Liberation Of Paris and Postwar

Liberation of Paris and Postwar

In June 1944, Allied forces, including the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle, invaded Normandy. Two months later, they broke through German lines and advanced rapidly across France.

An uprising broke out in Paris on August 19, led by the Resistance and the city's police. As running battles were fought in the streets of Paris, Hitler ordered the city's commandant, von Choltitz, to destroy the capital. Von Choltitz, however, stalled.

When General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division arrived on the outskirts of the city, von Choltitz ordered his forces to retreat, leaving the city open and largely intact with only stragglers from the garrison and dead-end resisters from the Vichy regime left to offer resistance. De Gaulle and Leclerc entered the city to a jubilant reception, establishing a temporary military government that lasted until 1946.

Modern Paris

After the restoration of civilian rule and the proclamation of the Fourth Republic in 1946, Paris made a rapid recovery from the war, aided by its lack of much physical damage.

Like the rest of France, however, it was caught up in the bloody but unsuccessful wars against nationalist guerrillas in French Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s.

During the Algerian war of independence, independentists detonated bombs in Paris. Tensions were high and led to the largest abuse in the city's postwar history when the Paris police leaked a false news story about policemen having been murdered by independentists. This led to a massacre of an estimated 300 pro-independence demonstrators on August 17, 1961.

Remarkably, the event, though known in some circles, was largely ignored until the 1990s.

Algeria gained its independence in 1962 and over 700,000 French colonists and pro-French Algerians migrated to the mother country, many to Paris.

In response, the government built huge new residential suburbs which rapidly gained a reputation for banal architecture, deprivation, racial tension and crime.

The combination of social unrest and a somewhat authoritarian, though democratic, government under de Gaulle, proved explosive and in early May 1968, an uprising broke out, led by Parisian students and factory workers.

The events fizzled out amidst violence between police and demonstrators, but had a significant long-term effect, eventually forcing the retirement of de Gaulle and the overdue social liberalisation of the country.

Many of the leaders of the May 1968 demonstrations went on to play significant roles in local and national politics.

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