Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

morning, 30 May, President de Gaulle reappeared at the Élysée Palace after landing by helicopter at Issy-les-Moulineaux. A communiqué was issued. After a meeting of the Council of Ministers, the President would address the nation by radio. Comparisons were immediately made with his radio appeal from London on 18 June 1940. Gaullist supporters, tipped off that their leader was about to fight back, began to gather in central Paris, armed with tricolours and transistors. The General’s speech at half past four was brief. He was not resigning. He had decided to dissolve the National Assembly and to appoint prefects to take on the post-Liberation authority of Commissaires de la République. But the underlying message of his text was a challenge to the left. If they wanted civil war instead of constitutional government, they would have it. This was de Gaulle’s last dramatic intervention. The next year, following an unfavourable result in a referendum, he resigned as President of the Republic and disappeared to Ireland. The succession was assured with Georges Pompidou as his replacement. The Fifth Republic, with the
dirigiste
Constitution which de Gaulle had wanted in 1945, maintained its stability well beyond the death of its creator eighteen months later.
    On that afternoon of his radio broadcast, 30 May 1968, the General’s supporters gathered exultantly on the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées. ‘De Gaulle is not alone!’ they cried. Fromcrowds nearly a million strong, there emerged a variety of other slogans. The favourite was the chant ‘
Le communisme ne passera pas!
’ No doubt there were many present who had been supporters of Marshal Pétain; but the vast majority now regarded themselves as average Frenchmen, exasperated with political strikes and chaos in the Latin Quarter. The Sartrian road to freedomwas at an end. Radical ideas had failed to overcome the bourgeoisie.

The Gaulish leaders in league against Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), led by Vercingetorix (d. 46 BC), from a protective sleeve for school books, late nineteenth century.

    Lutetia or the second plan of Paris in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, French School, 1722.

    Sainte Geneviève gardant ses moutons
, French School, sixteenth century.

    The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris.

    Epitaph of François Villon (1431–?) from
Le Grant Testament Villon et le petit, son codicille. Le jargon et ses balades
, 1489.

    ‘Weighing of Souls’, French fifteenth-century stone carving.

    Engraving of the
danse macabre
, artist unknown, 1493.

    Portrait of Catherine de Médicis (1519–89), French School, sixteenth century.

    Engraving of ‘La Cour des Miracles’.

    Engraving of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Paris, 1572, by de Soligny.

    Garden and Cirque at the Palais-Royal, Paris, by Hoffbauer, 1794

    Engraving of the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents by Hoffbauer, nineteenth century.

    Scène grivoise
by François Boucher (1703–70).

    ‘The Sans-Culotte’, French School, nineteenth century.

    ‘A Meeting of Artists, Mudscrapers and Rag Merchants’, caricature of a popular café at the Palais-Royal in Paris, French School,
c.
1800.

    ‘Gargantua’, caricature of Louis-Philippe I by Honoré Daumier, 1831.

    Aerial view of Paris,
c.
1871, showing public buildings, many of which were destroyed during the Paris Commune.

    ‘The Occupation of Paris, 1814 – English Visitors in the Palais-Royal’, English School, nineteenth century.

    The bombardment of Paris, German School,
c.
1870.

    The siege of Paris, bombardment by the Prussians, 1870–71, French School, nineteenth century.

    The construction of the avenue de l’Opéra, Paris, 1st and 2nd
arrondissements
, 1878.

    Unidentified dead insurgents of the Paris Commune, 1871.

    The construction of the avenue de l’Opéra, Paris, 1st and 2nd
arrondissements
, 1878.

    Illustration by Jacques Tardi from
Voyage au bout de la nuit
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932.

    André Breton,
c.
1930.

    ‘Une maison close monacale, rue Monsieur-le-Prince (couple s’embrassant)’, silver print by Halász Gyula Brassaï,
c.
1931.

    Scene from the film
Hôtel du Nord
, directed by Marcel Carné, with Arletty and Louis Jouvet, 1938.

    Liberation fighters in Paris, 1944.

    French women punished for collaborating, 1944.

    A policeman throws tear gas to disperse crowds during student riots in Paris, 17 June 1968.

    Paris suburbs, 28 October 2005.

References
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