Post-war Paris

Paris emerged from the Second World War physically less damaged than many European capitals but deeply marked by occupation, collaboration, resistance and wartime deprivation. Liberation in 1944 was followed by shortages, housing pressures and political argument over how France should rebuild and how wartime behaviour should be remembered.

During the 1950s the capital became a centre of renewed cultural and commercial life while the Fourth Republic struggled with decolonisation and political instability. Consumer culture, youth independence and new ideas about women’s lives developed alongside older social expectations, creating a city poised between wartime memory and the transformations of the 1960s.

Elizabeth Buchan’s Bonjour, Sophie brings its young heroine to Paris in 1959, where her attempt to build an independent life is also tied to discoveries about her French family’s wartime past.