PARIS – There was little bread and barely any butter. Without coal, electricity or gas, Parisians were cooking meals on campfires in the streets.
By summer 1944, the French capital – under the Nazi boot for four years – was ready for revenge.
Allied troops began rolling in on Aug. 24, and a day later the church bells tolled. The city was liberated. But preparations for Wednesday’s grandiose celebration to mark the anniversary rekindled the memory of another Paris, one on its knees and set to unleash its fury.
“There’s so much that the French had been bottling up in hatred of their enemy,” said David Wingeate Pike, a British World War II expert at the American University of Paris. “Paris had come to a humiliation it could never imagine before.”
The average Parisian lost 44 pounds during the Nazi occupation, which began June 14, 1940, he said.
In those dire times, the elegant Jardin des Tuileries was covered with potato patches, and rabbit hutches replaced flower pots on apartment balconies to provide the prime ingredient for stew.
“Paris was starving, without lights, without bread, without clothes,” recalled 80-year-old Madeleine Riffaud, a member of the underground Resistance at the time.
On July 23, 1944, Riffaud – code-named Rainer – volunteered to kill a Nazi to avenge the murder of a friend and “to show Parisians you can kill the occupier in broad daylight at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon,” she said.
Not quite 20, she shot to death a “handsome officer” walking on the Solferino Bridge near the Orsay train station – today the famous Musee d’Orsay.
“I killed that man, but I had no hate for him, I assure you,” she said. “I was afraid.”
Riffaud, who was arrested, tortured and then freed in a prisoner exchange, was among a minority who actively worked to subvert the Nazis. But her action was a sign of the rising fever taking hold within the underground and on the streets of Paris.
On July 14, nine days before Riffaud took aim, 100,000 people rallied in the streets, some singing the “Marseillaise,” France’s national anthem. For the first time, French police did not intervene.
There are no solid figures on how many people joined the Resistance, with its many clandestine and even rival networks. Pike, the historian, said a widely accepted figure is 100,000 Resistance members nationwide in 1943.
But small acts of resistance were part of everyday life.
Josette Maulet, 10 years old in 1944, remembered helping her mother listen to clandestine radio broadcasts.
“When my mother listened, I sang in the hallway so our collaborationist neighbor couldn’t hear,” Maulet said. The lady next door was known to consort with Nazi soldiers, she explained.
After the liberation, many women who’d had trysts with Nazi occupiers were paraded through the streets with their hair shorn and swastikas painted on their foreheads, underscoring French anger at those who collaborated.
Maulet recalls the ration tickets and long lines to obtain meager portions of food. The social order was turned on its head, with children and laborers given larger portions than white-collar workers.
And Paris was still the City of Light, despite it all, with fashion-conscious mademoiselles resorting to “bottled stockings,” a special dye painted on the legs to replace their ragged silk hose.
Food became even scarcer after the U.S.-led Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, with Parisians deprived of the staples that had trickled in from the Normandy countryside.
But the arrival of the Allies on French soil was above all a source of hope and a clarion call for Parisians to rise up. Orders for an insurrection went out from an underground Resistance bunker in southern Paris on Aug. 18. A day later, police officers in civilian clothes took over their headquarters. On Aug. 20, Paris City Hall was occupied.
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