On August 26 1944, the day after the liberation of Paris, General Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées amid scenes of excitable tumult. The leader of Free France had returned to the capital to reclaim it after four years of Nazi occupation.
“There was a continuous clack-clack from the press cameras,” writes Matthew Cobb in Eleven Days in August, his account of the liberation in which he describes the “joyous chaos that reigned behind the massive circle of policemen and firemen stationed around the circumference of the Place de l’Étoile”. The photographs of that day tell an important, if scarcely known, story. There, in the thick of the revelry, along with the celebrating crowds and po-faced officials, the cameras captured a diminutive Black man, walking in the procession a few feet away from the General. His name was Georges Dukson.
You might well miss him amid the human skyline of French military kepis and balding pates if you were not looking for him. But once you see this sole Black man in his billowing culottes and white shirt with his arm in a sling, you can’t take your eyes off him.
“Life,” wrote Susan Sontag in On Photography, “is not about significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” The significance of Dukson’s presence that day is not immediately apparent. At times it appears as though he is photobombing de Gaulle in the nation’s moment of glory. As de Gaulle lays a wreath under the Arc de Triomphe, there is Dukson a few feet behind him, being glared at by a French official. As de Gaulle strides down Paris’s main drag, stiff and reedy at 6ft 5in, there is the smaller, sturdier frame of Dukson over his shoulder. There he is again being manhandled away from the general by a man who looks like a police officer. Dukson appears to protest, swivelling his torso and raising his good arm, even as he keeps walking. In one picture, de Gaulle is clearly aware of the fracas, turning his gaze towards the commotion.
So why is this detail, from a historic moment that happened 80 years ago this month, significant? To answer that question we must go back a day, to August 25, when Paris was formally liberated after a German surrender. In the months leading up to the big day, de Gaulle had been desperately concerned about the optics of the liberation and France’s putative role in it. A proud and patriotic man in a supplicant role, the exiled leader knew that it would be the Americans and British who would provide the greatest share of troops and firepower to force the Germans out of France. But he wanted French soldiers to be among the first to enter the capital.
The Americans agreed. But, no less concerned with optics than de Gaulle, they had one condition: the French troops in question had to be white. The US was comfortable with spilling blood and spending treasure to free France, and then choreographing that freedom in a way that gave significant credit to the French for delivering it. What they could not tolerate was the sight of one of Europe’s most symbolic cities being rescued by Black troops.
De Gaulle met Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower in Algiers in December 1943 to work on the details. A few weeks later, a memo stamped confidential from Eisenhower’s chief of staff detailing plans for the liberation read: “It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel . . . This would indicate the Second Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred per cent white.”
The British were on board. General Frederick Morgan wrote to Allied Supreme Command: “It is unfortunate that the only French formation that is 100% white is an armoured division in Morocco. Every other French division is only about 40% white. I have told Colonel de Chevene [sic] that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division.” De Gaulle acquiesced. He was in no position to put up much of a fight, and there is no suggestion that he even tried.
So it was that on August 25 many of those who fought for Europe’s liberation were denied the right to participate in it. At the eleventh hour, it became patently clear that the freedom for which they were fighting did not apply to them. They call it the blanchiment or “whitening”. Dukson did not get the memo. That is what makes his appearance at the victory parade the next day so significant.
Georges Dukson was a lover, fighter, chancer, adventurer, braggart, extrovert and something of a scoundrel. He was born in the westerly coastal town of Port-Gentil in Gabon, then part of French Equatorial Africa, which also encompassed today’s Chad, Central African Republic and Republic of the Congo.
His father had fought for the French during the first world war and as a teenager Dukson enlisted straight away in the second. After six months of basic training in the Gabonese capital, Libreville, he was deployed to France as a sergeant. He was captured by the Germans in June 1940, and spent the next two years as a prisoner of war. After several attempts, he finally succeeded in escaping in 1943, along with a fellow prisoner, a wealthy industrialist who employed Dukson as a chauffeur and to run errands once they’d reached Paris.
What we know about Dukson comes from a book by René Dunan, a Parisian journalist, called “Ceux” de Paris, Août 1944: a witness account of the liberation of Paris that stands somewhere between a war diary and a first, rough draft of history. Dunan, a gifted raconteur, describes Dukson as “all kinds of audacious” and a “persistent” man who’d “do anything for a bet”.
