It is one of the glorious achievements of the azure capital that it owed its freedom only to its own strength, to its own children. Even though, for that, it paid the price in blood with 31 killed and 280 wounded. The occupier, on their side, lost 25 men and 105 were taken prisoner.
How many insurgents were in the streets? “700 to 800 engaged in firefights and about as many occupying companies and strategic sites: the Thiers post office, the Saint-Roch station, the TNL depot in Sainte-Agathe…,” estimates Jean-Louis Panicacci, a World War II historian.
The day before, on August 27, 1944, the Insurrectional Committee, meeting at 20 Boulevard de Cessole, decided to trigger the general uprising for the next day at six in the morning, even though they only had a little over a hundred men armed with grenades, 20 machine guns, 40 carbines, and four heavy machine guns.
Two days later, American troops entered Nice, where most of the municipal and state bodies were already reconstituted or in the process of being so.
Nice had liberated itself alone, without the help of the allied troops, and it can boast of being one of the few to have done so.
Less than a year later, on April 9, 1945, General de Gaulle, in a speech delivered at Place Masséna in front of a jubilant crowd, would say: “Nice, through the heroic sacrifice of its children, liberated itself from the occupier. Nice liberated, Nice proud, Nice glorious.”
