Paris Occupation walking tours?

I am interested in this as well. I did a WWII focused walk in London last Fall and it was excellent. I had seen the Paris Walks tour and it looks good. On a RS Paris tour our walk thru the Marais was with a Paris Walks guide and she was excellent.

Viator is a 3rd party booker so they don't actually run the tours so I wonder who they use. The Paris Tour company also looks kind of like a tour re-seller as there is not a lot of info on the actual tour...where to meet, where it goes etc. Others who are more familiar with Paris will likely know if they do their own walks or not.

I hope you get some responses from people who have taken some of these because I want to know too, lol!

Tara,

Your question is interesting in that other than the heroic French Resistance, I have not read much about the French in WW2. Intrigued by your query, I found this Washington Post article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-paris-during-nazi-occupation/2014/08/29/fce9e112-222c-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html

"A history of Paris during Nazi occupation" By Jonathan Yardley August 29, 2014

Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the
Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and
ambiguous than has generally been understood. We tend to think of
those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison
with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But just as
Keith Lowe made plain in his magisterial “Savage Continent” (2012)
that, in the years following Germany’s surrender in 1945, France was a
place not of peace but of widespread hatred and violence, so Ronald C.
Rosbottom leaves no doubt, in “When Paris Went Dark,” that the Nazi
occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis
were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own
humiliation....

Thank you, Edgar. I plan to read that book before we go. You may be interested in some fiction and non-fiction also of the period that I have enjoyed:

Helene Berr, Journal (diary of a young, French, Jewish woman who lived in Paris during the occupation then was sent to a concentration camp)
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (about Gertrude Stein and Alice Tolkas during the occupation)
Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation, 1940-1944
Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key (novel based on the round-up and deportation of Jews in Paris)

Best,
Tara

Also anything by Alan Furst. And I just read a pretty good historical novel, "The Invisible Bridge" by Julie Orringer, set in prewar Paris and wartime Budapest. A little too long and romantic for me but well written and researched.

I have had good experiences with Paris Walks, including their "Resistance" walk, and I don't know of anything likely to be better. You might want to visit the Shoah Memorial in the Marais. Also keep an eye out for the many plaques in various parts of the city (most notably the Marais) commemorating occupation-related events. And the two museums above Gare Montparnasse -- Jean Moulin and Gen. Leclerc -- have very interesting exhibits if your French is up to reading, or at least getting a sense of, the labels.

Paris Walks is a quality company with excellent guides. If I were going to choose one of these, that's who I'd go with, no question.

If you haven't already seen it, here's a link to a thread from a couple of weeks ago that may be of interest to you...

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/paris-then-now

We did a Paris Walks of Paris during WWII (can't remember the exact name) and unfortunately had a terrible guide. Don't remember her name, but she was American, blonde, in her 50's. Several of us left the tour three-fourths of the way through it was so bad. That was 5 yrs ago so this is not current info... but if she's still there I would avoid her. The owners, I've been told, are excellent.

Tara, another book you might be interested in is "When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944" by Donald Rosbottom. Well-written and full of information.

The “liberation” of Paris was part guerrilla operation, part victory parade, rather than a huge battle. A major concern was establishing de Gaulle as the boss. So a lot of the places that saw action look today just like all the other streets and plazas, with only the occasional plaque to distinguish them. The Paris Walks tour I took a couple of years ago was conducted by an amiable Franco-American student who knew where to point out bullet holes. But I was more interested in how the population reacted, which is harder to show. The tour can be worthwhile for those unfamiliar with the background but is less than stunning.
Another book that discusses how the French were caught in limbo during the German occupation is The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. It looks deeply into the complexities of getting by day-to-day without aiding the occupation. That enemy was eager to preserve Paris as a jewel of culture kept clearly subservient to Berlin. Since some of the intellectuals the book postmortems will not be familiar to non-French (or non-intellectual) readers, the reading can be a trudge but its analysis provokes deep thinking. Author: Frederic Spotts.

IMO Southam makes some big picture points, for those not familiar with the "WW2 liberation of Paris." I'd read that post twice. WW2 in northern France happened mostly at the D-Day Beaches and in Normandy and in the area in the northeast between France, Germany and Belgium.