Les libérations de la France

The liberation of France in 1944 was a major military objective in the Allies' first major offensive. But in order to reduce Germany to the point of surrender, the Allied strategy...

The French colonial empire (the French Overseas Territories) seems to have been forgotten at the start of WWII, before playing an important role from June 1940 to the end of 1944:...

The invasion of June 6, 1944 was followed in Normandy by wave upon wave of destruction and fierce resistance on the part of the Germans: the liberation was long in coming as battle...

"Meet at the beach," announces the BBC. On June 6, 1944, the Allied paratroopers found a region ravaged by the Occupation. All summer, the 150,000 German soldiers present in Britta...

In 1944 the Southwest underwent its own separate liberation; there were several partisan movements and many organizations - the FTP, the Spanish republicans, the "armée secrète", t...

"We knew why we were fighting. This fight was first for Freedom. Let's never lose sight of that." On the basis of testimonies, and focusing on the history of a department at war, D...

In the Vercors, beginning in 1942, a growing number of people who were opposed to the German hard labor brigades took refuge in the forest, and those known as the "maquisards" quic...

During the Second World War, few regions suffered as much as the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, which was looted and pressured by the occupying regime more than any other. Nowhere else did ha...

"Nancy has a stiff neck": on August 14, 1944, at 7.15 pm, a coded message broadcast by the BBC in London warns the French Resistance of the imminent landing in Provence. This opera...

In June 1940, the Wehrmacht entered Paris, which for four years became the Germans' military and political center for the occupation of France. Beginning with the Normandy invasion...

Alsace is the last of the liberated French territories. De facto annexed by the Third Reich in June 1940, it was placed under Nazi administration and brutally Germanized. From Augu...

Joyful parades, spontaneous dancing parties, etc., after four years of fighting, suffering, deprivation, death, and despite its cities and its economy in ruins, France of 1944 is c...