For four long years during World War II, France’s capital city festered under the thumb of Nazi occupation—until Aug. 19, 1944, when Paris, it seemed, could take no more. With the German forces on their heels throughout the region, an uprising broke out in the city. Less than a week later, on this day in 1944, Allied forces triumphantly made their way into the City of Light. For many around the world, it was the liberation of that great cultural center that marked the beginning of the end of the horrific war.
“Paris is the city of all free mankind,” TIME opined shortly after, “and its liberation last week was one of the great events of all time.”
The report from TIME’s war correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker captured the charged spirit of the moment:
I have seen the faces of young people in love and the faces of old people at peace with their God. I have never seen in any face such joy as radiated from the faces of the people of Paris this morning. This is no day for restraint, and I could not write with restraint if I wanted to. Your correspondent and your photographer Bob Capa drove into Paris with eyes that would not stay dry, and we were no more ashamed of it than were the people who wept as they embraced us.
We had spent the night at General Leclerc’s command post, six miles from Paris on the Orleans-Paris road. Here the last German resistance outside Paris was being slowly reduced, while inside the city the Germans and the F.F.I, fought a bitter battle that had already lasted six days. Late in the afternoon a French cub plane flew in 50 yards above the Cathedral of Notre Dame, on the He de la Cite where the F.F.I, had its headquarters, and dropped a message which said simply: “Tomorrow we come.”
Read more from 1944, here in the TIME Vault: Paris Is Free!
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