President Emmanuel Macron came to the south of France on Thursday to honor a second landing, the less white and more forgotten one, in which over 350,000 Allied troops stormed ashore in Provence and went on to liberate towns including Marseille and Toulon, before moving northward.
The landing, a pivotal moment in World War II, involved a large number of African soldiers conscripted in French colonies. It came a little over two months after D-Day began the liberation of France, with Allied forces battling their way onto the shores of Normandy in June 1944.
The southern landing has, however, earned little of the renown or recognition accorded to the heroes of D-Day.
“The air of Aug. 15 animates us still and makes of us a people that is stubbornly free,” Mr. Macron said on the 80th anniversary of the landing on 18 beaches along the French Mediterranean coast. “A people who, that day, was also liberated by this African army. Let us forget nothing.”
Forgetfulness of this other landing has long marked postwar French history. Official disinterest, obfuscation, dismissiveness and stereotyping accompanied the story of France’s Black soldiers, only for that neglect to be progressively rectified, under pressure, over the past two decades.
Fighting alongside American, British and Canadian forces, the soldiers from Algeria, Cameroon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa, fighting in the French army of Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, ousted the Nazis from a wide swath of southern France, including Lyon.
