Paris after the Liberation, 1944-1949 - Hardcover

Beevor, Antony; Cooper, Artemis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385471955 ISBN 13: 9780385471954

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1994

Synopsis

A vibrant anecdotal chronicle of the social, political, and cultural rebirth that Paris experienced after World War II uses archives, diaries, journals and interviews to document the beginnings of Existentialism, the Theater of the Absurd, fashion's New Look, and more.

About this title

Review:

A rich and intriguing story which the authors disentangle with great skill (Piers Paul Read Sunday Telegraph)

Skilfully balances historical narrative with social analysis, and tempering the appalling with the absurd (Jan Morris Independent)

Outstanding. Enormously enjoyable to read - exciting, lively, funny, and admirably tolerant and objective in its opinions. It is hard to see how it could have been better done (Philip Ziegler Daily Telegraph)

Held me gripped by every page and I was impatient at any interruption. The details of this book are spellbinding, often frightening and sometimes funny (Alec Guinness Daily Mail)

This book, like the city it discusses, oscillates satisfyingly between blunt history and roistering gossip (Frank Delaney Sunday Express)

To understand France today you should read this book about France yesterday . . . a wonderfully enjoyable picture. It is compulsive reading (Mark Bonham-Carter Evening Standard)

There is hardly any aspect of French life during that period which the authors do not explore, always with compelling liveliness and omniverous zeal. . . I shall return gratefully to it again and again (Alistair Horne The European)

A perceptive portrait of Paris in its heyday (J. G. Ballard The Times)

A beautifully written book about a vast tapestry of military, political and social upheaval. Remarkably well-researched, wise, balanced, very funny at times . . . I was a witness to events in Paris in the first desperate, glorious, mad weeks, and this is just how it was (Dirk Bogarde)

A dashing, multi-dimensional story. This book covers all aspects of life - diplomacy, strategy, rationing, politics and politicking (from Churchill, Pétain's and de Gaulle's point of view), the international theatricals and the tourist invasion, blitzkrieg and Ritzkrieg - to create a lovely tapestry, threaded with facts and figures (Olivier Todd Sunday Times)

From the Back Cover:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0385471955
• ISBN 13: 9780385471954
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 479