Paris (AFP)

Paris outraged Paris broken Paris martyred but Paris released! "75 years to the day after the famous speech of General de Gaulle, the capital commemorates Sunday again the end of four years of Nazi occupation.

The City of Paris has planned several symbolic and military ceremonies to celebrate this "decisive and exciting moment," according to Mayor Anne Hidalgo, that was the expulsion in August 1944 German troops, 1,500 days after hoisting the swastika at the top of Eiffel Tower.

It is precisely at the foot of the famous monument that the festivities will start at noon on Sunday with a tribute to the six firefighters of Paris who had climbed the stairs of the iron lady under fire to replace the Nazi banner with the flag tricolor.

Among them, Captain Lucien Sarniguet, who had "never digested the humiliation" to see the swastika floating in the sky Paris, as evidenced by his daughter, Jeanne-Marie Badoche, 92, with AFP.

After the firefighters, it will be the turn of the 2nd Armored Division to be in the spotlight, from 15:00 to the Porte d'Orleans, south of the capital, where General Leclerc and his men entered in Paris on August 25, 1944. The ceremony will be followed by a "parade of freedom" to the Place Denfert-Rochereau.

Witness of the time, Réné Gonin, 24 years old in August 1944, did not forget the arrival of the tanks in Paris. "The people were crazy, there are girls who did not go home at night (...) there was an extraordinary atmosphere," he says, moved.

- New museum -

Sunday, the town hall invites Parisians and tourists to participate in the parade "dressed according to fashion dress of the time" and encourages residents and traders of the neighborhood to decorate balconies and terraces with tricolor colors.

It is also place Denfert-Rochereau, above the headquarters of Colonel Rol-Tanguy, chief of the French Forces Interior (FFI) of Ile-de-France, that will officially open Sunday a new museum dedicated to the four years of Nazi occupation and the week of insurrection that ended it.

"Before, you had the grandfather who could tell, there are fewer and fewer witnesses, so the museum finds its place, takes over from the story," says the director of the museum, Sylvie Zaidman.

Better developed, the new Museum of Liberation should be able to contribute more to the work of memory than the one opened from 1994 to 2018 on the slab of the Montparnasse station and which never exceeded 14,000 annual visitors.

Other literary and musical events will punctuate the day of Sunday which will end with the projection in the lounges of the City Hall of "The Traversée de Paris", the film of Claude Autant-Lara with Jean Gabin, Bourvil and Louis de Funes.

Paris paid homage Saturday night to foreign fighters, including the Spanish "Nueve", the first to have entered the occupied capital, August 24, 1944.

The capital rose in August 1944, without waiting for the arrival of the Allies, after four years of German occupation. On the 25th, at the end of a week of strikes, barricades and bloody street fighting, Paris welcomed de Gaulle who, having arrived from Rambouillet (Yvelines), could finally proclaim "Paris libéré".

For the general's speech, 18-year-old Charles Pegulu de Rovin was in the front row: "It was great, that personage, that facility he had ... I said to myself: now, in France, we have a true boss, a boss ", recalls today the nonagenarian.

In total, the "Battle of Paris" will have cost the lives of nearly 1,000 FFI, 130 soldiers of the 2nd DB and about 600 civilians, as well as more than 3,000 German soldiers.

© 2019 AFP