The liberation of Paris was the most romantic event of World War II. It was not necessarily the most dramatic or the most important. The D-Day invasion and the atomic bombing of Japan were surely more dramatic, while the defeat of France in 1940 and the cross-Channel evacuation from Dunkirk were certainly more important developments from a strategic standpoint. But for sheer romance, joy, delight, tears of happiness and emotional dizziness, the liberation of Paris surpassed all the other momentous events of the war. It was a moment of supreme elation.
The City of Light had been home to the American expatriates of the 1920s and '30s–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and others. George Gershwin's musical production An American in Paris and Josephine Baker's extravagant exploits on the stage made the city a romantic dream to many Americans.
To the French, Maurice Chevalier's Paris had long been the most beautiful place on earth, where love flourished and couples necked in the metro and kissed along the Seine River. Painters made Paris the center of the art world. The accordion was the typical musical instrument of the bal musette, a slow dance in which men wore berets and held dead cigarette butts in the corners of their mouths. And the vistas! The Champs Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Place des Vosges. For sheer beauty, Paris was unrivaled.
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