On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation after four years. Eighty years later, the city marked the anniversary with a series of commemorations across five days. I attended the ceremony at Porte d’Orleans and Place Denfert-Rochereau.

The military presence was significant. Soldiers in formal dress, flags, a live performance of La Marseillaise, and aircraft trailing the tricolor across the sky. The atmosphere was solemn in the way that only ceremonies connected to living memory can be. There were people in the crowd who remembered 1944, or whose parents had lived through it.

One historical detail emerged during the ceremony that I had not known before. The first troops to enter Paris on August 25, 1944, were not French soldiers born in France. They were the Nueve, a company composed almost entirely of Spanish Republican exiles who had fled Franco’s dictatorship and continued fighting for democracy under the French flag. Their flag, the flag of the Second Spanish Republic, was visible among the standards at the ceremony. That detail says something important about what the Liberation actually was.

The frustration of the day was logistical. Security perimeters meant that most of the public was separated from the ceremony by significant distance. The actual proceedings were visible only on large screens positioned around the perimeter. For an event with this historical weight, watching it on a screen ten meters away from the barriers felt like a missed opportunity.

The crowd was predominantly elderly. The question of how this history gets transmitted to younger generations was impossible to avoid. A ceremony this important, attended mostly by people who already know it, raises a real concern about the future of this kind of public memory.

Go to this event if it coincides with your visit. Do not expect to be close to the ceremony. Do expect to feel something, because even from a distance, the weight of what happened in this city in 1944 is present in the air.