Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 by Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper

Viennot, de Gaulle’s ambassador, and Duff Cooper persuaded de Gaulle to send liaison officers.
    On 14 June 1944 de Gaulle crossed the Channel in the French destroyer
Combattante
. His party included Gaston Palewski, the ambassador Pierre Viennot, and Generals Koenig and Béthouart. One of them, hoping to lighten their leader’s mood, said to him: ‘Has it occurred to you, General, that four years ago to the day the Germans marched into Paris?’
    ‘Well! They made a mistake!’ came the inimitable reply.
    De Gaulle relaxed only after the party had landed on a beach near Courseulles in Normandy and visited General Montgomery in his caravan. He then went on to meet civilians on French soil for the first time since 1940. These rather dazed citizens all knew his voice from the nocturnal radio broadcasts, but nobody recognized his face: Vichy had never allowed the publication of his photograph. News spread rapidly. The local
curé,
Father Paris, came cantering up on his horse to reprove the General for not having shaken his hand. De Gaulle climbed out of the jeep he was in. ‘
Monsieur le curé,
’ he said, opening his arms, ‘I do not shake your hand, I embrace you.’ Two gendarmes then appeared on bicycles, which wobbled as they tried to salute. They were sent on ahead to Bayeux, heralds of the General’s coming.
    Here the emotional reaction to de Gaulle’s appearance was muted by the usual Norman reserve. One old woman, however, became confused in the enthusiasm of the moment, and cried out, ‘
Vive le Maréchal!
’De Gaulle, on hearing this discordant note, is said to have murmured, ‘Another person who does not read the newspapers.’ Gaston Palewski, when told of the approach of the Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux ‘to greet the Liberator’, was certain they had finally won: ‘the clergy does not take risks’.
    The sub-prefect appointed by Vichy, wearing his red, white and blue sash of office, welcomed de Gaulle’s party. But the change of regime had been too abrupt for him. He suddenly remembered the portrait of Marshal Pétain in the
salle d’honneur
and dashed off to take it down. It was four years and three days since the General and the Marshal had met on the steps of the Château du Muguet.
    4
    The Race for Paris
    On 31 July, General Patton’s Third Army began the breakout from Normandy at Avranches. Encircling the Germans from the west, his right hook brought the Allies to Argentan, 167 kilometres from Paris.
    For General de Gaulle, there was only one formation which merited the honour of liberating the capital of France. This was the Deuxième Division Blindée, the French 2nd Armoured Division, always known as the ‘2e DB’. Its commander was General Leclerc, the
nom de guerre
of Philippe de Hauteclocque.
    Much larger than most divisions, the 2e DB was 16,000 strong, equipped with American uniforms, weapons, half-tracks and Sherman tanks. Its core consisted of men who had followed Leclerc from Chad across the Sahara, besieged the Italian garrison at Koufra and gone on to join the British. In its ranks served regulars from the metropolitan army, including cavalrymen from Saumur, Spahis (colonial troops), sailors without ships, North African Arabs, Senegalese and French colonials who had never before stood on the soil of France. One company, the 9th, was known as ‘
la nueve
’ because it was full of Spanish Republicans, veterans of even harder battles. Appropriately, the battalion itself was commanded by Major Putz, the most respected of all the battalion commanders in the International Brigades. Leclerc’s division was such an extraordinary mixture, with Gaullists, Communists, monarchists, socialists, Giraudists and anarchists working closely together, that General de Gaulle formed an over-optimistic vision of how post-war France could unite under his leadership.
    De Gaulle had flown to Algiers after the Normandy landings. He regained France on 20 August, to be met with deeply unsettling news.