When Allied troops fought their way into Paris on August 25, 1944,
they were greeted by the wildest scenes of joy Europe had ever
witnessed. The following day, over a million people thronged the
streets in a delirious atmosphere of freedom to watch General de
Gaulle's triumphant march from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame.
There was a black edge to the exuberance, though. Hatreds from the
Vichy era led to the settling of scores in a chaos of often wild
justice. The period that followed was full of contrast and
contradiction: Picasso, a multimillionaire, became the Communist
Party's star recruit; an infatuation with American popular culture
thrived amid virulent anti-Americanism; black marketeers grew rich
on the misery of the population; literary and social life revived
miraculously amid the poverty and dilapidation; Christian Dior
revolutionized fashion with the extravagant use of material, and
working-class women tore the clothes in outrage from one of his
models. Arthur Miller observed of Paris, emotionally scarred by the
Occupation, that "the moral, the literary, and the political were
the same". Paris was the focal point in the opening stages of the
Cold War, and in the new era of the atom bomb. Existentialists and
Communists arguing in cafes sensed that history had entered a
decisive phase. At a time when rumor was as powerful as fact, word
of plots and counterplots proliferated, and France came to the
brink of civil war. Paris After the Liberation is the first work to
do justice to this extraordinary period. It is a landmark
achievement, a brilliant fusion of politics, literary life,
society, theater, fashion, and art woven into a rich and intimate
account brimming withrevelation. Acclaimed historians Antony Beevor
and Artemis Cooper (the granddaughter of England's first postwar
ambassador to France) have drawn on an astonishing array of
sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and photographs; interviews
with many of the period's leading figures; and important material
from archives in Paris, the United States, London, and Moscow,
whose newly opened state papers have provided a wealth of
completely fresh information, much of it startling. Paris After the
Liberation brings to life a pivotal moment of world history,
suffusing it with wit, anecdote, and brio. It is a brilliant and
thoroughly enjoyable work of synthesis, a fitting celebration of
the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris.
General
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