Although it looked a lot like a people's revolt against Nazi tyranny when the once-exiled Gen. Charles de Gaulle strode down the Champs-Elysees to Notre-Dame Cathedral on Aug. 26, 1944, scholars have long observed that it would have amounted to little without help from the Allies.
France was as divided then as it is today, and some Parisians were happy to go along with the new Nazi-backed regime. After the war, de Gaulle tried to paint a picture of a unified France under the yoke of Nazi occupation, the people fighting a tyranny imposed from without.
That image persisted, but thanks to the historian Robert O. Paxton's pioneering scholarship and Marcel Ophuls's documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity, we now know how greatly exaggerated this story was.
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