The Lion of the 17th: the story of Georges Dukson and the Liberation of Paris

The French military defeat to Germany in 1940, which just took around six weeks, was a profound humiliation. And so, when it came to Liberation of Paris some four years later, General de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French forces was obsessed with optics. De Gaulle, who was a very proud and patriotic Frenchman, found himself here in a supplicant role. It was primarily the Americans and the British who had led the way militarily to liberating France. De Gaulle was in charge of some troops, but they were junior parties in the military fight back. And so he asked the Americans primarily if, when it came to the Liberation of Paris, it could be the French troops who went in first. The Americans consented to that request, but they too were obsessed with optics, and had one condition – that the French troops that liberated Paris should be White.

In a memo stamped ‘confidential,’ General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith wrote: “It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of White personnel. This would indicate the 2nd Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel was the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred per cent White.” In reality, this was easier said than done. Two thirds of the Free French forces were in fact colonial troops drawn from the French Empire: from Senegal, Gabon, Chad, Mauritania in West Africa; from Algeria, Morocco in North Africa; from Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; and from Réunion and New Caledonia either near Africa or in the Pacific Ocean. The capacity of the French military to create a hundred percent White division was in fact very, very hard. For all that, the British government suggested that the French comply. British General Frederick Morgan wrote to Allied Supreme Command lamenting, “It's unfortunate that the only French formation that's one hundred per cent White is an armoured division in Morocco. Every other French division is only about forty per cent White. But I've told Colonel de Chevigné that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a White infantry division.” So, they sent the Black soldiers home, or confined them to barracks, or in other ways kept them out of the way so that the French troops who would come to appear as though they had liberated Paris were all White.

This was, as I mentioned, a real challenge. In the end, because there weren't enough White forces, they ended up including Syrians and Lebanese and some Algerians who were ‘light enough’ that they could ‘pass’. The Americans and the British could handle the fact that Liberation was choreographed to make it appear as though the French led the charge to Paris, even though they did not. But they couldn't entertain the notion that Black troops had been involved in Liberation of one of the continent's most celebrated cities –, even though they had. And so it was that on 25 August, 1944, those Black soldiers who fought for Europe's liberation were denied the right to participate in it because at the 11th hour they discovered that the freedom they were fighting for did not apply to them.

But not everyone got the memo. The following day, General de Gaulle came to claim his prize of France and Paris. Standing in the Champs-Élysées, amongst the human tumult of celebration and joy, there are a few pictures that stand out, pictures that include Georges Dukson, a 22-year-old from Gabon.

If you weren't looking for him, you might not see him, but once you do see him, you can't take your eyes off him. He's there effectively photobombing General de Gaulle as the General parades down the Champs-Élysées. You see him over de Gaulle’s shoulder as he lays the wreath at the Unknown Soldier. You see him walking just a few feet away from the general as this tall, reedy man in his military hat wanders down France's most famous street. And then you see Georges Dukson being manhandled by an official, the cause of which is not quite clear, but effectively looking by like he's being pushed out of the shot. Dukson sports a pair of billowing culottes with a white shirt. His right arm is in a sling. At a certain moment, it looks as though de Gaulle can see this fracas taking place to his left as he casts his eye over Dukson and the official in some kind of tussle.

Georges Dukson was a lover, fighter, chancer, adventurer, braggart, extrovert, and something of a scoundrel. He was born in the western coastal town of Port-Gentil in what is now Gabon. His father fought for the French during the First World War and as a teenager Dukson enlisted straight away in the Second World War to fight for France. After six months’ basic training in what's now the Gabonese capital Libreville, he went to France as a sergeant. He was captured by the Germans in 1940 and put in a prisoner of war camp. He escaped, came to Paris and joined the Resistance as the Liberation gained strength. In a run up to Liberation with fighting between the resistance and the Nazis taking place street to street, Dukson is given a Colt, and in his role as a sergeant gathers together a group of fighters. You see him in pictures standing atop German tanks; in another, looking like he has arrested some German soldiers. There are accounts of him commandeering or steering tanks through the street. He became something of a legend in the area where he was most prolific, which was the 17th arrondissement, and he earned the title ‘The Lion of the 17th.’