“I don’t know why,” Dunan writes, “but from the get-go I enjoyed the company of this young black man from Gabon . . . We drank together, I saw him again on other evenings, after the liberation, and that is how, bit by bit, I drew his story out of him. It’s a story that is one and the same time magnificent and lamentable.”
Dunan tells the story well, even if his narration is undermined by the kind of remarks that offer an insight into the racial attitudes of the time. He introduces Dukson as though he were an exotic exhibit: “His skin was so black that it reflected light. At times, it was so smooth, you could have admired yourself in it. When he first appeared in a foggy halo of the small bar on Chéroy street, all I could make out was the whites of his eyes.” Over the next 16 pages, he infantilises Dukson (“He was subject to that inferiority complex which has always, and will always, trouble coloured people living among whites”) and anthropologises him as a “victim, as are all negroes, to a crowd that might lead him astray”.
There is no reason to doubt the basic veracity of Dunan’s account, though, like many war stories, some elements may have been embellished. We should simply be aware of the filter through which Dunan shares his interpretations of Dukson’s behaviour and character.
We meet the two men in the final days of the Nazi occupation of France. US General George Patton’s Third Army had advanced from the west and was moving in on the capital. So, too, was the French second armoured division, which had been a multinational, multiracial force including several thousand colonial troops from Morocco and Algeria, as well as a contingent of Spanish Republicans. The Germans were in retreat, but had not yet gone. Parisians were emboldened, but not yet liberated. When locals waved toilet brushes at a detachment of departing German soldiers on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the Germans fired at them.
The resistance in Paris was making its presence felt. In this moment of transition, with fighting taking place from street to street, various military and administrative forces attempted to claim authority. Dukson joined the partisans, who were calling for open insurrection. He was given a Colt pistol and gathered together a band of fighters. Dunan described them as “a group of extraordinary courage, audacity and temerity”.
On Sunday August 20, the day de Gaulle returned to France, the resistance hung the tricolour from Paris’s Hôtel de Ville. Around that time a small but swelling unarmed crowd surrounded a Panzerkampf-wagen R35 tank destroyer with several German soldiers still in it. Overwhelmed, the Germans surrendered. At one point Dukson stood on top of the vehicle and then, later, walking backwards as though guiding an aeroplane to its stand, steered it triumphantly through the streets. A day or two later, on the corner of Boulevard Batignolles and Rue de Rome, Dukson was shot in the arm by a stray bullet (hence the sling in the photograph). “Hurry up, I have to get back out there,” he told the nurse patching him up, before returning to the fray with hand grenades in his pocket, unable to carry a gun.
In accounts that seem prone to some exaggeration, Dunan describes Dukson waiting against a wall for hours, barefoot, knife in one hand, revolver in another, for a German lorry to pass and then leaping “like a jaguar” to shoot one German soldier and slit another’s throat. Another time, Dukson played dead on the pavement, lying flat on his stomach, and then jumped up to shoot at a German vehicle when it was close enough. At one point, Dunan writes, Dukson leapt on to a German tank and killed the driver while his fellow-mutineers dealt with the others. Pictures show him standing on top of tanks and alongside captured Germans. They called him the “Black lion of the 17th arrondissement”.
Cobb mentions another Parisian diarist, the retired teacher Berthe Auroy, who heard of an alleged Nazi collaborator having her hair shaved off by a Black man in the 17th. This might have been Dukson, although, as Cobb writes, there were about 5,000 Africans living in Paris during the occupation, so we cannot be sure.
“Dukson was unleashed,” writes Dunan. “Making sure he had the battle today that he couldn’t have in 1940. Making sure they paid for his captivity. In the evening, in the small bar on the rue de Chéroy . . . Dukson would describe his day, standing there covered in blood and glory. People congratulated him, celebrated him. He swelled with pride. From sergeant, he was promoted to adjutant and then sub-lieutenant. Nothing could stop him.”
Well, almost nothing. In the days after the chaos of liberation, something like rule of law began to be restored in the city. Behaviour that would have been considered “resourceful” under Nazi occupation was now illegal. Dukson had shifted from enforcer of order to transgressor, selling goods left behind by the Germans on the black market. He was arrested by Paris’s new military police. En route to the prison, he jumped free at a traffic light and made a run for it. The police shot him in the leg, the bullet shattering his thigh. They drove him to the hospital. He died on the operating table.
