In February 1943, there was nothing in Stalingrad but the ghost of a city. The scale of the battle that had raged for the past seven months was so unimaginable that it is nearly impossible to talk about it without resorting to empty cliché. There are the figures, of course – 850,000 Axis casualties, 1.1 million Soviet – which make this a strong contender for the title of deadliest battle in human history. But such numbers are incomprehensible in any real sense. The further you sub-divide these overarching statistics, to reveal, for example,the 40,000 Soviet civilians killed in one week of bombing, or the 13,500 Soviet soldiers executed by their own leaders during the fighting, the more you seem to be able to glimpse the hell of the battle.

In November of 1943, a plane flew over Stalingrad carrying Soviet diplomats journeying to meet their British and American counterparts. One passenger, Valentin Berezhkov, recorded what he saw.

We pressed to the windows in silence… First individual houses scattered in the snow came into view, and then a kind of unbelievable chaos began: lumps of walls, boxes of half-ruined buildings, piles of rubble, isolated chimneys… Visible against the snow were the black figures of people…’

Flash forward to Paris on 25th August 1944. Anyone flying over this city on that day would have witnessed a very different scene. Paris is still there. Damaged, certainly, and neglected, but still quintessentially and recognisably herself. From the window of the plane, you can still see barricades, trenches dug into the streets, trees felled on the boulevards. Many buildings are riddled with bullet holes, and the elegant, graceful Grand Palais is smouldering. But the battle has been won in only six days, and though several thousand people died in the fiercest fighting, the contrast between the liberation of Paris and the battle for Stalingrad could hardly be more marked.

This, unsurprisingly, was not part of Hitler’s plan. The Führer had several times issued orders that Paris must not be abandoned without a fight to the death. On 23rd August, he commanded,

The city must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris.

Explosives had been primed in strategic and iconic locations around Paris, to ensure that if the Germans were forced to withdraw, they would leave nothing behind.

So why was this plan never carried out – who saved Paris? Since the day of liberation, two divergent versions of what happened in Paris that August have emerged, that go right to the heart of the many myths that flock around Paris and its liberation like moths around candlelight.

General von Choltitz

The first is, at base, your classic Parisian love story, with an unlikely leading man in the shape of German General Dietrich von Choltitz. Von Choltitz became the governor of Paris on 7th August 1944, and was the man responsible for carrying out Hitler’s orders, even (according to legend) receiving a screaming phone call from the Führer, demanding ‘Brennt Paris?‘ (Is Paris Burning?). There was nothing in von Cholitz’s past to suggest that he would do anything other than follow these orders to the letter. In 1940 and 41 both Sevastopol and Rotterdam were destroyed on von Cholitz’s orders. He apparently had no qualms about executing Resistance fighters in Paris, and, in a conversation secretly recorded whilst he was being held as a prisoner of war, von Choltitz admitted “executing the most difficult order of my life in Russia, (…) liquidation of the Jews. I have executed this order in its entirety nonetheless…”. He also issued the order to burn the Grand Palais on 23rd August 1944.

But on 25th August, von Cholitz surrendered Paris to the Allies, in direct contravention of his orders. None of the explosives had been detonated. And when De Gaulle paraded down the Champs-Élysées, it was through a sea of smiling faces, not the blackened wasteland of Hitler’s directives. So can it be that, at some pivotal moment, von Choltitz simply could not bring himself to carry out his orders, deciding he’d rather betray his leaders and surrender than see Paris destroyed? This is the version of events suggested by von Choltitz’s son, who claimed that his father realised the war was lost, and decided to prevent unnecessary bloodshed and destruction to the city. This idea is tempting, romantic even, but surely wide of the mark. In von Choltitz’s own account, he stated simply

If for the first time I had disobeyed, it was because I knew that Hitler was insane

Moreover, an experienced military man like von Choltitz would have recognised how disastrous Stalingrad had been for all sides, and seen the value in avoiding a repeat of those events.

The alternative version of events refuses to give con Choltitz even this much credit. Resistance member Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont argued in 2004 that von Choltitz wrought us much death and destruction on Paris and its citizens as he could, “and when he ceased to kill them it was because he wasn’t able to do so any longer”. Kriegel-Valrimont shudders at any attempt to paint von Choltitz as the saviour of Paris, and insists that it was Pierre Taittinger, chairman of the municipal council, who convinced him not to detonate the explosives around the city.

