The Liberation March Down the Champs-Élysées

On August 26, 1944, Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Four years of Nazi occupation had shuttered the city's spirit. Windows were boarded. Streets had grown quiet under the weight of fear. But that afternoon, something shifted. Word spread through every arrondissement: the liberator is coming. Parisians flung open their shutters. They threw wide their doors. They poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands, weeping, singing La Marseillaise, straining to catch a glimpse of the man who represented their deliverance.…