A City Too Precious to Burn

“Is Paris burning?” barked Hitler down the telephone to General Dietrich von Choltitz in August 1944, as the Allies pressed into France and the Führer awaited news of destruction. The city of light, he decreed, was to become a city of ashes. Yet when the smoke cleared, the bridges stood, Notre Dame still lifted its spire and the boulevards rang with liberation.

The Liberation of Paris 81 years ago to this week (on August 25) was a turning point not only militarily but symbolically. It was the moment when France reclaimed its soul. Two decades later, director René Clément turned that chapter of history into Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?), released in 1966, a film that sought to match the grandeur of the event with an equally monumental canvas.

Clément’s epic belonged to a cinematic tradition born out of the early 1960s, when war movies ceased to be intimate tales of a few soldiers and instead became ensemble spectacles. Darryl F. Zanuck had set the template with ‘The Longest Day’ (1962), a lavish re-enactment of the Normandy landings.

That film boasted an army of stars including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery appearing in brisk cameos. Its massive success bred imitation with the decade yielded a string of ‘all-star’ war epics like the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ (1965) that lumbered with glaring inaccuracies and the ‘Battle of Britain’ (1969) which unfurled a sky full of Spitfires and Messerschmitts.

But Clément’s film, based on Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s 1965 bestseller, was the most ambitious. In their propulsive narrative, Collins and Lapierre traced the underground resistance, the French communists and Gaullists competing for control, the arrival of General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division, and the delicate diplomacy of Allied generals reluctant to waste men for symbolic glory.

The book read like a thriller; Clément filmed it as one. The director marshalled an extraordinary cast of French cinematic greats like Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Yves Montand. Orson Welles, in one of his many mercenary European turns, portrayed the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, whose negotiations with von Choltitz arguably saved the city while Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford lent Hollywood gravitas.

The film’s appeal lay not in character development but in the mosaic, the sense that history was enacted by dozens of individuals across different strata. What makes ‘Is Paris Burning?’ different from the other war spectacles was that it revelled in ambiguity.

The resistance, fractured along ideological lines, appeared almost as dangerous to itself as to the Germans. Von Choltitz, played with weary humanity by Gert Fröbe (later famous as Goldfinger), was no mere cardboard villain but a man torn between duty and conscience. Nordling’s suave diplomacy supplied the crucial moral counterpoint. And Paris itself, shot in stark black and white despite the Technicolor fashion of the era, emerged as the true protagonist. By refusing colour, Clément emphasised the historical immediacy and newsreel verisimilitude. The Eiffel Tower, the boulevards and bridges became stages in a drama of survival, powered on by a glorious score by the great Maurice Jarre, by then internationally famous for his collaborations with David Lean, having composed the iconic scores for ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962) and ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1965).

Commercially, though, the film was less triumphant than its predecessors. Audiences, already saturated with war epics, found it ponderous. Americans, in particular, struggled to identify with a story centred more on French pride and problems than Allied heroics.

Critics carped at the longueurs. Yet the film, when viewed today, retains a sharpness precisely because it was less about spectacle than about a city’s fragile reprieve. The very existence of such films reflects the 1960s mood. Two decades after the war, memories remained vivid as survivors still led governments. Cinema became a form of collective commemoration, dramatizing events on a scale no history textbook could manage.

The Liberation of Paris remains one of those episodes where the symbolic outweighed the strategic. Militarily, the Germans were retreating anyway.

Yet Paris mattered: to de Gaulle, who saw it as the fulcrum of his restored authority; to Eisenhower, who feared being bogged down in urban fighting; to Hitler, who wished for one last monument to his nihilism.

On this anniversary of the city’s liberation, the film deserves fresh appraisal. In an age of computer-generated spectacle, its black-and-white clarity and documentary sobriety feel bracing.

Clément’s epic remains the most thoughtful of the war spectacles that Hollywood and Europe produced in the 1960s.