Paris: After the Liberation, 1944-1949. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper - Softcover

Antony Beevor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141032413 ISBN 13: 9780141032412

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2007

Synopsis

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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(the granddaughter of England's first postwar ambassador to France) have drawn on an astonishing array of sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and photographs; interviews with many of the period's leading figures; and important material from archives in Paris, the United States,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 the Author:

Anthony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, and his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War; Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award; Stalingrad; Berlin: The Downfall, 1945; D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which won the 2010 Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature; and Ardennes 1944. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris after the Liberation: 1944-1949. Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 was also a number-one bestseller and has been translated into twenty-four languages. A former chairman of the Society of Authors, he has received four honorary doctorates and a fellowship from King's College London and is a visiting professor at the University of Kent. He has received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, the Medlicott Medal for services to history, was made Commander of the Order of the Crown by the Belgian Government, and is and a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Beevor was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services in support of Armed Forces Professional Development.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0141032413
• ISBN 13: 9780141032412
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448