Review: “Paris ’44” is a cinematic depiction of liberation | Things you can do

Patrick Bishop, acclaimed historian and author of bestselling books on the Royal Air Force during World War II (Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys), long-time foreign correspondent and former Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph, returns in time for the 80th anniversary with Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory, a thoroughly researched, gripping cinematic account of the liberation of Paris.

Bishop’s aim is to “attempt to tell the truth without denying the power and authenticity of the myth” – the eleven days in August 1944 that were full of drama, bloodshed and joy. In a story full of ambiguity, the idea of ​​Paris, the City of Light, shone “like a distant beacon through the gloom of war”. It was the place that war photographer Robert Capa called “the beautiful city where I first learned to eat, drink and love”.

Bishop’s captivating narrative unfolds from the perspective of artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Irène Némirovsky, Jerry Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, as well as French resistance fighters and military officers such as Generals Philippe Leclerc and Charles de Gaulle.

He provides historical context with deprivation and fear brought about by the Nazi occupation from June 1940, a time when locals’ faith in authority “collapsed like a dam and panic broke out.” Hundreds of thousands then left Paris, and many realized, as Némirovsky wrote in Suite Française, that they were leaving behind “only stone and wood – nothing living.” What mattered was survival.

Although Picasso chose to stay in Paris (despite being offered asylum in the United States), he later told his friend Françoise Gilot that this was not an “act of courage” on his part. It was simply “a form of inertia.”

To combat the cold caused by the lack of heating fuel, the famous novelist Colette advised others to spend most of the day in bed, as she did in her apartment at the Palais-Royal.

During the German occupation, Hemingway hid in Cuba and finished his novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, while his wife, the intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, reported on the war from the front.

By the spring of 1944, Parisians were hungrier than ever, and with the hope of an Allied invasion “came the fear that death might come faster than liberation.” Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud, in her early 20s, had transported weapons, distributed leaflets and delivered messages. But now her priority was to deliver plastic explosives that “looked like modeling clay and smelled of almonds.”

During the Allied advance on D-Day, June 6, Salinger was on a ship with his division heading to Omaha Beach. The soldiers were told to limit their equipment to 40 pounds, but most packed extra items. Some took packs of cigarettes, while Salinger “carried the manuscripts of six stories featuring the character who now loomed large in his mind: Holden Caulfield.”

Gellhorn talked her way onto a Red Cross hospital ship and was the only war correspondent to help evacuate the wounded from the beaches of Normandy.

On July 14, Bastille Day, some 150,000 Parisians of all ages, dressed in patriotic red, white and blue garb, streamed through the streets singing “La Marseillaise.” German police made a few arrests and fired shots into the air to disperse the crowds, while French police stood by and did nothing: the tide was turning.

A month later, on August 17, communist leader Henri Rol-Tanguy issued a proclamation calling on every able-bodied citizen to “beat down the Boches and take up their arms” to “liberate Paris, the cradle of France.” Barricades were erected primarily where the poor and lower middle classes lived, while “women and children formed chains to pass sandbags and mattresses along the railings and stuff them into the gaps.”

Charles de Gaulle (leader of the Free French Forces and later President of France) was fully aware of the mythical power that Paris exerted on the world’s imagination, declaring: “Indignant Paris! Destroyed Paris! Tormented Paris! But liberated Paris! Liberated by its own strength…”

The 2nd Armored Division under Leclerc and an all-female ambulance unit was “fully equipped by the Americans” and tasked with liberating Paris.

The first troops to enter the city were mostly Spanish Republicans, refugees from the civil war. The surrender agreement issued by Leclerc required the German military commander, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to “immediately cease fire, raise the white flag, lay down arms and hand over all supplies.”

The sight of the Germans being led away, defeated and humiliated, some of them openly weeping, mobilized the masses and shouted their hatred of their oppressors. One woman “rushed into a column and stabbed a German officer in the eye with a hatpin.”

Salinger entered the city from the south with the 12th Regiment and remembered elegant women “dressed in their best August dresses.” He believed that at the ceremony welcoming the troops, if Paris had “stood on the hood of the jeep and peed, he would have said, ‘Ah, the sweet Americans! What a charming custom!'”

On August 25, “Paris experienced the greatest day in its modern history.” The city’s bells rang, citizens cheered wildly and sang the national anthem: the sounds of freedom and victory.

Capa described it all with wonder: “Never have so many been so happy so early in the morning.” During the parade the next afternoon, which began with the re-lighting of the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, Capa sat on the hood of a car and focused on the crowd rather than the celebrities. “He filled his lens with the vast, pure reservoir of human happiness.”

If you stroll through the streets of Paris today and look closely, you will see small marble plaques carved into the walls with the inscription “Ici est tombé X … Mort pour la France”. They mark the place where a soldier, a stretcher bearer or a citizen may have died for the liberation of the country.

As Bishop poignantly notes, when you walk through a Parisian neighborhood today, there is “always a ghost on your shoulder lighting the way.”