Jean Edward Smith, the political scientist and biographer, was renowned for writing tomes about such august Americans as Ulysses S. Grant and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In contrast, The Liberation of Paris, published by an 86-year-old Smith just before he died in September 2019, chronicles the freeing of the French capital in World War II in a crisp 242 pages.
The city’s liberation on August 25, 1944, following Nazi occupation is well-plowed ground in books ranging from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s popular narrative history Is Paris Burning? (1965) to Michael Neiberg’s The Blood of Free Men (2012) and Matthew Cobb’s Eleven Days in August (2013). Among such works, Smith’s stands out for its tight focus on the roles of three military generals: Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, and Dietrich von Choltitz.
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