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 14 Sep 14"In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific. "Sensory perception," Constance Classen, the author of "The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch," says, "is a cultural as well as physical act." It's a controversial claim made famous by Marshall McLuhan's insistence that nonliterate societies were governed by spoken words and sound, while literate societies experienced words visually and so were dominated by sight. Few anthropologists would accept that straightforwardly today. But more and more are willing to argue that sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity."
