Paris Breaks Free

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 271, 1 September 1944, Page 5

Paris Breaks Free

HE news from France has been so good ever since the landing in Normandy that the liberation of Paris was more surprising than exciting. It was surprising because it came a few days sooner than most people expected; but it was expected a little later, and this robbed it of some of its power to move us. Besides, Paris has seen so much and suffered so much, even in our own day, that it would be a little indecent to celebrate its release without some recollection of those things. It is no longer gay Paris but sad Paris, and we m not forget that its liberation Gneans first of all an inquest into the causes of its long humiliation. One of the cable messages received in New Zealand on the day of its liberation, but written and dispatched the day before, described

it as a "shabbier and tougher" city than the Paris of tradition, a city that the Allied soldiers would not find smiling, but tired, bitter, and sunk in recrimination. It could not be otherwise; and now that the Germans have fled, the problem of the Allied armies will be to restrain what one correspondent (quoting Burke) called "the old Parisian fury." That is not exactly the setting for a carnival of joyif victory in war could ever bring unshadowed delight; but the occasion justifies sober rejoicing. Paris is free of occupying troops. It is hungry, but will be fed. If thousands of its bravest citizens have gone before their time to its cemeteries, and tens of thousands to enemy concentration camps, the millions who remain will piece their lives together again and the great city itself recover the light it has so long shed on the world. For this, and for all the other things its liberation means — free minds, free newspapers, free choice of leaders, and free speech in the streets — New Zealand rejoices with the rest of the free world. But it rejoices soberly, remembering the price at which freedom has been bought.