (2007), 597–621; S. Gacon, L’Amnistie de la Commune à la
guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 2002).
428
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
This article attempts to exploit the recent studies in conflict resolution by
applying them, in a transhistorical approach, to the wider history of France.
This will mean analysing the perennial character of a reconciliatory event
recurring from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries: the entry into Paris.
Occurring as it does at the end of periods of unrest, this event offers its principal
protagonist a unique opportunity to mobilize the living forces of the state and
to unite them in a national communion which facilitates reconciliation. While it
is true that by itself entry into Paris cannot guarantee the reestablishment of
fraternal links between enemies of yesteryear, the sensation caused by this
‘great national liturgy’ seems to be an essential prerequisite of any hope of
global reconciliation.13 I shall be especially concerned here with four troubled
ends-of-period and with five entries: the entry of Charles VII on 12 November
1437 at the close of the conflict between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians;
that of Henri IV on 22 March 1594 at the end of the Wars of Religion; those of
the duc d’Artois on 12 April 1814 and Louis XVIII on the following 3 May, at the
Restoration; and, finally, the procession of Charles de Gaulle down the ChampsElysées on 26 August 1944. Our task will be to demonstrate, in the first place,
the importance of the entry as a political event, while second, we shall proceed
to show the differences between more usual entries and reconciliatory entries;
and third, it will be shown how the latter have enabled the parties present to
rediscover their identity, their legitimacy and authority, thereby opening up the
prospect of a resumption of the political process suspended during the period
of civil conflict. By the end we should be in a position to see to what extent the
processes of national reconciliation have relied, over centuries, on rituals that
appear to be immutable, subject to certain changes which have made the
achievement of reconciliation more difficult.
I
In medieval France, and in the France of the ancien regime—but also in other
European countries—the royal entry marked a moment of privileged dialogue
between a king and his subjects; a manifestation of the union which they would
enjoy throughout the reign that was about to begin.14 Between the fourteenth
and the seventeenth centuries, its importance as a cultural and political event
increased continuously, representing as it did one of the important devices used
13 These are the words employed by Georges Bidault, who became président du Conseil national
de la Résistance following the assassination of Jean Moulin, to describe General de Gaulle’s entry
into Paris: G. Bidault, D’une résistance à l’autre (Paris, 1965), 65.
14 B. Guenée and F. Lehoux, Les Entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris, 1968); C.
Sherman, ‘The queen in Charles V’s “Coronation Book”: Jeanne de Bourbon and the “Ordo ad Reginam Benedicendam”’, Viator, 8 (1977), 255–98; L. M. Bryant, The French Royal Entry Ceremony
(Geneva, 1986); M. Wintroub, ‘L’ordre du rituel et l’ordre des choses : l’entrée royale d’Henri II à
Rouen (1550) ’, Annales histoire, sciences sociales, 56 (2001), 479–505; B. Paradis and L. Roy,
‘Cueur craintif est de tout danger seur, puisque Titan en ce pays arrive. Le don dans les entrées solennelles en France aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, in Les Jeux de l’échange: entrées solennelles et divertissements du XVe au XVIIe siècle, ed. M.-F. Wagner (Paris, 2007), 105–40.
MICHEL DE WAELE
429
by the monarchy to communicate its political message. Taking place as a rule at
the beginning of a reign, it represented the first—and often the last—opportunity
for direct contact and exchange between the sovereign and his subjects. It is
true that the symbolic presence of the king before his subjects had been
increasing since the turn of the fourteenth century, thanks to the propaganda
organized by European sovereigns in their battles against external enemies.15
Even so, the real presence of the king constituted an important factor in
the establishment of stable and lasting relations between the monarch and the
people in his charge.16 A good example of this is supplied by the end of the
Wars of Religion.
In May 1594, Henri IV asked Pomponne de Bellièvre, Henry III’s former
superintendent of finances, to betake himself to Lyon in order to consolidate
the submission of that city to his (Henri’s) authority and to negotiate the
surrender of its former governor, the duc de Nemours. This was not an easy
mission. The economic capital of the realm, Lyon had been fiercely pro-League
during the final phase of the Wars of Religion. Moreover, internal dissensions
within the Catholic party manifested themselves at the end of 1593 and this
prompted the bourgeois of the city to rise up against the ‘tyranny’ of their
governor, the duc de Nemours, and to imprison him, all the while maintaining
their loyalty to the League. The citizens of Lyon, unlike some inhabitants of the
realm, did not submit willingly to royal authority, and, after negotiations on the
conditions of their recognizing Henri IV as their king, the municipality was
rather surprised by the royalist inhabitants who opened the city gates to royal
forces on 8 February 1594.17 In the end Bellièvre had to come to terms with the
troops of the duc de Savoie, who were roaming the surrounding countryside,
and also with troops of the king of Spain, who maintained a strong presence in
Provence.
Having arrived on the banks of the Rhône on 24 June, the royal envoy quickly
took stock of the poisonous climate in the city: his main worry was that the
people of Lyon might assassinate Nemours, an outcome that would lead the
latter’s brother to hand over all the fortresses in his command to the king of
Spain and the duc de Savoie, at a time when royalist forces in the region were
too weak to confront a powerful enemy army.18 Struggling to restore order
15 J. Strayer, ‘France: the Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King’, in Action
and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. T. K. Rabb (Princeton, 1969), 3–16; D. S. Bachrach,
‘The Ecclesia Anglicana goes to war: prayers, propaganda, and conquest during the reign of Edward
I of England, 1272–1307’, Albion, 36 (2004), 393–406.
16 Philippe IV of Spain made this presence an essential part of his politics, while his contemporary Charles I of England ‘between 1625 and 1640 [. . .] systematically distanced himself from his
subjects’: J. H. Elliott, ‘The king and the Catalans, 1621–1640’, Cambr Hist J, 11 (1955), 253–71;
J. Richards, ‘“His Nowe Majestie” and the English monarchy: the kingship of Charles I before 1640’,
Past and Present, 113 (1986), 70–96.
17 On the process of reconciliation during this period: M. De Waele, ‘Autorité, légitimité, fidélité:
le Languedoc ligueur et Henri IV’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 53 (2006), 5–34.
18 B[ibliothèque] N[ationale], Ms. fr. 15912, fo. 10, ‘Lettre de monsieur de Bellievre au roy’, 22
July 1594. On the sojourn of Bellièvre at Lyon: O. Poncet, Pomponne de Bellièvre (1529–1607). Un
homme d’État au temps des guerres de Religion (Paris, 1998), 189–92.
