New book offers an enthralling, cinematic account of the liberation of Paris during the Second World War

Patrick Bishop, acclaimed historian and author of bestsellers about the Royal Air Force during the Second World War (“Fighter Boys” and “Bomber Boys”), longtime foreign correspondent, and former Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph returns with “Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory,” an exhaustively researched, enthralling, cinematic account of the liberation of Paris, in time for its 80th anniversary.
Bishop’s purpose is an “attempt to tell it truly while never denying the power and authenticity of the myth” of the 11 days in August 1944 that were filled with drama, bloodshed and joy. In a story rife with ambiguity, the idea of Paris, the City of Light, gleamed “like a distant lighthouse through the gloom of war.” It was the place war photographer Robert Capa called, “the beautiful city where I first learned to eat, drink and love.”
Through the perspectives of artists and writers like Pablo Picasso, Irène Némirovsky, Jerry Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, as well as French Resistance fighters and military figures including Gen. Philippe Leclerc and Charles de Gaulle, Bishop’s engrossing narrative unfurls.
He provides historical context with privation and fear at the hands of the occupying Nazis beginning in June 1940, a time when local trust in authority “collapsed like the wall of a dam, and panic flooded in.” As a result, hundreds of thousands left Paris, and, as Némirovsky wrote in “Suite Française,” many realized that what they abandoned was “only stone, wood — nothing living!” What mattered was survival.
Though Picasso preferred to remain in Paris (even though he’d been offered sanctuary in the United States), he later told girlfriend Françoise Gilot that it wasn’t “an act of courage” on his part. It was simply “a form of inertia.”
To combat the cold from lack of heating fuel, the celebrated novelist Colette advised others to spend the greater part of the day in bed, as she did in her Palais-Royal apartment.
Meanwhile, during the German occupation, Hemingway was holed up in Cuba, finishing his Spanish Civil War novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” while his wife, intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, was covering the war from the front.
By spring 1944, Parisians were hungrier than ever, and with the hope of an Allied invasion, “came the fear that death might come sooner than liberation.” Resistance operative Madeleine Riffaud, in her early 20s, had been ferrying arms, distributing leaflets and running messages. But now her priority was to provide plastic explosives that “looked like modelling clay and smelled of almonds.”
The Allied advance on D-Day, June 6, found Salinger on a ship with his division, heading for Omaha Beach. The soldiers were told to restrict their equipment to 44 pounds, but most packed extra items. Some took cigarette cartons, while Salinger had “the manuscripts of six stories featuring the character who now loomed large in his imagination: Holden Caulfield.”
Gellhorn talked her way on board a Red Cross hospital ship and became the only war correspondent to help evacuate the wounded from the beaches of Normandy.
On Bastille Day, July 14, about 150,000 Parisians of all ages, wearing patriotic red, white and blue, filled the streets singing “La Marseillaise.” German police made some arrests and fired shots into the air to disperse crowds, while the French police stood idly by: the tide was turning.
A month later, on Aug. 17, communist leader Henri Rol-Tanguy issued a proclamation calling on every able-bodied citizen to “knock out the Boches and grab their guns” in order to “liberate Paris, the cradle of France.” Barricades went up mostly where the poor and lower-middle classes lived, as “women and children formed chains to pass along the railings, sandbags and mattresses to stuff into the gaps.”
Charles de Gaulle (leader of Free French Forces and later president of France) understood perfectly the mythic power Paris exercised over the world’s imagination, declaring, “Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself …”
The 2nd Armoured Division, led by Leclerc, accompanied by an all-female ambulance unit, was “entirely equipped by the Americans” and charged with liberating Paris.
The first of its troops to enter the city were mostly Spanish republicans, refugees from the civil war. The surrender agreement issued by Leclerc called on German military commander Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz to “cease fire immediately, run up the white flag, lay down arms and hand over all supplies.”
The sight of Germans being led away, defeated and humiliated with some of them openly weeping, energized the masses who screamed their hatred for their oppressors. One woman “darted into a column and drove a hat pin into the eye of a German officer.”
Salinger entered the city from the south with the 12th Regiment, recalling elegant women who had “put on their best August dresses.” In the celebration that welcomed the troops, he believed that if he had “stood on the hood of the jeep and taken a leak, Paris would have said, ‘Ah the darling Americans! What a charming custom!’”
On Aug. 25, “Paris lived out the greatest day of its modern history,” the bells of the city ringing, citizens shouting exuberantly and singing the national anthem: the sounds of freedom and victory.
Capa described it all, full of wonder: “Never were there so many who were so happy so early in the morning.” During the parade the next afternoon, which began with the relighting of the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, Capa perched on the hood of a car, concentrating on the crowd rather than the notables, “filling his lens from the vast, pure reservoir of human happiness.”
Now, if you wander Paris streets and look carefully, you’ll see small marble plaques set into the walls with the inscription “Ici est tombé X … Mort pour la France,” marking the place where perhaps a soldier, a stretcher bearer, or a citizen had died for the country’s liberation.
As Bishop so affectingly observes, if you walk around a Paris neighbourhood these days, there’s “always a ghost at your shoulder” lighting the way.