The Unliberated

The France still in chains writhed with hope and hate.

When the news of D-day reached Lyons, thousands on their way to work danced in the streets, hugged and kissed in Gallic joy, sang La Marseillaise, shouted: "Vive la France! Vive les Allies!" German and Vichy forces dared not interfere just then. Later the police staged a mass roundup.

Most Frenchmen went about their business pretty much as usual. But organized partisans stirred and struck. Many towns and villages of central and southern France flew the Tricolor. The core of unrest lay in the region around Vichy; there, by Nazi decree, all civilian motor and bicycle traffic came to a halt.

From their caves in the Haute-Savoie the guerilla maquis of southeastern France struck their hardest blows. They raided Grenoble, wrecked the rail junction at Bellegarde. In Marseilles, great port on the alerted, invasion-jittery Mediterranean, the Germans used tanks to quell demonstrators. The Nazis denied reports that Paris was seething. The capital, they said, was so calm that its curfew had been extended from midnight to 1 a.m. But they spoke of arresting hundreds of "Communists" and two shopkeepers who were ready to sell British flags for the day of liberation. Everywhere resistance groups, now designated by the Algiers Government as the French Forces of the Interior, listened to clandestine radios for orders from abroad : "Roger, your laundry will be ready Tuesday. . . . Jacques Laporte, please immediately deliver your fresh cakes to grandmother in Paris. . . ." In northern France, just behind the invasion fronts, saboteurs attacked the railways, did enough damage to enrage the Germans. Collaborationists began to flee; some were killed. Best estimate of the various undergrounds' total armed strength: 200.000. State of Vichy. The men of Vichy began to split. Marshal Philippe Petain. Chief of State, had just returned from a tour of bombed French cities. Propped up by occasional doses of benzedrine, the old man spoke less of collaboration than of unity and nationalism. But, at invasion showdown, he called upon French men to obey the Nazis. Pierre Laval, hated alike by Petain and by anti-Nazi French men, echoed the Marshal's words: "France must be dignified and disciplined in attitude. . . . We are not in the war." It was not enough. More violent Nazi- philes, their bridges already burned behind them, moved to range Vichyfrance openly on the Nazi side. Brutal Policeman Joseph Darnand, Minister of Labor Marcel Deat, slick Minister of Propaganda Philippe Henriot denounced Petain and Laval for straddling. Bull-like Jacques Doriot, powerful boss of the pro-Nazi Popular Party, bellowed that France must "make active contribution to this gigantic struggle." The Berlin radio hinted that Doriot might become No. 1. puppet: "A people's Government is ready to take over if the French Government does not do its duty."

State of a Nation. France was resistant and revengeful. But she was also weak. Four years of German rule and civil strife had sickened her.

France was a house of dead and missing --a million in German war prisons, a million and a half drafted for work in Germany, another 400,000 interned in France. France was hungry and sick. France stag- gered under debt and inflation. France was a land despoiled.

Despite all this, France in a sense was stronger now than she was four years ago. Out of war, defeat and occupation, France had recovered something of the spirit that made her great.

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