Cheered by nearly two million Parisians, de Gaulle walked the full length of the Champs-Élysées to Notre-Dame, projecting the image of a unified, self-liberated France even as sniper fire briefly interrupted the ceremony. The march cemented his political authority and symbolized the end of German occupation in the French capital.
Paris had only just shaken off four years of German occupation when Charles de Gaulle, head of the Free French forces, arrived to claim the moment for a France that saw itself as never truly defeated. Rather than ride in a car, he chose to walk, bare-headed, down the entire two-kilometer length of the Champs-Élysées, flanked by resistance leaders and generals, while an ocean of Parisians — men, women, children hanging from balconies and lampposts — screamed his name and wept.
The scene was almost undone by chaos: as the procession reached Notre-Dame cathedral for a service of thanksgiving, gunfire erupted, possibly from collaborationist snipers or nervous resistance fighters, sending the crowd scattering and diving for cover. De Gaulle, famously unflappable, continued walking upright into the cathedral as bullets cracked around him, an act of theatrical courage that only enhanced his legend.
The march was as much political theater as celebration. De Gaulle needed to establish, ahead of Allied administrators who might have imposed military government, that France had liberated itself and that he alone spoke for it. The gambit worked: within weeks his provisional government held effective control of the country, and the image of that long walk down the avenue became one of the twentieth century's most enduring symbols of national rebirth.