Two very different stories then. In one, a hardened Nazi is struck all too late by the futility and insanity of the war he has fought, and adds his name to the long list of Parisian heroes. In the other, the Parisians themselves are solely responsible for throwing off the rule of their alien, resented occupiers, who sought nothing but their destruction right up to the end. The truth must inevitably be found somewhere between the two. Von Choltitz was certainly no romantic hero, and it seems highly unlikely that he sought to ’save’ Paris for its own sake. More likely, this practical man genuinely did realise that Hitler’s time was coming to an end, and determined to get things over with as quietly and efficiently as possible. But despite the legitimate protestations of many French historians, the fact remains that there must, surely, have been a window of opportunity for von Choltitz to carry out his orders, press that button and set off explosions all over Paris. That button was never pressed – that’s the fact, cold and undeniable, and the legacy of some combination of the actions of both von Choltitz and those Parisians who fought for their city.

So the brilliant, uniform beauty of Paris remained, the City of Light apparently undimmed. But even as De Gaulle marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées, and the crackly sound of the Marseillaise once again echoed down the streets after four forbidden years, a process of soul-searching and recrimination was already beginning. There were some deeply unpleasant questions that needed to be asked about the last few years. Why had it taken so long for Paris to shake off its occupiers? Had life in Paris under the Germans been a bit too easy? Most troubling of all – who had collaborated? Deep down, had everyone collaborated? These questions were made all the more uncomfortable by the unavoidable comparisons between still-dazzling Paris and the scenes of devastation in many of the other cities of Europe. German occupation may have ended, but the damage and pain it could inflict on Paris and Parisians had not disappeared with von Choltitz.

I think I feel another post coming on…

Further Reading

Paris

• Paris: Biography of a City by Colin Jones Superb, detailed and comprehensive history of the city, from before it was even Paris to modern times.
• Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey A more social take on the history of Paris, with plenty of evocative detail.

Stalingrad

• Stalingrad by Antony Beevor As big, clever and moving as popular history gets.

I’ve just started reading the eclectic and lively Georgian London blog, and came across this piece about the menagerie at the Tower of London, which existed in various forms from 1252 until its closure in 1835, at which point its collection of animal inhabitants formed the basis for London Zoo.

The story of the menagerie (once you’ve managed to disable those parts of your brain sensitive to modern notions of health and safety, animal cruelty and basic common sense) is a dizzying carnival of unlikely experiences, which range from the sublimely ridiculous to the ridculously sublime. Picture, for example, the first resident of the menagerie; a polar bear, given as a gift from the King of Norway to the King of England. Although presumably fluffy, small and adorable to begin with (perhaps wrapped in a little bow), the gift soon grew into an almighty, boulder-pawed beast (as polar bears are so wont to do). Too large now for his strolls around the Tower, he was sent with his keeper to swim and catch fish in the river Thames.

This curious incident of the bear and his swim time seems to have set the tone for the menagerie, and as the delightful stories keep coming, the greater a tragedy it seems that there was no historical equivalent of Ben Fogle and Kate Humble to record them all in a sort of proto-Animal Park. Other residents of the Tower menagerie included Old Martin, the bear who put the grizzly back into grizzly bear, a lonely mongoose, monkeys bedecked in fine costumes, a plague of kangaroos (which apparently spread to other parts of England, until it was not at all uncommon to see kangaroos roaming around in parks) an elephant with a penchant for wine and a belligerent, beer-swilling zebra, who by all accounts was a much friendlier drunk.

There were also many Lions in the menagerie, whose chorus of roars at dawn came incongruously to mark the start of the day at the Tower of London. This put me in mind of another lion from another menagerie, whose wretched story is painfully revealing of the tensions and ironies that practically hummed in the air of revolutionary Paris.

This story is told in The Journal of a Spy in Paris During the Reign of Terror, a fascinating document which purports to have been recorded by one Raoul Hesdin (no doubt an assumed name), an English spy working for the French Government during the first half of 1794. No record can be found of anyone of this name in the employ of the government at the time, but the work rings with truth, and it seems safe to say that whoever he was, he was in Paris at the time, and in some position that gave him close access to the Committee of Public Safety, and all the important goings-on in this tumultuous period.

