Reading Eagle (August 28, 1944)
ON THE RECORD —
How Joan of Arc again points way to liberty
By Dorothy Thompson
When Gen. Charles de Gaulle raised the Cross of Lorraine, he may have thought of Joan of Arc, not as the Saint, but as the first European military leader to have organized a people’s war. Joan, a peasant girl and born democrat, lived in a feudal age, and the French nobility, who led, not national armies but their own, had lost province after province to the English, also led by feudal lords. They had fought, in the manner of their age, battles of cavaliers, exchanging captured noblemen for ransoms, thinking of their own interests, not of a “cause,” with victors and vanquished coming to terms immediately after the battle.
Joan was the first European nationalist. Her voices had told her that a country belonged to the people who spoke its language and tilled its soil, and had thus been created by God as a common family. Thus, in defending God’s creation they were fighting for God.
Joan’s greatest contribution to the deliverance of France was this creation of a popular faith, for which the common people would fight, because they instinctively felt it was true. That it was highly revolutionary, Joan herself was not aware; to her it was simply revelation and common sense. But the authorities who ruled that world knew full well that it was revolutionary and church and state collaborated to her doom.
Her second contribution was the discovery that the form of warfare was outdated. She had no more respect for the French military than Gen. de Gaulle had for Gamelin. She was a military genius, and this combination of what was then modern war a fanatical faith to raise the masses made her victorious.
I recalled these things about Saint Joan, as sitting on a remote Vermont farm, I turned, for hours, radio dials to the shortwave stations of the whole world and heard nothing but the Marseillaise, French songs, French military marches, French tributes – from London, from the Belgian Congo, from Cuba, from Brazil – realizing that in the rising of the people of Paris this war had reached its highest point. The excitement that swept the world was not only joy in the recovery of Paris, but joy in the vindication of humanity, and in the courage, shrewdness, and sheer ability, of the common man. somewhere in the shadows, I thought I heard a woman’s rough voice, chuckling, “I told you, boys, that’s the way! Have the people with you, and you’ll win.”
The French Committee of Liberation has organized and fought a revolutionary war. He had the allied armies, and without them the underground war could hardly have succeeded. But without the revolutionary war, the march into Paris would have been merely the reconquest of a great city, and not the revival of the French nation and a signal to the world.
In fact, the war of the armies and the war of the people were separated in the great moment. After the victory in Normandy, Gen. Eisenhower had a choice: to march on Paris, or turn north in pursuit of the German armies, seeking to destroy their military power. From a military viewpoint, Eisenhower made the right choice. As strategy Paris was secondary. Afterward Paris could be invested as a matter of course.
But in the life of a people there are no matters of course. Joan knew that. You must strike when the anvil is hot. You must strike when the spirit of the people is mounting to crescendo. De Gaulle and the Parisians knew what Joan knew. They did not wait for the cheapest moment. They took the appropriate moment.
And what a feat of organization! To command an army in the field is one thing. To command a ragtag and bobtail army, organized underground by stealth, uninformed, in hiding in homes, factories, and offices, consisting of the most disparate elements – ex-officers, students, college professors, and, in the mass, industrial workers, all under the eyes of the Gestapo and under the heels of an army of occupation; to give the order: Fight! And they fight! That is a miracle of organization and intelligence.
And the Germans? Nothing is more terrifying than the rising of masses. Once it starts it has the power of an eruption of nature. It has a primitive hostility that creates a panic no army can spread. The spontaneity of its actions makes it impossible to prepare cool countermeasures. The psychological surprise adds to the terror. One must remember that these hundreds of thousands of Parisians have been working under German eyes for four years, seemingly harmless. The police – they had been carrying out the German orders if not enthusiastically, then properly. And suddenly they all turn around and show one common visage of fearless wrath.
In a few hours, the Germans learned the first lesson in their reeducation process. In any critical moment, all power over the subjected depends on the willingness of the subjected. In the face of a united unwillingness, power cracks and flees in horror and terror.