But with the Liberation over and as rule of law was restored, Dukson shifted from being an enforcer to being a transgressor. He had been pilfering some of the equipment that had been left by the Germans at a time when that was illegal, and so was arrested. Dukson was being taken to jail when he escaped from the van that he was in, and was shot by his captors. The bullet shattered his thigh, and he was taken to hospital to be operated on. He passed away on the operating table, and were it not for the photographs, he would've passed out of history altogether.

Georges Dukson and the ‘blanchiment’ are separate if related stories, taking place just one day apart in the same city, which together tell us many things about both how the Second World War and Black people's relationship to Europe are often misunderstood. But for now, I want to concentrate on just three.

First, Dukson’s story teaches us the importance of understanding Europe at the end of the war, not so much geographically – from the Iberian coast to the Urals and from Iceland to Greece – as politically, sprawling across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania. At the time, the flags of Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain flew all over the globe. Dukson may have been born and raised in Gabon, but he was a French subject – raised, we are told, in the European way by a father who was especially keen to engender in him a love of France. Indeed, there were more Black people living in British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies than White people living in Britain, Belgium, and Portugal respectively – and more Africans, the majority of them Black, living under French rule than there were White people living in France. White Belgians in Belgium were outnumbered by Black people in Belgian territories by six to one.

Now, this distinction between Europe geographically and politically is not as stark as it was in 1945, but it's still evident. Take any euro note, turn to the side with a map on it, and in the far-left hand corner you'll see some dots. Those are places around the globe where the euro is still used. Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, in the Caribbean: Réunion just by Madagascar, the Canary Islands and the Azores in the Atlantic, and beyond. France's longest land border is not with Spain or Germany, but with Brazil – thanks to its territory in French Guiana, which is every bit as French as the Ardennes or the Dordogne. 'European' has not been synonymous with 'White' for several centuries now. And this was not primarily as a result of Black people immigrating to Europe to look for work after the Second World War but because of Europeans traveling around the world to plunder land, resources and labour in the name of civilisation.

That's the first thing. Second: while the Second World War marked a welcome triumph over the genocidal and militaristic pathologies of the Axis powers in general and Nazi Germany in particular, it can in no way be meaningfully understood as a war for democracy or freedom – since neither existed within the Allied Powers at the time. America ran a segregated army and denied Black people their basic civil rights and the right to vote in the South. Britain, France, Belgium and Holland all had colonies where they denied people the right to vote and some very basic human rights. The Soviet Union, of course, had its own issues. But the notion that this would be a fight for democracy and freedom, when large numbers of the people under the very countries claiming that did not have democracy and freedom, is obviously untenable.

Indeed, at the very moment that much of Europe and the US were celebrating their victory against tyranny, large numbers of people across the globe, most of them Black and Brown, were fighting to secure freedom either from or within those very same Powers. These contradictions were apparent in real time. A skirmish between Algerian militants and French authorities in the Algerian towns of Sétif and Guelma on VE Day resulted in a massacre of between 15,000 and 20,000 Algerians. That same month, as in Europe they celebrated their freedom, Syria and Lebanon also saw huge protests against French colonial rule. Eight weeks after that, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands. Two weeks after that, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from French rule.

Finally, the ‘blanchiment’ shows that it's not by accident that we do not know many of these stories, but partly by design. Black and Brown people were deliberately written out of the story, now it's time to write them back in. More than one million African Americans, almost one million African men and roughly 16,000 Caribbeans served in the Second World War, but rarely do we see them or hear about them. Life Magazine's 368-page pictorial history of World War II featured more than a thousand pictures of the war and just one Black American. Among more than 800 photos in Collier's photographic history of World War II there is similarly just one picture of a Black medical corpsman.

There is an African proverb that "Only when lions write history will hunters cease to be the heroes." We could do worse than starting with the story of Georges Dukson, the Lion of the 17th.

Gary Younge Hon FBA is a journalist, author and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester.