This is a transcript of a programme broadcast on Radio 4 on 15 August 2004. It must not be reproduced without permission

Part Two - France and Memory

Charles Dumont was barely into his twenties when he composed the song that would make his fortune and enter the French musical canon. I went to see him in the Paris apartment where he wrote it. He sat at the piano he has been playing for half a century and battered out its familiar rhythm. Its muscular base chords seemed to stir the air in the room.

"You know" he said, "She was standing right there where you are when I first played it to her. And from the beginning she took to it. We used to have a doorman downstairs and every time there was a visitor to the building he would complain about me - the noisy young man on the third floor always bashing his piano. But after the first public performance of this song, it became so well known in Paris that he would say to visitors - you know we have a young man on the third floor who writes songs for Edith Piaf".

Piaf's career had been in the doldrums and she'd all but given up. But when she performed "Je ne regrette rien" the roof came off the theatre. She winked at the young composer who was standing in the wings. "Je crois que ca marche" she told him on the way off the stage to resounding applause. "That seems to have done the trick."

But why did it do the trick? What was it that so enthralled Paris? Piaf is most identified with the Trauma of the 1940s, the swift defeat in May 1940, the compromise of surrender, the moral accommodation of Nazi-ism, the collaboration, the humiliation of four years of German occupation, the terrible betrayal of Vichy.

I see it as emblematic of the difference between the two countries that Britain revered the wholesome sweetness of Vera Lynn while France took to its troubled heart an emaciated, tortured diva whose tragedy - raw and visceral and inescapable - seemed to mirror that of a country so catastrophically betrayed.

And that defiant lyric - that devil-take-the hindmost repudiation of all regret - means the opposite of what the words say. It means, surely, especially in the voice that made it famous - "In fact there is so much to regret so bitterly that it is better to maintain a state of denial".

When I moved to Paris a year ago a friend here told me that to know France you must first understand two key dates: 1789, the year of the revolution; and 1940, the year of defeat and surrender. I would like to press the case for two dates that seem to me to be more revealing, one because it is almost invisible, and the other because it is so wrapped in myth that it, too, is almost impossible to see clearly. These are 1793, the year of the guillotine, and 1944, the year of the liberation.

1793 - the year of the terror. The year when the revolution that had sought to ennoble mankind by ending nobility, to liberate, to elevate was swept away in rivers of blood on the Place de la Concorde; when the revolution devoured its own children.

But my concern is with the second of these pivotal dates, because Paris is awash this month with 1944, with liberation nostalgia. On my way to work I walk pass grainy black and white posters in the city's public places. The iconic images are burned into the French collective memory. Three men with rifles, photographed from behind, and framed by a large open window, lean over a balcony, overlooking the familiar fa�ade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A crowd of civilians tear up the sticky hot tarmac of a Parisian boulevard to build a barricade. A column of sombre gaunt figures in German uniforms is escorted down a side street by armed guards of the French resistance, one of whom grins into the camera lens.

Paris Insurge, Paris libere: that is the name Paris has given to the official celebrations - Paris in revolt, Paris liberated. Incontestably Paris was in revolt. But liberated because it was in revolt, liberated by the uprising? This implausible causal link was drawn on the very day of the city's deliverance. General de Gaulle made straight for the city centre and there, at the Hotel de Ville, he made his first speech to the citizens of a free Paris. The moment is captured on film. De Gaulle stands tall among a packed crowd of euphoric Parisians and speaks easily, effortlessly, lyrically, and without notes. His voice is mesmerising, the sweep of his gaze compelling and engaging, and it is as though by his very presence, by his very words, he is bestowing liberation on a benighted people. It is a bewitching moment and even at the distance of sixty years, watching and hearing the tumble of his words on film, you feel their irresistible, almost spiritual force.

And this is what he said.

"Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrised! But Paris Liberated! Freed by herself, freed by her people with the support of the Armies of France, with the backing and assistance of the whole of France, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France".

This is the moment when General de Gaulle restored the pride of France, the moment he created the founding myth of the post war French republic. No, no regrets. We must have no more regrets. This is the moment to which you can trace so much of what would come to be known as Gaullism, the moment when selective memory would begin to play its indispensable role in the rebuilding of France.

The facts of the matter are there all the same and are not much in dispute. But in a sense the facts have always mattered less than the myth.

If there is a single day on which the Paris insurrection began in earnest it was August the fifteenth 1944, ten days before de Gaulle's triumphant appearance. By now the people of Paris could hear the guns of their allies approaching from the west. A little over two months earlier, on June the sixth, the greatest invasion force ever assembled had hit the beaches of Normandy. Four thousand, six hundred allied troops had been killed on that day alone, of whom two thousand five hundred were American and nineteen French.