But despite this elevated position, it is the personal perspective offered by the journal that makes it such a fascinating and valuable source. The study of the revolution can so easily get bogged down in valiant attempts to chart and explain the ever-changing, immensely complicated shifts in the political tides, at the expense of an understanding of what it actually felt like to be an individual living through the vast impersonal processes of the Terror, of people’s perceptions of what was happening and where it was all leading, and ultimately what the point of it all was.

It seems that Hesdin once had some enthusiasm for the revolution, and was perhaps even swept up in its very early phases. In the time since then, however, this enthusiasm has clearly softened, waned and ultimately reversed upon itself. By early February 1794, he writes,

I have little heart in such scenes for the compilation of a regular journal; if there were the least chance of my obtaining employment elsewhere or a passport to leave, I would leave this hideous shambles to-morrow. I am here to discover the secrets of a Government which has none, to unriddle mysteries when everything is but too patent, to assign causes to affects when famine, hideous famine, is the cause of everything. At times I console myself with the thought that I am taking part in a piece that will one day be read and re-read on History’s page – if, indeed, all History be not destroyed and the End of all things come.

What seems to pain Hesdin most is the transformation that has taken hold of Paris, a city which once had clearly bewitched and entranced him, in a way that Paris through the ages seems to have had a unique capacity to do.

I walked today under the chestnuts for an hour… The contrast to my youthful recollections of Paris moved me almost to tears. Nothing but the eternal white dust of the streets remains the same…

The ferment of minds in the salons, clubs, and coffee-houses, above all in the streets, was indescribable. People literally lived in the open air those two summers, and in ‘89 at every moment were seen horsemen dashing in with news from the Court or the Assembly at Versailles; orators declaiming on every chair and balustrade on the terrace. Now it is the silence of the grave

He tells us of dance halls banned by the government, but which continued anyway in secret, shifting from place to place each night to avoid detection. He watches as great books and priceless pictures sell for nothing, all vestiges of the past having ‘become objects of derision’. Most chillingly, he one day observes that guillotinings have become so much a part of the day that guards have had to be posted at the scaffolds to stop children from playing on it.

In the middle of all this comes the tale of an old grey lion, once the pride of the menagerie at Versailles, and now caged in the Jardin des Plantes. This was a beautiful botanical garden, marred only, Hesdin tells us, by the presence of strolling flower girls paid by the government to keep a spying eye and keen ear trained on visitors. In this small zoo (which, along with the park, still exists today) lived the Lion, ‘covered with sores and infested with vermin’, a pitiful sight – more mange than mane. For a small fee visitors would be allowed in to see him, and consequently, says Hesdin, he was ‘tormented by the Parisian sans-cullotes because he was king’. This sad image seems to encapsulate both the deep fears and growing frustrations of the people of Paris at this time. The King and Queen were both dead and the revolution had brought immense change, but as people screamed at the lion and tugged his hair, it is tempting to believe they were expressing a powerful sense that the revolution was not yet complete, that it had not done what it was meant to. Its leaders had sought to stoke an ever-burning fear of enemies both within and without, and even the idea of royalty was something that had still to be not only ridiculed but also actively and continuously attacked.

It’s best not to get too romantic about the case of one old Lion, but I’m always searching for moments like this in history, where in one seemingly trivial anecdote everything seems to crystalise, and petty actions have the capacity to reveal what otherwise goes unspoken; ideas and emotions so powerful and complicated that perhaps only unconscious action can express them.

In the end you can interpret the story of the lion in the park in whichever way you like, but through the eyes of Raoul Hesdin, things seem bleakly clear. Shortly before his diary comes to an abrupt and unexplained end, he sums up the world he sees stretching out before him.

Politics seem to be asleep, and all hope of resistance at an end; the yoke is to be eternal; the bloodshed perpetual, if men can be born fast enough to feed the fire.

Further Reading

• The Journal of a Spy in Paris During the Reign of Terror, January-July, 1794 … A reproduction of the 1895 edition of the journal.
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French RevolutionSimon Schama’s epic account, which complicates rather than simplifies the revolution (in a good way). Full of rich detail.
• The Terror by David Andress A probing and urgent account of the Terror, and an unusually lucid explanation of the fluctuations of revolutionary politics.

The photograph used to illustrate this article is by Vincenzo Gianferrari Pini, and was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.