430
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
within the population, Bellièvre asked Henri IV to come to the city himself:
‘Sire’, he wrote on 6 September, ‘since your servants think that without your
presence it will be impossible to remedy the ills which are appearing and
germinating in these provinces, we are hoping that the mere sight of your
Majesty will console his servants and dumfound his enemies.’19 Earlier, on 4
May, Henri IV had sent a letter to the magistrates of Lyon in which he showed
himself to be perfectly aware of the difficult situation in which they found
themselves.20 In the same letter he provided evidence of his intention to go to
them as quickly as possible but, he specified, the siege laid to the fortress of La
Capelle, in Picardy, compelled him to go first into the north of his realm in order
to deal with that threat. He undertook to take the road south as soon as the
matter was settled; but his stay in Picardy dragged on. In fact, he spent most of
the months of June, July and August waging war in that region and, in particular,
busying himself laying siege to the town of Laon.21 He apologized for this to the
people of Lyon in letters dated 24 June and 4 August.22 On 24 August, his Picardy
adventure having been successfully concluded, he finally announced his
imminent arrival on the banks of the Rhône, a project which came to nothing.23
Despite urgent appeals from Bellièvre, who between 11 September 1594 and 15
February 1595 wrote no fewer than sixteen letters to the king begging him to
make the move south—the people of Lyon ‘considering your arrival to be the
only possible remedy for the ills from which they suffer and by which they are
threatened’—Henri IV did not pass through the gates of Lyon until 23 August
1595.24
This episode from the Wars of Religion shows that the loyalty of the French
people to their king was best secured by his physical presence among them.
Bellièvre and the people of Lyon were not asking for some royal army to be sent
to forearm them against their enemies: what they wanted was that the monarch
show himself in their presence. In a letter dated 18 October, Bellièvre notified
his master that the king’s newly faithful subjects were oppressed by many evils
and suffering great hardship [so much so that] ‘I no longer see any chance of
being able to retain them on our side unless by the consolation that they would
get from the sight and assistance of their good king. They say, Sire, that it seems
your good fortune is linked to your presence.’25 So, at the end of a civil war, the
kingly entry became an reconciliatory event of great importance, as General de
Gaulle clearly realized when he referred to the ‘the huge crowd massed all the
way down the Champs-Elysées’: ‘[S]ince each person present has in his heart
chosen Charles de Gaulle as the last recourse of his suffering and as the symbol
19
BN, Ms. fr. 15912, fo. 36.
‘A nos tres chers et bien amez les les consuls, eschevins, manans et habitans de nostre ville de
Lyon’, in Recueil des lettres-missives d’Henri IV, ed. J. Berger de Xivrey (Paris, 1843–76), vol. 4,
148–50.
21 J.-C. Cuignet, L’Itinéraire d’Henri IV (Bizanos,1997), 98–9.
22 Recueil de lettres missives, 181–3 and 202–5.
23 Ibid., 209–11.
24 BN, Ms.fr. 15912, fol 129.
25 BN, Ms. fr. 15912, fo. 100.
20
MICHEL DE WAELE
431
of his hope, everything hangs on his seeing him, a familiar and fraternal figure
so that in this appearance the unity of the nation can shine forth.’26
According to William Long and Peter Brecke, an event must contain the
following factors if it is to be considered as having reconciliatory significance:
a direct physical contact, or a certain proximity, between former
enemies, generally effected by important representatives of each of
the factions; a public ceremony accompanied by substantial publicity
or by a significant media coverage which broadcasts the event to the
whole of the national community; and ritual or symbolic behaviour
indicating that the parties consider the dispute to be resolved and
that relations in future will be friendly.27
The entry of a governor into a city that had previously refused to open its
gates answers to all these requirements. In the first place it puts him in contact
with the different powers which are based in the city. Thus, upon his entry into
Paris in November 1437, Charles VII was presented with
the provost of Paris and the provost of merchants, the magistrates
and a great show of bourgeois notables in grand and rich attire; then
came the bishop of Paris accompanied by leading figures from the
churches of the said city; then the great president of the Parlement
. . . and with him all the lords of the said Parlement. They were
followed by the rectors and doctors in theology and law from the
University of the said city and other notable persons learned in
several branches of knowledge. Then came the lords of the Chambre
des comptes.
Henri IV was received in the month of August 1594 by the comte de Brissac,
governor of the city under the League, and by the provost of merchants,
l’Huillier. For his part, the duc d’Artois was awaited in April 1814 at the barrière
de Pantin by the provisional government of the realm, by the municipal council
and some general officers. He was harangued by Talleyrand in the name of the
provisional government and by M. de Chabrol speaking for the city. As for
Charles de Gaulle, he was received in August 1944 at the Arc de Triomphe by
members of the provisional government, the Conseil National de la Résistance
and the Comité Parisien de la Libération, as well as by general officers and
numerous combatants from the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur.28
By its very nature the reconciliatory entry represents a public manifestation
in the course of which crowds throng to see the personage in question traverse
26
De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 583.
Long and Brecke, War and Reconciliation, 6. See also L. Schirch, Ritual and Symbol in
Peacebuilding (Bloomfield, CT, 2005).
28 Gilles le Bouvier dit le héraut Berry, Les chroniques du roi Charles VII (Paris, 1979), 190–1;
ed. L.-R. Lefèvre, Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne d’Henri IV (Paris, 1948), 387; duc d’AudiffretPasquier (ed.), Mémoires du chancelier Pasquier (Paris, 1894), vol. 2, 344; de Gaulle, Mémoires de
guerre, 582.
