Amid the sunshine and wild celebrations of Friday 25 August 1944, the day the Germans surrendered control of Paris, Charles de Gaulle declared the city to have been “liberated by itself”, with “the help and assistance of the whole of France”. The truth was not quite so noble. De Gaulle sought to embody “the whole of France”, but it had been a fractured nation, subject to regular violent upheavals, ever since 1789. Its army had crumbled before Hitler in 1940, and the reconstituted French force that triumphantly entered Paris in 1944 comprised one armoured division entirely equipped by, and under...