Various subgroups of the police leave flowers on the monument. This one is from the gay and lesbian police association:
This is a separate monument dedicated to fonctionnaires who participated in the resistance.
There are a lot of reminders like this spread around Paris. The pain, suffering, and humiliation of WW2 is, as you would expect, very important to French culture. And the glory of the resistance is in a special category - maybe along with De Gaulle. I'm sure that's at least partially because the resistance and the Free French Army offset some of the shame of surrender. The WW2 French experience is a very solemn topic. I find myself being more aware of it than before - even with the many, many books I read about it over the years - but I talk about it less and less. From a distance in the U.S., it was easier to joke about the whole French / German thing and invasions and so forth. But now that seems like the equivalent of joking about 9/11.
There is a school of thought that says the French lost WW2 at the WW1 Battle of Verdun 30 years earlier. Everything you've heard about the hellishness of WW1 happened at Verdun. And French leadership was seen as callously throwing away thousands upon thousands of young French lives on pointless counterattacks and defense of valueless terrain. Leaders were accused of breaking the army through their flawed strategy. Its spirit (not to mention numbers and resources) still hadn't recovered when the next war rolled around. And Pétain refused to reenact anything like Verdun again in the 40's so he lead the capitulation.
Yeah - I know that was a pretty random post.
7 comments:
Possibly random, but it stirs my heart. You've infused some history with "the rest of the story", and I, for one, am grateful.
It's still hard to grasp how recently it happened.
Yes; just about as long as I've been alive. I can remember the newsreels at the movie theatres, as though it were yesterday. I'm sure they were edited, big time, but I remember faces and uniforms of different nations, grime and even weak smiles......and I remember seeing the liberation of Paris, and cheering in the theatre.
Not to be pokey, but did you see any monuments from the French thanking the U.S. and allies for pushing the Germans back out?
Yes, that narrative is memorialized out there too. I might even do a post about it some day.
History! Cool! I have heard the gratitude for the allies is more apparent and more displayed up around Normandy. But, it would make sense for there to be some "official" expression, at least, in the capital, one would think.
Must have been an exceptionally difficult time for them -- both in real day-to-day terms, as well as culturally.
And it all could have been avoided.
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