The demonstration started out as a peaceful gathering on the Highroad of the Glorious Fatherland, once known as Champs Élysées. However German regime’s occupational troops reacted without mercy. The assembly of mainly French demonstrators was fiercely broken up with bayonets and warning gunshots fired. Eye witnesses at the scene reported dozens of dead and numerous wounded, however hospitals were reluctant to confirm these numbers officially. Such is the fear instilled by the military regime.

According to sources, a large number of arrests and deportations ensued. The military searched houses, arresting countless demonstrators and civil rights activists then carting them off by truck to unknown destinations. Sources that cannot be disclosed for safety reasons speak of executions in backyards and anonymous mass graves in the Bois de Boulogne.

In a short statement, the puppet government in Vichy commented, “We are the state!” and that such “expressions of popular dissent” were part of the new German Reich’s “birth pangs”. He added, “Soon, everything would be completely under control”. Ideas like “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood” were called “outdated” and “belonged in the past”.

The international League of Nations severely condemned this renewed outbreak of violence, while at the same time admitting that the incidents in the former French capital were a German domestic affair. No political consequences will be effected, so as not to jeopardize trade relations with forcibly united Europe.