"Is Paris burning?" The shrill voice is Adolf Hitler's. He smashes his fist of the table. "Jodi!" he screams to his chief of staff. "I demand to know! Yes or no? Is Paris burning now?"
At that moment, noon on August 25, 1944, advance elements of General Leclerc's Free French, supported by American infantry, were streaming across the bridges of the Seine. Their arrival was the climax of an extraordinary and fateful interplay of circumstances that saved the city, its population and its priceless treasures from Hitler's vengeful sentence of destruction and death.
Few days in history have witnessed an emotional outpouring as overwhelming as that which accompanied the liberation of Paris. Yet few men then realized, or even now comprehend, the miracle that had occurred: how narrowly all Paris had escaped being reduced to rubble and ashes.
The whole story of that miracle is told for the first time in Is Paris Burning? It encompasses the explosion of events, large and small, that involved Prussian generals and schoolboys of the Resistance, General de Gaulle impatiently forcing the hand of his relectant American allies while he himself was desperately maneuvering to gain control of the French underground, and the ordinary people of Paris rising to throw off the Nazi occupation as an enraged Hitler vowed to leave the city "nothing byt a field of ruins."
At that moment, noon on August 25, 1944, advance elements of General Leclerc's Free French, supported by American infantry, were streaming across the bridges of the Seine. Their arrival was the climax of an extraordinary and fateful interplay of circumstances that saved the city, its population and its priceless treasures from Hitler's vengeful sentence of destruction and death.
Few days in history have witnessed an emotional outpouring as overwhelming as that which accompanied the liberation of Paris. Yet few men then realized, or even now comprehend, the miracle that had occurred: how narrowly all Paris had escaped being reduced to rubble and ashes.
The whole story of that miracle is told for the first time in Is Paris Burning? It encompasses the explosion of events, large and small, that involved Prussian generals and schoolboys of the Resistance, General de Gaulle impatiently forcing the hand of his relectant American allies while he himself was desperately maneuvering to gain control of the French underground, and the ordinary people of Paris rising to throw off the Nazi occupation as an enraged Hitler vowed to leave the city "nothing byt a field of ruins."