27
432
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
the distance which will invariably lead him to Notre-Dame and seal the
reconciliation between public authority and the city. According to Enguerran
de Monstrelatet, the spectators of Charles VII’s entry were so numerous ‘that
people had great difficulty walking in the streets’. The comte de Beugnot relates
that during the entry of the duc d’Artois ‘there was not a single window which
did not frame faces beaming with joy. The people, spread out along the streets,
pursued the prince with their applause and shouts.’ Geoffroy de Courcel,
referring to General de Gaulle’s entry into Paris, adopted words close to those
which we find in the general’s own Mémoires: he recalled that ‘a huge crown
thronged over the pavements, around the windows and on the rooftops of
buildings lining the Champs-Elysées: people were perched on trees and high up
on the street-lights, like so many bunches of human grapes’. The General himself
evoked the image of a sea of people, in his recollection of some two million
people assembled for the occasion.29 This participation of the masses in a
reconciliatory entry had a further virtue in that it enabled Parisians, who may
have been divided among themselves during the conflict now ending, to testify
to their unity before the presence of power. Thus the entry of a leader into the
city and the accompanying ceremony bear witness to the twofold reconciliation
necessary to a state and the end of civil conflict: the first is vertical and binds
together authority and the inhabitants of the city; the second is horizontal and
binds Parisians to each other.30
The reconciliatory entry was widely publicized, all the more so because Paris,
the biggest city in France, was surrendering to legitimate authority. The latter had
at its disposal numerous tools for spreading the good news: letters written to its
various partners in far-flung corners of the realm, official proclamations, organized
festivities, pictorial representations and, finally, newspaper articles and radio
broadcasts. No stone was to be left unturned in spreading this good news. On the
very day of his entry into Paris Henri IV sent a circular letter to the municipal
authorities in the towns that supported him, informing them of the event and
asking them to give thanks to God ‘by processions and other solemnities’. When
the inhabitants of Meaux heard the news, ‘a Te Deum was sung forthwith in the
cathedral by Monseigneur St-Etienne. The great bells were rung and a great
number of joyful people were to be found there. Later, after the Te Deum had
ended, several artillery salvoes were fired and illumination was brought to the
streets and crossroads of Meaux. On the outskirts of the city people shouted
“Vive le Roi!“ at the tops of their voices, a cry repeated several times.’ For their
part, the inhabitants of Castres, a Protestant town, celebrated the news with a big
29 Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, 306; Mémoires du comte Beugnot, 111; Geoffroy de
Courcel, ‘Le 26 août 1944 aux Champs-Élysées’, Espoir, 47 (1984), 50; de Gaulle, Mémoires de
guerre, 583.
30 M. De Waele, ‘Clémence royale et fidélités françaises à la fin des guerres de Religion’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 24 (1998), 231–52; B. Frederking, ‘“Il ne faut pas être le roi
de deux peuples”: strategies of national reconciliation in Restoration France’, Fr Hist, 22 (2008),
446–68.
MICHEL DE WAELE
433
bonfire.31 Later on, engravings depicting the entry of the king into his capital, or
showing him watching the departure of Spanish soldiers from a window,
broadcast the event to a wider public, thus enabling it to be lodged in the
collective memory. In the contemporary era, the modernization of the means of
communication has enabled news to be spread almost instantaneously. De Gaulle
noted in his memoirs the (premature) announcement of the liberation of Paris by
the BBC and, later on, by the ‘Voice of America’. In fact, on 27 August a religious
thanksgiving service was held in New York to celebrate the event and less than
two weeks later the New York Times announced that the first films about the
Liberation of Paris would be shown that day.32 In Paris itself, newspapers, which
had started to roll off the presses again at the time of the uprising in the capital,
devoted their front pages to the procession down the Champs-Elysées.33 In a
word, reconciliatory entries have been characterized by gestures of unity among
parties, which have vouched for a better future. This is especially manifest in the
pardon granted to former enemies by the royal power in 1437, 1594 and 1814.
Ever since Greek antiquity, societies have used pardons—indeed the complete
oblivion of misdeeds—as the pillar on which reconciliatory undertakings were to
rest.34 Very early on, the kings of France adopted a similar attitude, through
which they showed their religious legitimacy by accomplishing a divine act par
excellence, that for which Christ died on the Cross.
The importance they attached to this gesture is also evident in their desire to
reserve for themselves the right of pardon, over which they had possessed a
monopoly since the beginning of the sixteenth century.35 Charles VII, no less
than Henri IV and Louis XVIII, marked the return of Paris to the heart of the
political community by the sign of pardon. In the preamble to the constitutional
Charter of 1814, Louis XVIII affirmed that:
in thus attempting to rejoin the links of time, which had been broken
by fateful divisions, we have erased from our memory, as we would
wish that they might also be erased from history, all the ills that have
afflicted our homeland during our absence . . . The wish closest to
31 Recueil de lettres missives, 120–1; Bibliothèque Municipale de Meaux, Ms. 84, fo. 261, N. Lenffant,
‘Recueil sur l’histoire de France et particulièrement sur l’histoire de Meaux’; J. Gaches, Mémoires sur
les guerres de Religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc (1555–1610) (Geneva, 1970), 451.
32 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 574–5; New York Times, 26 Aug. 1944 and 7 Sept. 1944.
33 For an idea of these publications, foreign as well as Parisian, see the illustration next to page
265 of Paris 1944. Les enjeux de la libération, ed. C. Levisse-Touzé (Paris, 1994).
34 M. De Waele et J. Biron, ‘L’Hercule Gaulois et le glaive spirituel’, in Le Recours à l’Écriture.
Polémique et conciliation du XVe au XVIIe siècle, ed. M.-J. Louison-Lassablière (Saint-Etienne,
2000), 211–29.
35 J. Foviaux, La Rémission des peines et des condamnations. Droit monarchique et droit
moderne (Paris, 1970); C. Gauvard, ‘De Grâce Especial’. Crime, Etat et société en France à la fin
du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1991), vol. 2, 895–934; G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favour: Ritual and
Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1992); G. Althoff, ‘Ira regis: Prolegomena to
a history of royal anger’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. B.
H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 59–74; J. Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à
la fin du Moyen Âge (1380–1440) (Paris, 1981), 118–23; Le Règlement des conflits au Moyen Age.
Actes du XXXIe congrès de la SHMESP (Angers, 2000) (Paris, 2001).
434
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
our heart is that all French people live together as brothers, and
bitter memory will not disturb the security which must follow the
solemn act we grant them today.36
Restoring peace within the political community by means of pardon and total
forgetting of misdeeds, rather than hunting down and punishing those
responsible for the unrest, represented behaviour we generally find recurring in
societies where the collective factor is crucial to the maintenance and
development of their members. Indeed, aggression towards deviant members
of the group appears potentially more damaging to the community if the latter
relies for its daily survival on the efforts of all members.37 This does not, however,
rule out punishment for certain people, which, at the end of a civil conflict,
generally takes the form of voluntary or enforced exile.38
The dynamic of civil conflict within a republican regime is rather different.
When a party rises up against the king it rises up against the person of the
monarch, who alone enjoys the authority that decides the fate to be meted out
to his enemies. In a republic, or a democracy, crimes are committed against the
totality of the citizens who form the nation. Violence is no longer directed
against the king or his ministers but against the social whole, which will want
to react to it. As early as the eighteenth century, at the instigation of the thinkers
of the Enlightenment, the general conception of justice was beginning to
change, in that punishment of the criminal in the name of retributive justice
was gradually winning approval. The fate reserved for the criminal was to be
regarded as a measure in pursuit of ‘higher’ aims than simple vengeance:
atonement, control and rehabilitation. In response to these objectives, new
institutions emerged, such as prisons in England.39 This new philosophy has
gradually made headway and today dominates the political scene whenever
investigating crimes committed during civil wars or revolutions are concerned.
