Liberation of paris

Beautifully restored color photos from England and France made before and after D-Day feel somehow familiar and utterly, vividly new.

BU 1. General Charles de Gaulle walking through the streets of Paris following the city's liberation 24 August 1944.

blueblackdream: Lee Miller, Paris 1944

General Charles DeGaulle, on the day of the Liberation of Paris, August 25th, 1944

Mobilisé en 1939, Doisneau retrouve à son retour un Paris occupé où il va user de mille expédients pour subvenir à ces besoins. La presse étant quasi inexistante, il réalise quelques publicités, assure une série de portraits de scientifiques à la demande de Maximilien Vox. Son activité est également souterraine puisqu’il fabrique, tout au long de ces sombres années, de faux papiers pour la Résistance. Il réussit néanmoins à illustrer quelques aspects de la vie quotidienne : rationnement…

Seventeen-year-old Simone Segouin the French partisan known by her nom de guerre Nicole Minet with her German submachine gun MP40. Throughout the war she was an active resistance member and killed an unknown (but presumably high) number of Germans and captured 25 POWs during the fall of Chartres. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944 she was promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Croix de guerre.

Allied troops in front of the Notre-Dame de Paris, 1944.

U.S. Army soldiers make an amphibious landing on the banks of Germany’s Rhine River. Navy sailors take a break from combat for a dip in the Pacific Ocean. A young marine cleans sand out of his shoe. These World War II–era images are part of a small collection of photographs on display in the basement of National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Tucked away among the 11.5 million photographic items housed in the National Geographic archive, the images were among those recently…

Charles de Gaulle in the victory march on the Champs-Élysées, August 1944.

French General Charles de Gaulle returned in 1944 to a free Paris, which had been liberated from four years of German occupation during the second world war