As General Morgan had intimated, the blanchiment was much easier said than done. With most of the original French army captured, killed, deserted or otherwise neutered, the Free French forces comprised two-thirds colonial troops. They drew their ranks from across west, central and north Africa, as well as the Middle East, the Pacific and the Caribbean. These were the troops that assisted in the allied liberation of north Africa and Italy, and would then land in southern France. There simply weren’t enough white soldiers in any single battalion to make the plan work.
But needs must. Where necessary, Black soldiers were confined to barracks and replaced with white counterparts drafted in from other units. When there still weren’t enough white men, de Gaulle included those soldiers from north Africa and the Middle East who could pass for white, as well as Spaniards.
Only one Black soldier would slip through the net, due to a technicality. Claude Mademba Sy was born in Versailles to a father who was an African commander in the French army. He counted as a French citizen rather than one of the colonial troops and was in a French regiment. For whatever reason, the French just didn’t exclude him.
With Black soldiers’ physical presence otherwise removed, the historical erasure could begin almost immediately. Just three months later, on November 11 1944, the first photographic exhibition dedicated to the liberation of Paris, showcasing a selection of François Boucher’s portfolio, opened at the Musée Carnavalet. Of the 1,500 photographs he collected, only one featured a Black soldier. The curator there thinks it is unlikely it was displayed.
So Dukson’s appearance at the victory parade is not merely of historical interest. The second world war still looms large in the European imagination. (That’s why Rishi Sunak leaving early from a D-Day commemoration was considered such a disrespectful blunder.) It shapes our thinking about the continent and has a profound impact on our politics. And for good reason. In a range of ways, it laid many of the foundations for the continent’s current institutions.
Avoiding another war in Europe was the rationale underpinning the creation of the EU. The Holocaust defines Germany’s relationship with the Middle East (and is one reason why many European nations have not collected statistics on race and ethnicity). “The war” is the historical reason why Germany does not sit on the UN Security Council, while France does, even though Germany’s population and economy are significantly larger.
The war is also central to most European nations’ patriotic mythmaking. Many Austrians cheered Hitler’s troops as they marched in during the Anschluss in 1938. Today the nation has settled on its status as “the first victims of the Nazis”. The resistance is central to France’s self-image, even though collaborators outnumbered resisters until almost the very end. Despite rejecting thousands of Jews and storing millions of dollars worth of Nazi gold, much of it looted from dispossessed Jews, the Swiss pride themselves on their wartime neutrality.
As Paul Gilroy explains in After Empire, where Britain is concerned: “That memory of the country at war against foes who are simply, tidily and uncomplicatedly evil has recently acquired the status of an ethnic myth. It explains how the country remade itself through war and victory but can also be understood as a rejection or deferral of its present problems.”
In this shared myth, Black people do not feature at all. In this huge blood-soaked morality play they do not appear as heroes, villains, victims, perpetrators, conquerors, collaborators or resisters. With a handful of exceptions, you will see them neither on the statues to the fallen nor in the endless movies and books dedicated to the subject. Like Dukson on the Champs-Élysées during the liberation, you would not know they were ever there unless you went looking for them.
But they were there, in sizeable numbers and to notable effect. As the blanchiment showed, Europe set about this task of erasure with great prejudice. It takes real effort to imagine the second world war in Europe without the presence of Black people, particularly after the arrival of the Americans on the western front. They were not present in every place, but at virtually every stage and, in certain moments, their involvement was central to the war effort.
University of London Professor David Killingray estimates that almost a million Africans fought in the second world war. Between 20,000 and 25,000 colonial troops from the Caribbean also served. Not all would go to Europe, as Dukson did. Some would stay in Africa or the Caribbean. Others were posted to Burma, India and the Middle East. Most fought for the US, Britain and France. The French saw their colonial troops as central to their war preparation from the outset. Of the 80 French divisions deployed in 1939, seven were African and three from colonies elsewhere.
De Gaulle fled France in 1940 after the German invasion and establishment of the Vichy regime and declared a government in exile from London. But he established the Free French capital in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville. That “means that the French were all Congolese while Europe was at war and Germany was madly bent on conquering the planet”, argues the writer Alain Mabanckou in “Letter to France”.
That de Gaulle was able to move to Brazzaville was primarily down to Félix Éboué, the only Black governor in the French empire and the first to abandon Vichy and back him. The grandson of slaves, born in the South American-based colony of French Guiana, Éboué was first governor of Chad and then Equatorial Africa. Many white governors in the region and beyond soon followed his lead, and when Algeria was eventually liberated from Vichy in 1942, de Gaulle moved his base there, where it remained until the liberation.