It was the idea behind the creation of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in the
aftermath of the Second World War and it has enabled the development of new
notions, such as that of crimes committed against humanity; crimes which,
according to some people, can never go unpunished. The need to protect the
rights of man, they claim, calls for retributive justice as absolutely imperative: ‘if
36 ‘Lettres d’abolition en faveur des habitans de Paris’, in Recueil général des anciennes lois
françaises, depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, ed. F. A. Isambert et al. (Paris, 1825),
vol. 8, 832; ‘Edict et declaration du Roy sur la reduction de la ville de Paris, soubs son obeissance’,
in Recueil des edicts et articles accordez par le Roy Henry IIII pour la reünion de ses subiets (n.p.,
1606), fos 20v°–26; text of the constitutional charter consulted at http://mjp.univperp.fr/france/co1814.htm35 (accessed 23 June 2008).
37 M. H. Ross, The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, 1993); C. M. Turnbull, ‘The politics of non-agression’, in Learning Non-Agression:
The Experiences of Non-Literate Societies, ed. A. Montagu (New York, 1978), 161–221.
38 R. Descimon and J. J. Ruiz Ibáñez, Les Ligueurs de l’exil: le refuge catholique français après
1594 (Seyssel, 2005).
39 M. A. Pauley, ‘The jurisprudence of crime and punishment from Plato to Hegel ’, Am J Jurispr,
39 (1994), 97–152; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Court in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986),
520–618.
MICHEL DE WAELE
435
the law is incapable of punishing the generalized brutality of the recent past,
what lessons can be offered for the future?’, wonders Diane Orentlicher, who
echoes what Validimir Jankélévitch, among others, has written on this subject.40
Although Charles de Gaulle did not completely close the door on pardons—we
see this in the things he said about Cardinal de Suhard, who had been asked to
absent himself from the Te Deum celebrated in Notre-Dame—he was not able
to proclaim them, nor to prevent Parisians from punishing certain individuals
they accused of having collaborated with the enemy, among them women
suspected of having had relationships with German soldiers.
So the entry into Paris at the end of a civil conflict really does represent a
reconciliatory event. Public and widely publicized, it brings the leader into
contact for the first time with the population and the local authorities. Charles
VII, Henri IV, Louis XVIII and Charles de Gaulle all had this much in common,
namely that the Parisians had scant knowledge of them, indeed their image of
them was distorted by the propaganda of their enemies.41 The act of communion
represented by the entry makes it possible to unite, quickly and easily, two
entities that have hitherto remained unknown to one another. In the surrounding
festival oblivion falls over the torments which have preceded it, at least for the
moment. The ritual on which the reconciliatory entry draws is very similar to
that implemented during the first official visit of a king of the medieval and early
modern periods to his capital. This being so, it differs from normal entries in
three principal respects: it is generally spontaneous; it unites the whole of the
population into a whole instead of reflecting the social hierarchies in place; and
it celebrates national continuity rather than the beginning of a new regime.
II
Because of their importance, normal entries are carefully orchestrated and the
municipal authorities appear on stage as part of the setting. The procession that
comes to meet the king is planned down to the last detail, and the speeches
convey messages dear to the heart of the municipal officials. The canopy under
which the monarch walks to and fro is richly embroidered with his colours, or
with those of the city, while the streets have been cleaned and decorated with
the royal coat of arms and colours. Arcs de triomphe are set up, local artists
elaborate complex iconographic programmes and little theatrical plays are put
on, before the procession ends with the celebration of a Te Deum. All these
ingredients become ever more complex over time, all the more so since their
40 D. Orentlicher, ‘Settling accounts: the duty to prosecute human rights violations of a prior regime’, Yale Law J, 100 (1991), 2542. ‘Oublier ce crime gigantesque contre l’humanité [l’Holocauste]
serait un nouveau crime contre le genre humain’, in V. Jankélevitch, L’imprescriptible (Paris, 1986),
25.
41 M. De Waele, Les relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris, 2000), 93–135;
F. Audigier, ‘De Gaulle descendant les Champs-Elysées, le 26 août 1944. De l’image au lieu de
mémoire’, in Les médias et la libération en Europe 1945–2005, ed. C. Delporte and D. Maréchal
(Paris, 2006), 387–403.
436
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
designers must, in troubled times, answer to the requirements and aspirations
of the crown. Thus the entry of Charles IX in 1571 expressed the Neoplatonic
dream of an order that brought his realm into harmony with universal concord.
Drawing their inspiration from neoclassical principles, the designers of
Renaissance entries gradually developed esoteric themes which few people
could understand.42
The reconciliatory entry, by contrast, could not be planned down to the last
detail, even though municipalities experienced in mounting such events were
able to organize them quite quickly, if necessary. Thus, on 3 December 1589
the inhabitants of Beaune learned of the imminent arrival within their walls of a
papal legate. Two days later, the protocol to be observed on the arrival of
Cardinal Caetani was decided. Among other things, agreement was reached on
the decoration of the main street with tapestries and the erection of two portals,
one at the Porte Saint Nicolas, through which the legate would make his entry,
and the other in the main street. Upon these portals was to be displayed,
together with other items, the coat of arms of the pope, the legate and the duc
de Mayenne. On 9 December the entry took place.43 Parisians would not enjoy
similar leisure to prepare the reconciliatory entry of Henri IV. On 21 March
1594, towards 9pm, some supporters of the king were informed that, around 3
or 4am, the gates of the city, which until then had supported the League, would
be opened to the king.44 The king’s men passed through the walls without
striking a blow and, at 8am the king heard mass in Notre-Dame. This event was
the outcome of a number of weeks of negotiations between the monarch, the
League governor of the city, Charles Brissac, and influential figures within the
municipal government. None of this had leaked out and the people of Paris,
faced with a fait accompli, were obviously unable to prepare the sovereign’s
entry into their city.
The confusion surrounding the last days of the Napoleonic regime again
made it impossible to organize a grandiose entry for the duc d’Artois; all the
more so because the entry was to take place as much within the framework of
the resolution of a civil conflict, as within the context of an essential pacification
between France and troops of the allied coalition ranged against Napoleon. In
fact, the first prince to make an entry into Paris in 1814 was the tsar Alexander.
