[1939 - 1945] World War II

The year is 1939. Across France, a strange and unsettling quiet has descended. War was declared against Germany in September, yet the winter that follows is not one of pitched battles, but of waiting. They call it the *Drôle de Guerre*—the Phoney War. On the border, French soldiers sit in the state-of-the-art concrete fortresses of the Maginot Line, a technological marvel designed to be an impenetrable shield. They play cards, write letters home, and stare across the Rhine, a nation holding its breath, confident in its defenses. In Paris, the cafés are still full, though the conversations are laced with a nervous energy. The fashions of the late 1930s still grace the boulevards, but beneath the stylish hats and elegant coats, there is a deep, collective anxiety. This fragile illusion of security was shattered on May 10, 1940. The German war machine did not throw itself against the Maginot Line. Instead, it did the unthinkable. Panzer tanks and mechanized infantry, a torrent of steel and fire, tore through the dense Ardennes forest in Belgium, a region the French high command had deemed impassable. The sound of the Blitzkrieg—the lightning war—was the terrifying scream of Stuka dive bombers, their sirens dubbed "Jericho's Trumpets," as they plunged from the sky. The French army, trained for the static trench warfare of the last great conflict, was utterly unprepared. The result was a rout. Millions of civilians, gripped by panic, fled south. Roads became clogged with a desperate tide of humanity—cars, farm carts, bicycles, and families on foot, carrying what little they could, strafed by German aircraft. In just six weeks, it was over. On June 14, the iron-grey uniforms of the Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Élysées. Nazi banners were unfurled from the Arc de Triomphe and draped over the grand façade of the Hôtel de Crillon. Paris, the City of Light, was now a city occupied. France was broken in two. The armistice, signed on June 22 in the very same railway carriage where Germany had surrendered in 1918, was a calculated humiliation. The northern and western parts of the country, including Paris, became the Occupied Zone, under direct German military rule. The southern part became the so-called "Free Zone," governed from the spa town of Vichy by an aging World War I hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain. He promised to shield France from the worst, a policy of collaboration in the name of national survival. Life under the jackboot changed everything. The clocks were moved forward an hour to Berlin time. A strict 9 p.m. curfew silenced the nights. German signs appeared on buildings, and the ever-present sight of soldiers became a grim normality. Daily life became a struggle for survival defined by rationing. A French citizen was entitled to perhaps 300 grams of bread a day, a sliver of meat a week, and almost no real coffee or sugar. This gave rise to the *marché noir*, the black market, a dangerous but essential world of whispered deals for a piece of butter or a few real cigarettes. Ingenuity became a necessity; so-called "national coffee" was brewed from roasted barley and chicory, and shoes were fashioned with wooden soles to save precious leather. Yet, in the depths of this despair, another France was stirring. On June 18, 1940, a little-known general named Charles de Gaulle, having escaped to London, broadcast a message on the BBC. His voice, crackling with static, reached a scattered few, but his words would ignite a fire. "Whatever happens," he declared, "the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished." This was the birth of *La Résistance*. It was not a single army, but a mosaic of clandestine groups. They were men and women from every walk of life: students, printers, railway workers, housewives, priests. Their work was perilous. They printed underground newspapers on hidden presses, guided downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees mountains, and relayed intelligence on German troop movements. Their primary weapon was sabotage—a cut telephone line, a loosened railway track, a subtle act of defiance that could cripple a German operation. To be caught meant torture by the Gestapo and almost certain execution. The internal divisions in France were starkly personified by the *Milice*, a brutal pro-Nazi paramilitary force created by the Vichy regime, who hunted their own countrymen with savage zeal. The Vichy government’s collaboration reached its nadir with its complicity in the Holocaust. In 1942, French police, on German orders, began rounding up Jewish families. During the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in July, over 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, were arrested in Paris and interned in a cycling stadium in horrific conditions before being shipped to Auschwitz. The yellow star, sewn onto the coats of Jewish citizens, became a symbol not only of Nazi persecution but of the Vichy regime’s betrayal. Hope returned with the tide on June 6, 1944. As Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, the French Resistance rose up across the country, disrupting German communications and reinforcements in a massive, coordinated effort. The fighting to liberate France was brutal. Cities like Caen and Le Havre were reduced to rubble. The climax came in August. As Allied armies approached Paris, its citizens rose up. Barricades made of overturned cars and torn-up cobblestones appeared in the streets, just as they had in the revolutions of centuries past. On August 25, the French 2nd Armored Division, commanded by General Leclerc, was given the honor of leading the charge into the capital. As their tanks rumbled towards Notre-Dame, the great bell of the cathedral, Emmanuel, began to ring, silent since 1940. Soon, every church bell in Paris joined in, a jubilant, deafening chorus of liberation. That afternoon, Charles de Gaulle strode down the Champs-Élysées, a target for snipers but a symbol of a France reborn. Liberation was joyous, but the aftermath was bitter. The country was scarred physically and psychologically. Over 550,000 French men and women, military and civilian, were dead. The joy of freedom was tainted by the rage of retribution. An ugly period of score-settling known as the *épuration sauvage*—the wild purge—saw thousands of accused collaborators executed without trial. Women accused of "horizontal collaboration" with German soldiers had their heads shaved in public squares, a brutal act of communal shaming. The war had not just been fought against an external enemy; it had been a French civil war, leaving wounds that would take generations to heal. The nation that emerged from the ashes of 1945 was free, but it was a France that had to rebuild not just its cities, but its very soul.