Paris: occupation, persecution and liberation

Story period: 1940–1944

Location: Paris, France

German troops entered Paris on 14 June 1940. Over the next four years, occupation brought shortages, persecution and repression, while resistance developed within the city. An uprising and the arrival of French and American forces ended German control in August 1944.

Defeat brings occupation

June 1940

The French capital became a centre of German administration.

France’s military defeat brought German troops into Paris on 14 June. The armistice of 22 June divided France into an occupied north and an initially unoccupied south. Paris became the headquarters of German military administration, while the southern administration was based at Vichy.

Occupation and the Vichy regime were related but different parts of French wartime rule. Neither arrangement meant that the war itself had ended: Charles de Gaulle became a leading figure of French resistance outside occupied France.

Living in an occupied city

1940–1944

Scarcity affected everyday choices; persecution threatened lives.

Food, tobacco, coal and clothing were rationed from September 1940. Supplies grew scarcer and prices rose; a black market developed alongside official distribution. Obtaining daily necessities was part of the occupation’s history, not a pause between battles.

For Jews, occupation also meant exclusion, confiscation, arrests and deportation. This persecution was part of the Holocaust. It cannot be understood simply as the hardship shared by everyone living in a city with shortages.

Resistance was built through particular people and groups

1940–1944

Underground work included information, publishing and escape assistance.

A group associated with the Musée de l’Homme collected information and helped escaped French prisoners of war leave the country. It published the underground newspaper Résistance in December 1940. Leaders were arrested in 1941 and executed in February 1942.

This was one network, not the whole Paris resistance. Its work shows that resistance could mean publishing or helping people escape as well as armed fighting. Occupation and resistance explains the wider range of choices and coercion.

An uprising and arriving armies

August 1944

Liberation combined local action with the Allied advance.

An uprising began on 19 August as Allied forces advanced after the Normandy campaign. French and American troops entered the city on 25 August, and its German commander signed a surrender that day.

The end of German control was therefore more than the arrival of a single leader. Local resistance and advancing armies both belonged to the liberation. The city’s liberation was also one stage in a war that continued into 1945.

The marker provides city-level orientation in Paris. It does not identify a particular administrative building or the boundary of the occupation zone.

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