Despite the fall of Napoleon, declared during the night of 2/3 April, the
restoration of the Bourbons was not yet in the bag. A provisional government
of five men, presided over by Talleyrand, was formed, a move that did not
prevent Napoleon from continuing to negotiate with Alexander through the
intermediary of General Caulaincourt.45 Prevailed upon by his superior officers
to abdicate in favour of his son, the Emperor finally gave way on 6 April. While
42
43
44
45
J. Blanchard, ‘Le spectacle du rite: les entrées royales’, Revue historique, 305 (2003), 494.
Archives Municipales de Beaune, Registre de délibérations consulaires 16, fos 110–13.
De l’Estoile, Journal pour le règne d’Henri IV, ed. L.-R. Lefèvre (Paris, 1948), 386.
Mémoires du général de Caulaincourt, ed. J. Hanoteau (Paris, 1933), vol. 3, 255–337.
MICHEL DE WAELE
437
the provisional government continued to be strengthened by the flow of
support from the generals, the rank and file deserted in droves, very often
making no attempt to hide their Bonapartist sentiments. A constitution was
drawn up on the model of that of 1791, but it fell far short of attracting general
enthusiasm. When the duc d’Artois learned of its existence he announced that
he was not going to observe it, and, when he made his entry into Paris, he had
still not ratified it. So it was difficult to organize the event down to the very last
detail.
Only Charles VII was able to benefit from a lavish entry, since the municipal
officials were allowed a period of nearly nineteen months to prepare for it. In
the event, royal troops seized the city in April 1436, whereas the king did not
pass through its gates until 12 November 1437, thereby signalling his displeasure
at not having seen the municipality return to the fold any earlier. Coming to
meet Charles were ‘the provost of the merchants, the magistrates and the
bourgeois in great numbers, accompanied by the crossbowmen and archers of
the city, all of them dressed in blue-green and bright-red robes’. After the provost
of the merchants had given the sovereign the keys to the city, the municipal
notables placed ‘over the king a blue baldachin covered in very rich fleur de
lys’. Charles’ route to Notre-Dame was littered with pictures celebrating the
magnificence of his realm and the monarchy, as well as the reconciliation
between the city and its king.46
Being occasions when cities put themselves on show, normal entries offered
an opportunity for displaying the hierarchies that structured municipal life. The
cortège that accompanied the sovereign to the cathedral gave spectators a
‘microcosmic view of the society they knew, as it paraded past before their
eyes’.47 The participants filed past, observing the medieval structure of the
procession and, in so doing, highlighted the rank and duties each person enjoyed
in relation to others. The way the procession was managed did not prevent
outbursts of joy, but it did open the door to disputes over precedence and
propriety which needed to be settled. As a major political event, the entry
required that foreign princes, no less than members of local society, position
themselves properly in relation to the monarch. In England, some of these
ceremonies gave rise to serious problems among ambassadors of the various
European countries represented in London, regarding their proper place within
the cortège. In Paris, in 1486, members of the Parlement called to account the
provost of the city and officers of the Châtelet, who had presented themselves
to Charles VII, before rather than after the magistrates. In Florence, in 1515,
Lorenzo de Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici refused to be accompanied by inhabitants
46 La Chronique d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douët-D’Arcq (New York, 1966), vol. 5,
301–7; Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (1405–1449), ed. A. Tuetey (Geneva, 1975), 314 and 335;
G. le Bouvier dit le Héraut Berry, Les Chroniques du roi Charles VII (Paris, 1979), 190–4.
47 R. Strong, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, 1450–1650: art et pouvoir (Arles, 1991), 15. For an
example of these processions, see the entry of Charles IX in Paris in 1571, in Les entrées solennelles
pendant le règne de Charles IX, ed. P.-L. Vaillancourt and M. Desrosiers (Ottawa, 2007), 341–8.
438
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
of the city who had driven out members of his family some twenty years
earlier.48
Reconciliatory entries afforded less scope for these priorities and for the
quarrels that accompanied them—even though these were not completely
absent. The unity that had been regained expressed itself in popular rejoicing,
so the solemnity associated with normal entries, with their obligatory stops to
admire the decorations prepared by inhabitants of the city, gave way to festivities
and gay abandon. The celebration of freedom regained somehow militated
against the event stiffening into a demonstration of the political and social order.
Granted, the head of state appeared in pride of place, thereby clearly
demonstrating a certain hierarchy, and he was surrounded by individuals closely
associated with the new regime, but it was impossible to detect the social
contours of the city that was being returned to legitimate authority. In fact, one
entity present in its totality—the municipality—was encountering another,
namely the central power.
This fact led to another difference, one of fundamental significance: the
attention of people participating in these reconciliatory entries was not directed
towards symbols or representations, but at a concrete reality offered to them
without accessories, as the traditional authority regained possession of the
capital of the state through the person of the head of government. Despite the
personalization inherent in this sort of ceremony, Georges Bidault pointed out
that, in August 1944, ‘you would be hard put to hear a few cries of “Vive la
France”, whereas cries of “Vive de Gaulle” were ringing out everywhere’.49 It
was not so much the beginning of a new reign that was being celebrated as the
continuity of political life, a continuity that had been momentarily interrupted
by a few years of civil conflict. This state of mind was symbolized by de Gaulle,
who was asked upon his arrival in the capital to solemnly proclaim the Republic.
The general’s reply was clear: ‘The Republic has never ceased to be. Its existence
has been incorporated by, in turn, Free France, France as a nation in combat and
the Comité français de la libération nationale. Vichy always was and will always
remain null and void. I myself am the president of the government of the
Republic. Why should I now proclaim it?’50 When it was announced to the
Bourbon pretender that Paris had been liberated in March 1814, the marquis de
Maisonfort quipped to him: ‘Sire, you are now king of France’, whereupon the
pretender replied ‘Have I ever ceased to be so?’51 The total amnesty granted to
the enemies of yesteryear, like the oblivion to which misdeeds committed
against ‘legitimate’ authority were consigned, also constituted measures that
aimed at obliterating from the collective memory breaches perpetrated against
48 D. M. Bergeron, ‘Venetian state papers and English civic pageantry, 1558–1642’, Renaissance
Quaterly, 23 (1970), 37–47; Bryant, ‘Parlementaire political theory’; R. C. Trexler, The Libro cerimoniale of the Florentine Republic (Geneva, 1979), 66.
49 Bidault, D’une résistance à l’autre, 66. Henri IV was also greeted with cries of ‘Vive le Roi’: de
l’Estoile, Journal, 388.
50 Cited in Kaspi, La Libération de la France, 130.
51 E. Lever, Louis XVIII (Paris, 1988), 333.
MICHEL DE WAELE
439
national and municipal continuity, which might be legitimately regretted by
their authors. The aim in view was union, the reconciliation of the French
people, without which the destiny of the nation was compromised.