Black involvement went beyond these three major powers. Most of Belgium’s military contribution to the allied cause came from Black people. After Belgium surrendered, following just 18 days of fighting, most of its remaining troops came from the Congo’s 40,000-strong Force Publique, which primarily fought the Italians in east Africa and helped staff garrisons in west Africa.
Once the Netherlands surrendered, after just a few days in May 1940, the Schutterij local forces in the Dutch colony of Suriname held the fort along with the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army until the Americans arrived 18 months later. When what is now Indonesia was overrun by the Japanese in 1942, the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean were their only outpost. Suriname, in particular, mattered because it provided most of America’s bauxite, vital for military production, and vulnerable because it sat next to French Guiana, which was under Vichy French rule until 1943. Italy “recruited” 256,000 “Askaris” to its Royal Corps of Colonial Troops by 1940, of whom 182,000 were from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia and 74,000 from Libya, though many were mercenaries and conscripts and proved of limited military value.
Then there were the African Americans. The British asked the US to refrain from sending Black troops to the UK because they didn’t want to administer American-style segregation on British soil. The Americans made it clear they couldn’t exclude Black soldiers even if they wanted to, because they were essential to the war effort. “Sixty per cent of US army engineers are coloured and provide most of their organised dock labour,” said one British civil servant in Washington in a telegram to the Foreign Office.
About 200,000 African-American soldiers passed through Britain during the war, most on their way to Europe. Serving in a segregated army, most were not permitted to join combat troops and instead served in supply lines, delivering the food, materials and medicines, burying the dead and driving, fuelling and fixing the trucks. “As American combat forces pushed into occupied France they could only go as far as their supply lines could take them,” writes Matthew Delmont in Half American. “Which meant they could only go as far as Black supply troops could take them . . . Almost everything the allies transported to the front passed through the hands of at least one Black American.”
Between them, Black troops played important roles in Africa, where they kept Mussolini’s troops engaged in the east, and defended against further German incursions into north, west and central Africa. With north Africa liberated from Nazi control, thanks to their significant contributions, the allies could open up a strategically crucial southern flank against Italy, which proved successful, forcing the Germans to shift and disperse resources. The legendary African-American Tuskegee Airmen provided effective cover for the sea landings of allied troops at the Battle of Anzio in Italy, shooting down a dozen Nazi planes.
The 92nd infantry division, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, the only Black infantry division to fight in Europe, fought through southern Italy to Tuscany.
These are more than simply facts of military history that have been marginalised. These important elements of Europe’s past speak quite urgently to how we misunderstand the present.
At the Alliançe Francaise, the French government’s cultural institute, in Libreville, Gabon, they say they have never heard of Dukson. Were it not for the photographs, and Dunan’s written account, the lion of the 17th arrondissement would have passed out of history.
What information we do have doesn’t give us a very clear picture about everything that was going on that day, when Dukson shared the spotlight with de Gaulle. In his account, Matthew Cobb argues that footage taken earlier in the day by the Place de la Concorde shows Dukson “apparently acting as a steward”. Cobb’s theory is that he was unable to perform the task because his arm was in a sling, and so “wandered to the front” of the parade and was captured on film before being ushered back.
The scene looks far more confrontational to me. The picture suggests that he’s being shoved away, presumably because he’s too close to someone or something, and that he’s protesting.
The significance of seeing Dukson in the picture with de Gaulle is that it prompts us to ask some questions. How might Europeans think about ourselves differently if the second world war were understood as a multiracial endeavour to which Black people were integral, as opposed to a conflict in which, if their presence is acknowledged at all, is seen as peripheral? How would conversations about responsibility, obligation, entitlement, sacrifice, patriotism, immigration, integration, welfare, equality and justice, as they relate to Black people and migrants, be discussed if their contributions to this crucial moment were fully recognised? How might the French understand immigration and non-white people differently if they knew that Toulon, the first large city to vote for the Front National, was liberated with a significant contingent of colonial troops?
How would we understand terms like “threat to western civilisation” and the “values of liberal democracy” if we could grasp not only that the greatest threat to those values came from within the continent, but that Black people rallied en masse to defend them, even when their colonial overlords decided that those values didn’t apply to everyone.
In short, how different would our view of Black people’s place in Europe today be if we were able to spot Dukson in those pictures of August 26 1944 and not think, “What is he doing there?” but instead “Where are all the others?”
Gary Younge is professor of sociology at Manchester university
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