- Landing of Provence: the day Africa freed France
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has paid tribute this Thursday to the African soldiers of the French Army who participated 75 years ago in the landing of Provence and contributed to the liberation of France from the Nazi yoke during World War II.
"The names, faces, lives of these heroes of Africa should be part of our lives of free citizens because, without them, we would not be," Macron recalled in a ceremony in Saint-Raphaël (southeast of the country) in the The presidents of Guinea, Alpha Condé, and Ivory Coast, Alassane Ouattara, and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy also participated. The socialist François Hollande did not attend the meeting due to agenda problems.
Macron urged the mayors of all France in the cemetery of Boulouris to dedicate streets, squares and monuments to these African soldiers, whose memory "makes all Africa feel proud and tells of France what it is deeply".
"Thousands were sacrificed to defend a distant land, a land often unknown, a land that until then had never stepped on, a land on which they mixed their blood forever ," added the French president, who interrupted his vacation in the French Riviera to participate in the ceremony.
The landing of Provence has been overshadowed in history by the landing of the Allies in Normandy , which took place two months before and whose epic has been taken on numerous occasions to the cinema by Hollywood and has run rivers of ink.
The so-called Dragon operation also had the following objectives: to open a new front against the German Army, free southern France from enemy occupation, reconquer the ports of Toulon and Marseille and trace the Rhone river to join the allied forces that had landed in June in Normandy.
On the night of July 14 to 15, 1944 , 600 volunteers from the African commandos climbed the cliff of Cap Nègre on the Côte d'Azur. On July 15, 95,000 soldiers and 11,000 vehicles landed in Provence. Days later more men joined.
Some 350,000 men in total participated in this military operation, of which 120,000 of the Allied forces and about 230,000 were soldiers of the French Army . 90% of the soldiers of the French Army came from the French colonies of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
They advanced faster than expected: they released Provence in 13 days. On August 23 they arrived in Toulon, on 29 they released Marseille and on September 12 they managed to join in Burgundy the soldiers advancing from Normandy. Paris was closer.
The landing of Provence had great symbolic value for France and General Charles De Gaulle . Unlike Normandy, where most of the soldiers who participated in the operation were Allied soldiers, at the landing of Provence, it was the French troops that had liberated France.
However, the sacrifice of thousands of African soldiers was ignored for years by De Gaulle's interest in "bleaching" the liberation. It had to be demonstrated that the French had liberated France and at that time French was equivalent to white soldiers . In the United States, where there was still segregation, they were also not very interested in highlighting this detail of the story.
The African soldiers were not only forgotten, but in 1959 the French Government froze the military pensions of the soldiers of the former colonies who served in the French Army. In 2010, Sarkozy defrosted them by matching the pensions of all French and foreign veterans, mostly Africans, who had served in the French Army.
"These African fighters, for many decades, did not have the glory and esteem that their bravery justified," said Macron, who believes that "France has a part of Africa in it. And on this soil in Provence, that part was that of the spilled blood. "
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