Every reconciliation requires a prior division, no matter what form the latter
might take, though specialists are not agreed as to the nature of the conflicts
that have divided French people over the centuries. Dimitri Nicolaidis, for
example, maintains that there cannot have been civil wars before the completion
of the process of state construction, that is to say before the second half of the
nineteenth century, whereas Jean-Pierre Deriennic believes that they began to
appear with the Renaissance and the development of the early modern state.52
Moreover, specialists disagree over the nature of the civil conflict that divided
France between 1940 and 1944: some find a civil war here, others the early
beginnings of such a conflict, others again a simple confrontation that it is not
possible to describe in this way.53 Despite these differences of opinion we can
at the very least affirm that the divisions between Armagnacs and Bourguignons,
royalists and supporters of the League, and the free French and active or passive
collaborators, had to be healed in the period immediately following the conflicts
that had set them at odds. What was involved were exercises rendered all the
more difficult because they involved mobilizing in each case thousands, indeed
millions, of people.54 The reconciliatory entry participated in their success by
reaffirming a momentarily lost identity and making it possible to reappropriate
possession of symbolic spaces that had been desecrated during the preceding
confrontations.
III
One thing is self-evident: it is impossible to reconcile two individuals or two
entities which are not at the very least prepared to collaborate in future. Now,
in the four cases that concern us here, the will to work together manifested
itself in the gesture made by Parisians a few days, indeed a few hours, before
their legitimate leader entered the city. The municipality, or some of its main
leaders, took up arms to help drive out the occupier. In 1436, numerous
bourgeois mobilized the inhabitants, ‘had the people armed and went straight
52 D. Nicolaïdis, ‘Guerre civile et Etat-nation’, in La Guerre civile entre Histoire et Mémoire, ed.
J.-C. Martin (Nantes, 1995), 27–32; J.-Deriennic, Les Guerres civiles (Paris, 2001).
53 For an idea of the debates surrounding this question: Burrin, ‘La guerre franco-française: vers
Sigmaringen’, in La France des années noires, ed. J.-Azéma and F. Bédarida (Paris, 1993), vol. 2,
31–45; L. Capdevilla, ‘Violence et société en Bretagne dans l’après-Libération (automne 1944–
automne 1945)’, Modern and Contemporary France, 7 (1999), 443–56; J. Jackson, La France sous
l’Occupation 1940–1944 (Paris, 2004), 596–613; C. Pavone, Une guerre civile. Essai historique
sur l’éthique de la Résistance italienne (Paris, 2005), 269–74; R. Paxton, La France de Vichy
1940–1944 (Paris, 1997), 366–9; G. Ranzato, ‘Evidence et invisibilité des guerres civiles’, in La
Guerre civile entre Histoire et Mémoire, ed. Martin, 17–25; H. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy de
1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1990), 9–26.
54 J. W. Elder, ‘Expanding our options: the challenge of forgiveness’, in Exploring Forgiveness,
ed. R. Enright and J. North (Madison, 1998), 161.
440
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
to the Porte Saint-Denis, and were soon some 3–4000 men strong, as many from
Paris as from the neighbouring villages, whose hatred against the English and
the governors was so great that they desired nothing else than to destroy
them’.55 Forced to withdraw into the Bastille, a few days later the English
defenders received permission to return home, taking their weapons and
baggage. In 1594, Henri IV began to negotiate the surrender of the city with its
governor and the principal members of the municipal government, more than a
month before ‘the fruit was ripe’, so that numerous inhabitants were ready in
the early hours of 22 March 1594 to contribute to the success of the operation.56
In 1944 the Parisian uprising began on 20 August, a few days before the arrival
of the first units of the Leclerc division. The situation was more confused in1814,
in that the foreign forces liberated Paris before the Senate declared Napoleon
dethroned and before the French people and the army were released from the
oath of loyalty that bound them to the Emperor. Since the beginning of the year,
when the Empire seemed to be falling apart once and for all, some men—
Talleyrand in particular—were preparing the political structure of the postBonapartist period, without any question of resorting to arms. Yet, if we are to
believe the comte de Semallé, an insurrection had been brewing in the capital
for at least two weeks and, from the day after the entry of the tsar into the
capital, local papers were demanding the abdication of the Emperor and the
return of the Bourbons.57
This active involvement of Parisians in their own process of liberation is of
fundamental importance, for it allowed them to renew contact with their past
identity, and to lay full claim to it, without sharing the glory of the moment with
anyone else. In so doing it enabled a veil of silence to be drawn temporarily over
the implicit or explicit aid given by the city’s inhabitants to their illegitimate
rulers, while also making it possible to point the finger at scapegoats who would
later bear the burden of collaboration. The death of Charles VI on 21 October
1422 had made Henry VI of England the king of France, according to the terms
of the treaty of Troyes (21 May 1420). Despite the fact that there were no more
than a hundred or so soldiers billeted in the English garrison at Paris, the
inhabitants of the city did nothing to throw off the yoke of the foreigner. They
even seemed to have come to terms with the situation. After the regent Bedford
had gained a victory over the ‘roi de Bourges’ at Verneuil in August 1424,
Parisians organized a triumphal entry for him in September, which struck the
imagination of those who witnessed it: ‘Paris was festooned everywhere that lay
on his route, while the roads were decorated and cleaned; the citizens of Paris
came to meet him dressed in bright red.’ Having watched a mystery play
performed in front of the Châtelet, ‘[Bedford] went straight off to Notre-Dame,
55
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 315.
M. Wolfe, ‘Amnesty and oubliance at the end of the French Wars of Religion’, Cahiers
d’Histoire, 16 (1997), 44–68.
57 E. de Waresquiel, Talleyrand: le prince immobile (Paris, 2006), 431–8; Souvenirs du comte
de Semallé page de Louis XVI (Paris, 1898), 165–7.
56
MICHEL DE WAELE
441
where he was received as if he were God. In short, never was greater honour
done, even when the Romans made their triumphal march, than to him on that
day, and to his wife who followed him everywhere, wherever he went.’58 In
spite of the economic difficulties of the time, and the disillusionment generated
by the realization that the Anglo-Burgundian regime was in fact completely
dominated by the English, the Parisians would not begin to get worked up until
the death of the Duke of Bedford in 1435 and the first tangible signs of the reappropriation of the realm by Charles VII.
