Wartime liberation of Paris reexamined in astute account

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2024 (416 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the spring of 1940, Nazi German armies would overrun and occupy Paris, France. They would remain until the summer of 1944, when Paris was finally liberated.

From the outset, numerous myths have been attached to these events. But the real story, British journalist and popular historian Patrick Bishop says, is more complicated and more interesting.

It is to refute the myths and depict the real story that Bishop has penned Paris ‘44, a well-written work of popular narrative history.

The myth-making began with a speech by general Charles de Gaulle, the leader of Free France, when he arrived in Paris upon its liberation in August 1944.

“Paris liberated,” he averred. “Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help and assistance of the whole of France, of that France which fights, of the only France, of the true France, of the eternal France.”

This version of the events of the liberation, Bishop says, “did not sit easily with the facts.” For example, the uprising in the city against the Nazi army was limited in scale; the people of Paris did not really liberate themselves.

Moreover, what de Gaulle called the whole of France had in fact no direct role in the liberation. And his notion of the only, true and eternal France was an invention: as Bishop says, “the nation rarely agreed on anything and the occupation had only opened another bitter chapter in a long history of discord.”

Bishop underscores the experiences of various cultural and intellectual figures who participated in the “mighty drama” of the occupation and liberation. These include American novelists Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger, and the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

Bishop’s subtitle, The Shame and the Glory, is significant: his narrative depicts plenty of both.

After the liberation, mobs abused women who were accused of consorting with the enemy, and innocent people were killed. This was the shame of Paris, but there was also glory: the courage of resistance fighters who, at great personal risk, harried the German war machine.

Bishop makes an interesting point about the ideological diversity of the French resistance. It included communists, royalists and French patriots with no definite political convictions.

It has been said that only someone who lived through it could fully understand the atmosphere of the occupation. But Bishop, with his skeptical approach to myths and evocation of multiple perspectives, probably comes as close as possible to reconstructing what actually happened in this dark and tragic era.

Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.