Bastille Day in 1945: Versailles, the city of the Sun King, swept up in republican jubilation
How they laughed! "Oh yes, that's right, we laughed all the time. I remember that wonderful day so well. Our little group would have fun over nothing at all. We felt so free, you know?" Their joy was understandable. That July 14 was the first since the Nazi surrender was signed on May 8, 1945; the war was finally over in Europe. Using every superlative, the press in 1945 referred to it as either "le 14-Juillet de la paix" (Bastille Day of peace), "le 14-Juillet de la victoire" (Bastille Day of victory), or, in a more patriotic tone, "le 14-Juillet de France" (Bastille Day of France).
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LeMonde
14-07-2025
- LeMonde
Bastille Day in 1945: Versailles, the city of the Sun King, swept up in republican jubilation
Madeleine Leguedey would never forget that wild farandole dance in front of the main gates of the Château de Versailles. The weather was beautiful that morning of Saturday, July 14, 1945. With her friends Yves, Bernard, Gilberte, Denise and Alain, the teenager spun and zigzagged until she was out of breath. Picking up the pace, the boys led the girls, whose flared dresses twirled with even more abandon. How they laughed! "Oh yes, that's right, we laughed all the time. I remember that wonderful day so well. Our little group would have fun over nothing at all. We felt so free, you know?" Their joy was understandable. That July 14 was the first since the Nazi surrender was signed on May 8, 1945; the war was finally over in Europe. Using every superlative, the press in 1945 referred to it as either "le 14-Juillet de la paix" (Bastille Day of peace), "le 14-Juillet de la victoire" (Bastille Day of victory), or, in a more patriotic tone, "le 14-Juillet de France" (Bastille Day of France).
Euronews
06-06-2025
- Euronews
veterans gather in Normandy to mark 81st anniversary of D-Day landing
D-Day veterans gathered in Normandy on Friday to mark the 81st anniversary of the pivotal military landing in World War II. Along the coastline and near the D-Day landing beaches, tens of thousands of onlookers attended the commemorations, which included parachute jumps, flyovers, remembrance ceremonies, parades, and historical reenactments. Many were there to cheer the ever-dwindling number of surviving veterans in their late 90s and older. All remembered the thousands who died. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth commemorated the anniversary of the D-Day landings, in which US soldiers played a major role, with veterans at the American Cemetery overlooking the shore in the village of Colleville-sur-Mer. On 6 June 1944, the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France represented the largest-ever armada of ships, troops, planes and vehicles to breach Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's defences in western Europe. A total of 4,414 Allied troops were killed on D-Day itself. In the ensuing Battle of Normandy, 73,000 Allied forces were killed and 153,000 wounded. The battle — and especially Allied bombings of French villages and cities — killed around 20,000 French civilians between June and August 1944. The exact German casualties are unknown, but historians estimate between 4,000 and 9,000 men were killed, wounded or missing during the D-Day invasion alone. 'The heroism, honour and sacrifice of the Allied forces on D-Day will always resonate with the US Armed Forces and our Allies and partners across Europe,' said Lt Gen Jason T Hinds, deputy commander of US Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa. 'So let us remember those who flew and fell." "Let us honour those who survived and came home to build a better world. And let us ensure that their sacrifice was not in vain by meeting today's challenges with the same resolve, the same clarity of purpose, and the same commitment to freedom.' Nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed on D-Day. Of 160,000 troops landing in Normandy on D-Day, 73,000 were from the US and 83,000 from the UK and Canada. Forces from several other countries took part in the fighting, including French troops under General Charles de Gaulle. The Allies faced around 50,000 German forces. More than 2 million Allied soldiers, sailors, pilots, medics and other people from a dozen countries were involved in the overall Operation Overlord, the battle to wrest western France from Nazi control that started on D-Day. A jury in Malta found two men guilty on Friday of complicity in the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, after a six-week-long trial covering two homicides ended late on Thursday. Jamie Vella and Robert Agius were found guilty of supplying the bomb that killed her. Caruana Galizia was murdered on 16 October 2017 by a car bomb that was detonated while she was driving near her home. In her career, she had written extensively about suspected corruption in political and business circles in Malta, and her murder shocked Europe and triggered angry protests in the Mediterranean island country. Caruana Galizia's investigative reports had targeted people in then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's inner circle whom she accused of having offshore companies in tax havens disclosed in the Panama Papers leak. She also targeted the opposition and at the time of her death was facing more than 40 libel suits. The Caruana Galizia family said in a statement that Thursday's verdict brings them a step closer to justice. "Yet, eight years after Daphne's brutal assassination, the institutional failures that enabled her murder remain unaddressed and unreformed," the family added. Vella and Robert Agius, together with two other men – George Degiorgio and Adrian Agius – also faced charges related to the separate murder of a lawyer, Carmel Chircop, who was shot and killed in 2015. Vella, Degiorgio and Adrian Agius were found guilty of charges tied to the murder, while Robert Agius was found not guilty. The judge will decide on sentencing at a later date. George Degiorgio and his brother Alfred Degiorgio both pleaded guilty in 2022 to carrying out the murder of Caruana Galizia and were each sentenced to 40 years in prison. A third man, Vincent Muscat, pleaded guilty in 2021 for his role in the Caruana Galizia murder and was sentenced to 15 years. He testified in the recent jury trial after being granted a presidential pardon for his role in the Chircop murder on the condition that he tell the whole truth. Yorgen Fenech, a prominent Maltese businessman, is currently out of jail on bail awaiting trial on charges of alleged complicity in Caruana Galizia's murder.
LeMonde
04-06-2025
- LeMonde
Georges Didi-Huberman: 'Neither persecuted, nor refugees, nor prisoners, we are nonetheless the psychological hostages of the intolerable situation in Gaza'
Gaza or the intolerable. For months now, each day more than the last, seemingly. The situation is two, three, a thousand times intolerable. First, on a human level, of course, for what the civilian population has endured, crushed beneath the bombs of an army that, following the American model, believes it can "eradicate" (that is, uproot entirely) by indiscriminately destroying everything on the surface (houses, hospitals, women and children, journalists, ambulance workers, humanitarian personnel…). The situation is also politically intolerable, as the countless voices raised against it have proven desperately powerless, so long as American bombs continue to be delivered and used. [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu has long since stopped listening to the world around him – a deeply cynical and tactical deafness, but also suicidal at its core, apocalyptic, eliminating any possibility of a political solution to this conflict. All of this is well known, even if it must be repeated. Yet, there is a third aspect to this intolerable situation: a psychological one, I would say, particularly affecting Jews in the diaspora. Those who have never dreamed of empire, only of a civic life in whatever country they have chosen to live in. Those who do not place their Jewish existence in the crucible of a state. They do, it is true, carry the heavy burden of history, stacked in piles or half-arranged along the winding corridors of their memory. Henry Meige, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, in 1893 published a medical thesis on what he called the "wandering Jew syndrome": It often concerned destitute migrants who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and lost their minds after enduring such immense suffering. They could be recognized in the streets of Paris by the enormous bundles they carried on their backs, filled with pitiful, disparate, useless yet sentimental objects. Four decades later, after Hitler came to power, those who had not fallen victim to Nazi persecution became migrants again who endured miserable living conditions and the loss of rights, among them many great intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, who analyzed this condition with rigor in a now-famous essay, We Refugees (1943).