At the time of the Wars of Religion, the city not only drove back King Henri
III, in May 1588, but also attempted to coordinate national urban opposition to
the reign of Henri IV. Two hundred years later, the various popular movements
that brought about the fall of the Bourbons took Paris as their point of departure,
despite the fact that a great many of the rioters were provincials. While the
Parisians showed no great love for Napoleon, they did nothing to remove him
from power either, before 1814. In the wake of the defeat of 1940 the city of
Paris did not, despite its latent hostility towards the occupiers, become the
spearhead of resistance, which developed more rapidly in the territories under
the control of Vichy. Collaborators enabled the German administration to
function without striking a blow.59
Parisian uprisings, which took place while wartime regimes were approaching
their end, made it possible to mask the relative apathy of inhabitants of the city
during those periods, like their participation in the struggle against legitimate
authorities. The awakening assumed various shapes and sizes: while some
royalists participated in the surprise attack of March 1594, by gaining possession
of the gates of the city, thousands of men took part in the struggles that shook
the capital from 20 to 26 August 1944. Their action made it possible to resolve
in a few days, even a few hours, a situation that might have sunk into stalemate
had the struggle continued. Such action did not always play a decisive role in
the general strategy designed to lead to a cessation of fighting: while the return
of Paris to the bosom of royal authority prompted a great many cities that still
raised a standard for the League to follow its example, the military repercussions
of the liberation of Paris in 1944 were insignificant. However, the importance
of the insurrection is not to be measured by that yardstick.
Politically, the city regained its identity and its pride by actively participating
in its own liberation. L’Humanité of 26 August 1944 featured on its front page:
‘Soldiers of Leclerc, American Friends, Paris which has liberated itself, weapons
in hand, welcomes and salutes you!’ The text of the ensuing article insisted on
the fact that during the fighting the city had ‘displayed the heroic virtues which,
over the centuries, have earned its reputation and its glory’. No mention was
58 Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous Charles VI et Charles VII, ed. A Mary (Paris, 1929),
185–6.
59 G. Llewelyn Thompson, Paris and its People under English Rule: The Anglo-Burgundian
Regime, 1420–1436 (Oxford, 1991); R. Descimon and É. Barnavi, La Sainte Ligue, le juge et la
potence (Paris, 1985); Paris et la Révolution: actes du colloque de Paris I, 14–16 avril 1989, ed.
M. Vovelle (Paris, 1989); H. Michel, Paris allemand (Paris, 1981).
442
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
made in this story of the military pressure exerted by the Allied armies on Axis
forces: the whole narrative was centred on the city and its inhabitants.
It would nevertheless be naive to suppose that taking-up arms sufficed on its
own to erase years of division from the collective memory. After all, Paris had
set its face against legitimate governments on many occasions in the past.
Insurrection thus made it possible to break the chains that prevented the city
from following the straight and narrow. In the lettres d’abolition which he
granted to Parisians, Charles VII insisted on the fact that the latter were
constrained to ‘abide with, and make obeisance to the English, our ancient
enemies’.60 Henri IV, for his part, accused the leaders of the League—who were
not part of the Parisian reconciliation—of manipulating the French people,
while at the same time allowing themselves to be ‘won over to the passions of
Ministers of the King of Spain’.61 The Parisians’ opposition to their monarch,
God’s chosen one, was thus presented as a phenomenon that went against
nature and which could not possibly last. Once they had become good French
people and true Parisians again, thanks to their participation in their own
liberation, the inhabitants of the city were able to negotiate proudly with the
political institutions to which they had always remained faithful.
In 1944, the people responsible for the difficult situation which the city (like
France as a whole) had experienced, were to be found substantially among the
political leaders of the pre-war years and the early years of the war. They were
accused of having failed to contain Hitler’s Germany, politically and militarily,
and of having thrown in the sponge too soon after the setbacks of May 1940.
While the taking-up of arms enabled Parisians to renew contact with their
ancestral identity and with the continuing loyalty they had shown to the
legitimate powers of the land, the reconciliatory entry gave them the
opportunity—that it also gave to the national authority—to regain possession of
intensely symbolic spaces which had been soiled by the enemy in the course of
the conflict. For example, the entry of Charles VII took the route that had been
followed on 1 December 1420 by the kings of France and England, the duc de
Bourgogne, Louis III of Bavaria and numerous lords when they entered the city
following the signing of the treaty of Troyes. The same route was also followed
in September 1424 by the regent, on the occasion of his own triumphal entry.62
And 500 years later General de Gaulle elected to march down the ChampsElysées, which had been the theatre of German parades during the
Occupation.
The symbolic place on which all these processions converged was NotreDame; it was here that Henry VI was crowned, on 16 December 1431, as
Napoleon had been on 2 December 1804; it was here that the supporters of the
League gathered to give praise to God for the failure of attacks by the ‘king of
Navarre’ against their city; and it was also here that, under the auspices of
60
61
62
‘Lettre d’abolition’, 832.
‘Edict et declaration du Roy’.
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous Charles VI et Charles VII, 142–3, 185–6.
MICHEL DE WAELE
443
Cardinal Suhard, funeral rites were celebrated for Philippe Henriot, assassinated
by the Resistance on 28 June 1944. Under the Capetians and the Valois, the
cathedral occupied a less important place in the system of monarchical
symbolism than Reims or Saint-Denis.63 Even so, from Henri IV onwards, the
Bourbons had made it integral to their mechanisms of government. For example,
on 21 June 1598, the peace with Spain was sworn there by the king, ‘accompanied
by many persons of noble rank and by the principal princes and lords of his
court’.64 In 1814, witnessing the entry of the duc d’Artois, comte Beugnot
recorded that ‘the procession set off for Notre-Dame, following the ancient
custom of going to render to God, in the leading church of Paris, the solemn
homage of the French people for every happy event’.65
When the Church fell under the control of the enemies of legitimate authority
it disturbed the immemorial order associating French power with the divine
purpose. The fact that the reconciliatory authorities presented themselves at
Notre-Dame first testifies to their will to regain possession of that place and of
the privileged relation that united France with the Creator. Yet the country
evolved over the centuries, and Notre-Dame could not remain for ever the sole
memorial site visited by heads of government in the process of repossessing
their liberated capital. Charles de Gaulle, the day before his procession down
the Champs-Elysées, went instead to the Hôtel de Ville—that pre-eminently
republican symbol—in order to reassert the reappropriation of the public
administration by legitimate authority.66 Even so, what we are witnessing here
is the continuing desire to reconnect with the immemorial web of the history
and greatness of France.
Moulded by tradition and steeped in the history of France in particular, de
Gaulle felt that history came to life when he walked down the Champs-Elysées.
