- Title: Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory
- Author: Patrick Bishop
- Genre: History
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
- Pages: 400
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There’s something about this moment in history that makes reading about the middle-third of the last century an exercise in both processing the past and navigating the present. The decline of democracy. The rise of extremism. The geopolitical realignment, the effects of which are still being determined. The questions lurking, perhaps just out of conscious reach, including, “What would I do, if …”
In Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory, historian and journalist Patrick Bishop writes a biography of a city experiencing occupation and, later, liberation. Covering the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 to the aftermath of its allied liberation in the summer of 1944, Bishop captures the intricacies, events, characters and broader context of a remarkable moment in time that could have led to the destruction of one of the world’s historically significant cities.
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Calling Bishop’s effort a biography does more to respect the work than deeming it a history alone. In many ways, the book is a series of biographies, sketches of the organizations and characters who made up the events that led to and shaped the occupation and how we’ve come to understand it. Woven throughout the timeline are details of the people – partisans, belligerents, politicians, day-to-day citizens – bound up in the unfolding of those four brutal years.
We come across figures that loom large in history, for better or worse, taking up space in our collective consciousness still: Ernest Hemingway, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Martha Gellhorn, J.D. Salinger, Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle and Adolf Hitler. That they were all mixed up in the Paris of the 1940s is a remarkable detail embedded in an extraordinary history.
Bishop captures the significance of these figures but, at the same time, weaves in the stories of names long forgotten by most outside a small cadre of knowledge keepers. Perhaps few beyond those who know their national histories could cite the names Philippe Leclerc or Dietrich von Choltitz, for instance. But they played important roles in shaping events during the Second World War and, therefore, shaping our lives today.
The biography and history of the Nazi occupation of Paris is a fascinating and important subject in its own right: the struggles to merely exist, the German cruelty and occasional kindness, the ups and downs and backs and forths of the war, the mixed loyalties, the shame of collaboration, the relief of liberation and the cathartic and brutal revenge Parisians would exact upon being freed.
Throughout the book, Bishop highlights concerns at the time as to whether Paris itself would survive the war and, if so, in what shape. While Hitler had initially promised to preserve the city as the treasure it was, near the end of the war he ordered German occupiers to make a final stand in the City of Light and blow it up should the Allies approach it.
While the book is even in its thoroughness, Bishop’s study excels in its analysis of the manoeuvring between anti-Nazi French factions during and after the occupation. Gaullists and Communists may have co-operated to fight the German occupiers, but they soon had an eye on the postoccupation order, and the power struggle between them anticipated the divide between factions that would mark the second half of the century. This storyline deserves a book of its own.
Beyond the historical focuses, a contemporary concern is embedded in Bishop’s work. The occupation produced collaborators – from Marshal Philippe Petain, the French hero of the First World War, down to ordinary Parisians – who worked and even cohabitated with the Nazis, as well as resisters who chose to fight a guerrilla war inside the city rather than capitulate to them. Paris ’44 is equally a study, an implicit moral examination, of who chose which side, why and how, during a time of great difficulty.
To his credit, Bishop spends little time moralizing. Rather, he mostly tells stories in splendid detail and leaves you to decide for yourself how you’ll judge the protagonists and antagonists. But it’s impossible to avoid wondering what you would have done in such a situation, whether you found yourself a Parisian, a German, an American or whatever else during a defining moment in global history that asked, indeed required, that millions take a side and many take a stand.
Contemplating our present realities, it’s equal parts uncomfortable and necessary to ask ourselves what we will do should things go all the way off the rails. They might, after all. While Bishop characterizes the liberation of Paris as “momentous history” but also “a performance” in which every side played its part, the “actorish awareness” of those who knew they were amid history is one we can appreciate.
History was watching the occupation and liberation of Paris. It is watching us today. And while we are not in any conflict remotely similar to the deadliest war in recorded history, we are nonetheless in a time of choosing.