Today, the spot where this happened is marked with a small plaque bearing the name of Georges Loiseleur, who "died for France". A 19 year old, Rene Dova, who was killed in the same incident is also remembered.
Across the city there are about 500 of these memorials dating from the week of fighting exactly 70 years ago, when Parisians won back their lost honour and threw off the Nazi yoke.
The earliest ones were put up spontaneously by families or comrades. Later, a law of 1946 set out strict rules about proof of merit, and about appropriate language.
Thus, while the first plaques use emotional phrases like "lachement assassine par les Boches" (victim of a cowardly murder by the Hun), the later formula "Mort pour la France" reflects an official appropriation of the act of memory.
Each memorial evokes a personal story from the liberation of Paris. But time is passing, and the memory of what actually happened at each of these 500 spots is fading.
Adam Clark on 24 Apr 14"Next time you tell a story to someone, don't be upset if they don't believe you, because what you may not know, is that occasionally you can't even believe your own memories! Yes, that's correct, even your own memories can deceive you. The concept of false memories is well supported in scientific research. People generally think of their memories as something like an accurate recording that documents and stores everything that happens with perfect accuracy. In reality, human memory is very prone to inaccuracies."