‘With every step that I made on this the most illustrious axis in the world, the
glories of the past sprang up to take their place alongside the glory of today.’ He
referred later to the monuments to the glory of the national past that he passed
on his route: the Arc de Triomphe, the statue of Clemenceau, the Tuileries,
Concorde, the Carroussel, the Invalides, the Institut, the Louvre, the palace of
Saint-Louis and Notre-Dame. This catalogue enabled him to evoke the Aiglon,
the Roi-Soleil, Turenne, Napoléon, Foch, Jeanne d’Arc and Henri IV. This review
of the glories of France led him to exclaim: ‘The history trapped in these stones
and in these places seems to smile at us.’ But history was also invoked to warn
of the dangers that threatened France, particularly when she was divided. There
then followed a new enumeration of more tragic deeds, of the capturing of Paris
by Caesar, of the march-pasts of the invaders down the Champs-Elysées; and
63
A. Erlande-Brandeburg, ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, in Les Lieux de Mémoire. Les France de
l’archive à l’emblème, ed. P. Nora (Paris, 1992), vol. 3, 359–401.
64 De l’Estoile, Journal, 524.
65 Mémoires du comte Beugnot, 111.
66 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 579; M. Aghulon, ‘La mairie. Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, in Les
Lieux de mémoires. La République, ed. Nora (Paris, 1984), vol. 5, 167–93.
444
‘PARIS EST LIBRE’
this enumeration included Saint-Barthélemy, the Fronde, the 10 August 1792,
the exiles of Charles X and of Louis-Philippe, and the fall of Napoléon III. De
Gaulle concluded his review with the following words: ‘This evening Paris,
while resplendent with the greatness of France, draws upon all the lessons that
the dark days have to teach us.’67
IV
Thus we see that the entry into Paris represents an important element in the
process of national reconciliation in the wake of significant civil conflict. It
differs from normal entries in that it allows the city to reconnect with its past
identity and with the symbolic sites that have played an essential role in its
destiny. And it can represent an important lever for obtaining the ‘liberation’ of
the rest of the territory, as is shown by the large number of towns that recognized
Henri IV following the surrender of Paris. As a source of hope, it casts a veil of
oblivion over the ordeals suffered by the population during the troubled years
that preceded it. Even if such a ceremony was not actually part of the republican
political arsenal, this did not prevent General de Gaulle from adopting, quite
spontaneously, a mode of behaviour—his procession down the Champs-Elysées
on 26 August 1944—that precisely brought to mind the action conducted by
the kings of France of the medieval and early modern periods. It thus testified
to the tenacity, over the centuries, of ancient rituals of reconciliation and to the
importance retained by the personification of authority even when republicanism
held sway. This being the case, the new conceptions of justice that began to
develop in the eighteenth century no longer allowed the public authorities to
grant block pardons for acts committed in the course of conflict. This was all
the more so because it was now very often the victims of these conflicts, people
to whom no consideration was given in the past, who appeared in the limelight—
and specifically in the limelight of the media—while the actual fighting faded
into the background.68
It is becoming ever more difficult to completely forget past crimes, as is
shown by the example of the Commission for Reconciliation and Truth set up
to enable South Africa to confront the legacy of apartheid. The leaders of the
former regime had to publicly admit their atrocities in return for a pardon. Yet,
as we clearly see, the reconciliatory act remained an act of pardon, in the course
67 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 585–6. For the general’s relationship with history: F. Bédarida, ‘L’Histoire dans la pensée et dans l’action du général de Gaulle’, in De Gaulle en son siècle, vol.
1: Dans la mémoire des hommes et des peuples (Paris, 1991), 141–9; A. Larcan, De Gaulle inventaire. La culture, l’esprit, la foi (Paris, 2003), 825–45.
68 Victims have only very recently become a preoccupation of politicians and university researchers. Benjamin Mendehlson used the expression ‘victimology’ for the first time in 1947, but the lecture he delivered that year, to the Roumanian psychiatric society, was not published until 1956:
‘Une nouvelle branche de la science bio-psycho-sociale: la victimologie’, Revue internationale de
criminologie et de police technique, 10 (1956). Equally important was the publication of a book by
the German criminologist Hans von Henting: The Criminal and his Victim: Studies in the SocioBiology of Crime (New Haven, 1948).
MICHEL DE WAELE
445
of which the winning side consented to forget some of the grievances in order
to carve out a place within the nation for its former enemies. It sometimes
happened, however, that the effects of reconciliation were not felt immediately.
Jean Juvenal des Ursins confronted Charles VII in 1440, pointing out to him that
‘Paris, Troyes, Sens and—to be brief—all the regions that have shown their
loyalty towards you are in dire straits, their devotion responsible for their
devastation.’69 According to de Gaulle, there were many French people who,
unaware that terrible sufferings still awaited them, mistook the liberation for
the end of the war.70
Civil war is synonymous with deep ruptures in the fabric of human affairs,
bringing significant destruction at the physical level. The restoration and general
acceptance of a legitimate authority is meaningless if the totality of persons
comprising the nation does not accept new sacrifices necessary to the
reconstruction of the devastated nation in all respects. Reconstruction can
never be complete. Some people will always harbour an obdurate ill-will towards
their former enemies, who were sometimes their torturers. The memory of a
conflict will be expressed in different forms, sometimes incompatible with each
other. Yet despite these divergences reconciliation really does happen whenever
the national effort to extricate itself from the crisis becomes perceptible and
yields concrete results.
In our own time, some scholars have claimed that reconciliation is reached
whenever a certain number of years elapse without any significant resumption
of hostilities. A mathematical criterion such as this can appear arbitrary, ignoring,
on the one hand, the state of mind that must exist between the inhabitants of a
given country and, on the other, the manifestations of collaboration and
mobilization necessary to reconstruction. The rituals of reconciliation, like
those manifesting themselves on the occasion of entries, contribute significantly
to the creation of this sort of state of mind, without by themselves being able to
guarantee that the road to reconciliation will be followed all the way. Such
rituals must be accompanied, as much at the outset as in the final stages, by
gestures that contribute to the re-establishment of unity. A prior insurrection
does indeed greatly facilitate the restoration of constructive relations between
parties. Yet harmony, once regained, can rapidly disappear again, or its bonds
weaken, if conflict persists on other fronts, or if reconciliation is not accompanied
by reconstruction. While historians investigate further the circumstances and
causes behind civil conflicts, they should bear in mind that the reconciliation
and reconstruction of a country constitute an integral part of the problematic to
be analysed.
69 ‘Loquar in tribulacione’, in Ecrits politiques de Jean Juvénal des Ursins, ed. S. Lewis (Paris,
1978–92), vol. 1, 314.
70 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 599.