Amid the sunshine and wild celebrations of Friday 25 August 1944, the day the Germans surrendered control of Paris, Charles de Gaulle declared the city to have been “liberated by itself”, with “the help and assistance of the whole of France”. The truth was not quite so noble. De Gaulle sought to embody “the whole of France”, but it had been a fractured nation, subject to regular violent upheavals, ever since 1789. Its army had crumbled before Hitler in 1940, and the reconstituted French force that triumphantly entered Paris in 1944 comprised one armoured division entirely equipped by, and under the operational command of, the US.
If any one person saved Paris, it was Dwight D Eisenhower, allied commander, who acceded to de Gaulle’s lobbying – Ike being one of the few people who found the prickly General endearing – and agreed to march on the city. The allies’ original intention after the D-day landings had been to bypass Paris, considering it irrelevant to the push towards Germany. Paris was not irrelevant to the world, though. It transcended the unhappy nation to which it belonged, embodying the fantasies, sexual and artistic, of myriad “wannabe Hemingways and Picassos”. This beacon of freedom, the City of Light, had fallen to the powers of darkness, and there was a literal dark cloud over Paris on 10 June 1940, as the Germans approached and the French government departed. The cause was smog from burning fuel dumps, but “the stillness of the night, the sweet scent of chestnut blossom mingled with petrol only increased the sense of impending doom”.
