I wrote a lengthy explanation of the methodology behind my research process for Taking Paris but after giving it a long thought I ended up hitting “delete” and starting over. This is a book that could not have been written before the digital age. Thanks to COVID, there was no travel, no libraries, no archives, no museums, no battlefields to walk—map in hand, imagining the feints and parries as men fought and died. I am sometimes not sure if I am a writer who travels or a traveler who writes, but removing the actual road trip from the creative journey completely changed what it means to research a work of history.
Everything was done online. Everything. I had no choice. Digitized newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London literally took me back in time, and online databases such as (and I’m just picking one of the many priceless sources of information at random) George Washington University’s Churchill appointment calendars made it possible to see the handwriting, style of paper, and intensity of the prime minister’s day. YouTube showed me detailed videos of long-ago battlefields in Africa and Europe, the sights and sounds of Paris being liberated, and a marvelous video about life inside a Char B1.
Google Earth allowed me to see images of the places United Airlines could not fly me. Countless other Google searches told me about plants, artifacts, church bells, and the thousands of other details that go into writing history. When one cannot go to Paris to hear the bells of Notre-Dame, listening to the deep peal of the bourdon is as simple as an online search. Try it. Completely enchanting. I’d sometimes write about Paris with the sounds of the bells of Notre-Dame ringing through my office. Puts you right there.
As a journalist, I spent a decade covering the Tour de France long ago, so many of my recollections about the sights and smells of various towns and cities came from notebooks filled with observations from those years. One particular morning in Paris during those years, I left my room early for a run through the streets of the city. But while the streets were empty, the sidewalks were filled with thousands of spectators waiting for the bike race. In a burst of inspiration, I went back to my hotel and retrieved my press pass. I had the privilege and thrill of flashing my press pass to the gendarme and climbing over the metal barricades holding back the fans, there to run alone up the empty cobbles to the Arc de Triomphe. It was spectacular. Needless to say, being able to travel on foot through a roadway normally teeming with cars gave me the unique perspective of running in the footsteps of the Armistice Day protesters, the Nazi occupiers, and Charles de Gaulle himself.
Finally, more than ever, I leaned on the scholarship of others: Julian Jackson’s De Gaulle and his other works about wartime Paris; Hanna Diamond, Jean Edward Smith, William Manchester, Sonia Purnell, and more than a hundred other authors whose books formed tall piles surrounding my desk like a defensive perimeter; an infinite list of Google books that provided a telltale fact or two, as well as the secondary and sometimes tertiary Google searches to verify that data. And if you are looking for the most in-depth work about the taking of Paris, please read Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Written in 1965, the authors had the enormous good fortune of interviewing the many participants in Paris on that historic day.
Finally, I hope you have enjoyed this journey. Let’s do it again soon.