gatherings were immediately turned into charity events for some desperate
group of castaways (of which there were many); for the homeless, the FFI,
orphans, deportees, refugees, the wounded, and the dead. The singer and
comedian Pierre Dac, who had been one of the most well-known voices on
Radio London during the war, performed at a Red Cross benefit at Luna
Park in September 1944. Then it was an open-air music-hall extravaganza to
benefit prisoners and war victims. At the end of 1944 public performances
during the Semaine de l’Absent gathered donations for prisoners of war and
deportees. Jazz and symphony concerts and gala performances by American
and French stars from Fred Astaire to Maurice Chevalier offered aid to war
victims. The festivities and commemoration pouring out from the place de
la Bastille, the place de la Nation, the place Jeanne d’Arc, Notre Dame and
the city’s churches, the Hôtel de Ville, the Champs-Élysées, the place de la
Concorde, the place de l’Opéra, the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens, and
neighborhood squares all signaled a vigorous resurfacing of collective life and
public space.
The largest, most electrifying celebration marked the end of the war in
Europe, or V-E Day, on May 8, 1945. It elicited an outpouring of emotion
and fervor. The American journalist Janet Flanner described it as “an occu-
pation of Paris by Parisians. They streamed out onto their city’s avenues and
boulevards and took possession of them. . . . They paved the Champs-Élysées
with their moving, serried bodies. . . . [They] drowned out the sound of the
church bells that clanged for peace.” Food was scarce, everyone was hungry,
but “all anyone cared about was to keep moving, to keep shouting, to keep
singing snatches of the ‘Marseillaise.’”
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Writing in Combat, Jean-Paul Sartre
described V-E Day in Paris as a “provocative carnival . . . tanks and jeeps
maneuver in a sea of humanity, carrying hundreds of improvised tourists.”
The city was a gleaming stage set for the celebration:
In the middle of the night an enormous tide streamed around the illu-
minated monuments. Projectors traced the initial of the day in the sky.
Flares, airplane vapor crossed above the Opéra flooded in lights and
draped in red, above the Hôtel de Ville, above Notre Dame, above all the
great squares where the blinding radiance of the projectors dispelled a
night five years long. And mobs, mobs everywhere, as if the population
of Paris suddenly tripled. All you could see was an enormous mass of
people crying, laughing, singing.
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