The 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Pierrefeu

D Day – in Provence

The siren went off at exactly 6 o’clock in Pierrefeu. In this little Provençal village, the prompt timekeeping was impressive in itself. But the crowd flocking towards the centre of the village was also something I hadn’t seen before – young and old, teenagers, grandmothers and tots in pushchairs.

Monday, the 16th of August was sixty years to the day since Pierrefeu was liberated in World War 2. The previous day had seen the pomp and ceremony of medal-giving by President Chirac, fly-pasts by the French equivalent of the Red Arrows and re-enactments of the landings on the beaches along the Var coastline. These had been led by sections of the American and French armies (made up, mainly, of African troops from France’s colonies), almost ten weeks after D Day in Normandy. The fanfare over, it was now time for this village of five thousand souls to commemorate its own little piece of history.

I managed to get a prime spot by the main road at a little table in the Bar Central (aka Chez Michelle) and ordered a glass of chilled rosé as I prepared my camera and notebook to capture the events of the evening.

It was the older folk I was watching. The old lady who sits, knitting, at the narrow house at the foot of the old village had just walked by. She’s the one who’s kind of the village grandmother. Everyone talks to her and she has a faltering, rather fractured french as if she has trouble talking. I wondered what she made of it all.

A woman of loose morals is liberated
Originally uploaded by Blue Blanket.

A few minutes after the siren, a motley selection of jeeps, ambulances and troop carriers drove through town, manned by locals in period dress and sometimes carrying rather unlikely-looking passengers, like the small boy wielding a rifle and a lady of a ‘certain age’ whose costume suggested she might have been more at home at the Moulin Rouge…

After some waving and cheering, it appeared we were liberated! Michelle who runs the bar told me that, actually, it took almost as long sixty years ago. There were a few shots from the bank opposite the café and a cannon was fired at – or from, she wasn’t sure - Chateau Something-or-Other. And that was it, really. Funny, as my elderly neighbour, Simone, had a different tale, speaking of bombings that made everyone scurry for their wine cellars and attempted sabotage of bridges. And a builder I’ve met talked of only hearing distant gunfire from miles away towards the coast.

But, having done my Liberation homework, these diverging accounts sort of sum up the war in Occupied France for those who lived through it. No one has quite the same story or the same recollections.

What is not in dispute, though, is the impact on the village of having its menfolk deported to snowy labour camps in Germany or the tragedy of losing those who died at the start of the war or in the resistance fighting around the area in 1944. Down by the Mairie a little exhibition about the Liberation contained various archive letters, documents and newspapers of the time as well as authentic accounts from surviving ‘resistants’ who were present. I was gratified to read that, on the day the village was liberated on the 16th August, it was the Quartier Sainte Croix (where my house is!) which took the lead in the revelries, initiating a rousing, acapella version of La Marseillaise ‘au milieu d’applaudissements frénétiques’. The crowd then processed down to the market square and partied on until the small hours.

Which was exactly what appeared to be on the cards sixty years on. A Glenn Miller Tribute band wowed the clientele of the Café de Commerce while several villagers gave an energetic – and impromptu - jiving demonstration around the now-parked jeeps. Later, after a firework display, which would have given Edinburgh at Hogmanay a run for its money, the crowds partied on in the market square and the sounds of Europop boomed around the village hillside.

What I remember from the evening, though, was not the sound and fury of the disco or the fireworks. It was the old folk of the village quietly walking around the exhibition at the Town Hall, pointing out old friends in the blurry black and white pictures and recalling those who didn’t come back. And the story told by the elderly resistance fighter who, as the eldest son, was more or less sent off to join the Maquis by his father. He tearfully remembered his father’s parting words to him. ‘You were born in this country, you will free this country. Don’t be rash but be brave. And come home again.’