In Focus: Paris, Summer 1944
Roger Hudson explains a moment of panic on the streets of the newly liberated French capital.
It is August 26th, 1944 and Paris has just been liberated after four years of German occupation. General de Gaulle is at a thanksgiving service in Notre Dame, visible over the rooftops in the photograph. Suddenly shots have rung out, fired by either a fanatical German sniper, by a member of the Milice, the Vichy equivalent of the SS, or by a trigger-happy fifi – a member of the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur (FFI), as the Resistance is now called. The crowd on the Pont d’Arcole, crossing the Seine to the Ile de la Cité, has instinctively gone to ground. Within the cathedral a similar scene is enacted at the same time, when someone’s revolver goes off by mistake. One lone figure remains standing: it is, of course, de Gaulle.
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