Two decades later, as President of France, General de Gaulle would telephone his American counterpart, President Lyndon Johnson to tell him that France had decided to withdraw from NATO. "My intention" the General told him, "is that all American servicemen should leave French soil" to which Johnson is said to have replied "Does that include those buried in it?"

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. On August 15th 1944, the Germans, of whom there were still thousands in Paris, had already begun to distrust the French police, and were in the process of disarming them. The Resistance now called on the police to go on strike. Emboldened by the audible approach of the allies, they issued a chilling warning: that any officer who did not heed the strike call would be considered a traitor after the liberation. It worked. From this moment the Germans began to lose control of the city.

On August the 19th, at eight o'clock in the morning, the Resistance occupied the police headquarters - the Prefecture - on the north bank of the Seine and shortly after two o'clock the same day German forces attacked it.

But at eight o'clock that evening something extraordinary happened that was to divide the Resistance leaders against each other and which could have ruined everything for de Gaulle. Unhelpfully, the Germans agreed to a truce, a ceasefire. With the Swedish consul-general negotiating, this truce was then extended into the next day and from the Prefecture to include other key buildings that had been occupied by the Resistance.

That the Germans were now actively negotiating with the resistance was an unmistakable sign that they were getting ready for the end. They had already started to evacuate leading French collaborators, and abandon many city centre public buildings.

Some Resistance leaders argued passionately that the truce should be respected; that there was real potential now for the liberation to take place, eventually, with relatively little blood-shed.

But this peaceful solution was unacceptable to de Gaulle. The people of Paris could not be denied their uprising. They needed to participate in their own liberation. Without it, the founding myth of post war France, the saving narrative, would not have been possible.

What is striking is that de Gaulle understood from very early on the vital importance of this - of the need to wipe away the stain of France's humiliation.

The British historian Andrew Roberts, whom I ran into on the beaches of Normandy on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, told me that something like 95 per cent of the allied troops who died that day were English-speaking. Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans. The invasion of France was an Anglo-Saxon undertaking. In this context it was necessary for France to establish an alternative truth, and it is a measure of de Gaulle's extraordinary political vision that he understood that imperative and acted upon it.

The Paris uprising served no military purpose. Paris would still have been liberated if everybody had stayed at home - and in fact many did just that. Its purpose was not military but political: to establish the tenor of post war France and to hand France to de Gaulle. And while it celebrates the official narrative, France knows this, and has faced and dealt with the reality. What is striking is that sixty years on it is still important, still arguably imperative that France should celebrate the official narrative - the one from which the allies are largely missing. I don't think I understand France well enough to know why.

All over Paris you find little stone plaques on street corners where Parisians fell. Where the rue de Rivoli meets the Place de la Concorde, there are seven. Guy le Comte, aged twenty one, Madeleine Brinet, nurse, aged twenty three, and the others, mort pour la patrie, who died for the nation, August 25th 1944. Nine hundred Resistance fighters and 600 Parisian civilians died in the ten day uprising. I find these little plaques unspeakably poignant. Frequently, even now, they have fresh flowers attached to them. The street corner heroes of the liberation are still mourned, still missed.

The American writer Irwin Shaw, on assignment for the New Yorker, entered Paris that day. He found himself in the basement of one of the city's most famous theatres, the Comedie Francaise, which had been turned into an emergency operating room. There were two dead men wrapped in French flags.

"One of them" Shaw wrote, "was a very young blond boy who had been shot through the temple - a small, exact, round wound from which the blood still seeped out onto the stone floor under his thin, handsome, sunburned, healthy-looking face." He had a streak of rouge on his cheek, like all the soldiers that day in Paris, from the kisses of liberated Parisian women, and there was a dark wine stain on the front of his Khaki wool shirt.

August 25th. The last day. The anonymous blond boy in the flag who had been kissed by the women of Paris and had taken wine to celebrate had almost - but not quite - made it. Just because the Resistance was later mythologised, does not mean the Resistance was a myth.

Shaw went back to Paris a year later to report on the first anniversary.

He was saddened by the squabbling newspapers, by "listening to the vague, hurt rhetoric of the politicians along the left bank, by hearing the ungenerous mutterings against the Americans". "There should not be merely the formal celebrations of the anniversary but an attempt by all who were involved to relive the actions, the fears, the emotions of the ennobling day of triumph".

His colleague - the legendary American war correspondent Ernie Pyle who entered Paris with General Leclerc's column, wrote this. "We have won because of many things because of Russia, and the western desert, and the bombings and the blocking of the sea. It is the result of Tunisia, and Sicily, and Italy"

And while the battle for Germany was still raging he cautioned subsequent generations not to assume that there was something providential or pre-ordained about the allied victory. "We did not win" he wrote "because destiny created us better than other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud. I hope we can rejoice in victory - but humbly. The dead would not want us to gloat."

History does not record what the tired, humble witness made of de Gaulle's proud claim that a humiliated Paris had found redemption by the act of liberating itself.