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1944 Paris: an "all-white" liberation army?

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011

  In 1944, once the Allies had defeated the German army in Normandy, Free French leaders wanted their troops to lead the liberation of Paris.
  
  But Allied High Command requested the Free French force in question to be "all-white", if possible, but this was very difficult because c.60% of FF forces were black West Africans in their ranks. The 2nd Armored Division was chosen because 'only about 25%' of its troops were black.
  
  "Paris liberation made 'whites only'”. ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News. 6 April 2009.
  
  
  
  Oddly enough (sarcasm) we don't hear this mentioned in most documentaries and war films?
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011

  Hereward
  
  Though one can never discount racism perhaps, what was more important than race in this respect was that they were not French-born, and I think that it was seen as vitally important to start immediately to rebuild France.
  
  The French people had been broken and humiliated , and the English view of the French, after hundreds of years of that special intimacy between enemies, is that the French have very brittle self-confidence and need to be charmed and "sucked up to" in order to get the best out of them.
  
  I have had a quick look at the "Memoirs of Field Marshall Montgomery", for somewhere he gives a summary of a speech that he made to the French in the last year of the war in which he paid tribute to the fighting spirit of the people of mainland France and their valuable contribution to the war effort.
  
  In 1958, when the book was published he could be frank and honest about it, and confess that he was more or less lying. He knew what he had to tell the French and what they needed to believe. And the Allies needed them to believe it too.
  
  In 1944-45 the recovery of France as both an ally and partner during the war, and as part of the post-war reconstruction of a New Europe, demanded that the pride and self-confidence of the people of metropolitan France should be restored. And thus the symbolism of the French march into Paris was staged (as I understand it ) in line with the British decision some years before to choose De Gaulle as the leader of the Free French.
  
  Harold Nicholson in his War Diaries spells out his role as a minder to De Gaulle in his early days in London, and the debate about whether he or the French Admiral, who also claimed to be the leader in exile, among possibly others, should be "promoted" "appointed" by Britain.
  
  In spite of- or perhaps even because of - their, at times, difficult relationship, Churchill seems to have realised that De Gaulle had the kind of qualities that would allow his voice on British Radio to become the Voice of Free France. But if this alien-appointed French-man was to prove effective in France the great symbolic show of him striding into Paris had to be an image that the French Nation could assoiate with. And the full realization of the meagre role of metropolitan France might have just created further damage to French morale.
  
  It still always amazes me when I drive back into South London after our regular trips to France that I see many more black faces in the 30 minutes or so that it takes to get home than I have seen in four weeks in France. And the new France O TV station that has started up this year, while heavily inclined to multi-racialism, is also focussed on France "outre mer"- like the small island in the Indian Ocean (?) that became a Department of France this year.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011

  Another piece of important PR for Britain was served by not having the proportion of troops from the Empire so evident.
  
  In the year of the Iraq War, when old Anglo-French tensions were very palpable, I was told by a new friend in our French campsite that I should never go to Dunkirk for the local people there hate the British.
  
  In accordance with the central directive traditions of French education he had been directed to Dunkirk to teach and he was now the principal of a primary school, his wife also on the staff. There they learned that children are taught all about the way that the British ran out on the French and decided that France would fall to the Nazis: and by their withdrawal made that French defeat certain.
  
  So the French forces surrendered in hundreds of thousands and became prisoners of war. Soon enough a French Government signed an Armistice and many French expected the British to "see reason" and also accept to negotiate with Hitler.
  
  Britain did not do so and destroyed the French Fleet in North Africa killing many French sailors. Then the French had to settle down for the long-haul with Armistice terms that had been accepted as a temporary expedient that had to be lived with and endured for years. Years when France had to pay Germany the cost of maintaining a German army of occupation in cash, while also producing all kinds of goods for Germany- while minus the young men who were still prisoners of war, as well as those who were drafted in to be sent as war-workers within the Third Reich.
  
  So of course the numbers of men from metropolitan France who were available to fight in the Free French Forces was limited..
  
  Of course the British have their own way of looking at it, and Montgomery mentions too all the French who had been rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk and brought to England, who demanded the right to be returned to France as soon as the Armistice was signed
  
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 30th June 2011

  On the wider question of racism, I think that the article is very much a piece of journalism aimed at a British audience and addressing the concerns of 2011 rather than 1944, and that racism in a French context is very different from a British one.
  
  At the core of Britishness there lies the aspiration to further spread the English idea of everybody belonging to a Commonweal- the process that made the Kingdom of Wessex the foundation for the Kingdom of England- etc- until the Commonweal was supposed to be an Empire and Commonwealth in which people shared a common Britishness- a sense of belonging together and standing and falling together in extremis.
  
  France did not achieve that sense of being one State until Louis XIV a thousand years after Alfred the Great, and Voltaire credited "the Sun King" with creating a view of a French Society because there was a clear framework and structure laid down by the monarch as to just how every part of France had to conduct itself and interact. Hence his great "Hall of MIrrors" reflected this idea that- whatever people had in their heart and soul- what really mattered in normal times was just how they conformed to social expectations. Hence the revolutionary work of Jean Jacques Rousseau was called "The Social Contract"- a term which is much used in current debate in France- for wider social relations are really no more than a form of contract which has no greater capacity for endurance than the perception that both sides are keeping up their end of the bargain. And- in extremis- France can very easily fall apart into those component parts in which people invest their heart and soul, as happened when France disintegrated in 1940.
  
  Hence recent French controveries about their racial or ethnic minorities have featured aspects of superficial conduct which emphasise a cultural difference between them and the French majority. The whole question of the wearing of the Muslim veil in public goes to the heart of the French solution to its religious wars which was to make all public places and especially public institutions like schools totally secular, with no place for religion on the curriculum or in personal attire or adornment. And when sportsmen of African origin end up playing football or rugby for France, it is the fact that they can not even sing the French National anthem when they are on show before the World as representatives of France that irritates French people.
  
  Of course people like Janick Noah, who are seen to embrace and exemplify the best aspects of French culture can become national treasures, and earlier this year President Sarkosy made a glowing tribute to a black intellectual, politician, poet, dramatist from France's Afro-Caribbean population as he was installed in the Pantheon which Napoleon set up in tribute to French Greats.
  
  In terms of tennis one might reflect on these issues as they impact on the Wimbledon semi-final in which Andy Murray faces Jo-Wilfred Tsonga.
  
  I have never detected in France the kind of issues about Tsonga's "Frenchness" that have been around the question of whether Murray is Scottish or British. But then perhaps I am more aware of the SNP raising these issues: and the possible impact of the Dunblane Massacre on Murray's deep sense of belonging and security, he having been one of the pupils in that school on that day.
  
  Cass
  
  
  

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  Posted by Michael Alexander Kearsley (U1675895) on Thursday, 30th June 2011

  The US of course did have elements of segregation actually in army elements, whereas there was no segregation based on ethnicity in the British Army, apparently in the US Army at time in mess hall they were segregated into whites and other groups.
  
  Not that Dwight Eisenhower or George Patton or such in any way supported such things, but it was just a legacy of the way society in the US operated.
  
  When Roma and Sinti first arrived outside Paris at the turn of the 16th century and camped around the city the populace was convinced that it was an invading army and that Paris was under siege. Certainly it was important for French morale for a French force to enter the Capital city, it was a disservice to the many fighters from the empire who had been in the thick of most of the heaviest fighting for France to be kept out of the entry to Paris, but it was done out of good motives.

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