Amid the sunshine and wild celebrations of Friday 25 August 1944, the day the Germans surrendered control of Paris, Charles de Gaulle declared the city to have been “liberated by itself”, with “the help and assistance of the whole of France”. The truth was not quite so noble. De Gaulle sought to embody “the whole of France”, but it had been a fractured nation, subject to regular violent upheavals, ever since 1789. Its army had crumbled before Hitler in 1940, and the reconstituted French force that triumphantly entered Paris in 1944 comprised one armoured division entirely equipped by, and under the operational command of, the US.

If any one person saved Paris, it was Dwight D Eisenhower, allied commander, who acceded to de Gaulle’s lobbying – Ike being one of the few people who found the prickly General endearing – and agreed to march on the city. The allies’ original intention after the D-day landings had been to bypass Paris, considering it irrelevant to the push towards Germany. Paris was not irrelevant to the world, though. It transcended the unhappy nation to which it belonged, embodying the fantasies, sexual and artistic, of myriad “wannabe Hemingways and Picassos”. This beacon of freedom, the City of Light, had fallen to the powers of darkness, and there was a literal dark cloud over Paris on 10 June 1940, as the Germans approached and the French government departed. The cause was smog from burning fuel dumps, but “the stillness of the night, the sweet scent of chestnut blossom mingled with petrol only increased the sense of impending doom”.

Paris ’44 tells the story of the occupation and the liberation, but it does not read like military history. There’s no danger of being lost in logistics. The book resembles some epic thriller, with vividly evoked characters all somewhere on the spectrum between collaboration and resistance, shame and glory. At the former end we have Marshal Pétain, octogenarian head of the puppet Vichy regime, whose conservative – to put it kindly – values were symbolised by that sedate spa town in which it was based. We learn of Pétain’s daily routines: “Every Sunday morning at 11.15 he went to mass at the church of St Louis, not so much to pray as to set an example.” His henchman, Pierre Laval, wore a white silk tie for luck; it made him resemble “a Chicago mobster, as well as highlighting the nicotine stains on his teeth”.

Also on the roll of dishonour is the military governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, described by his captors as “a cinema-type German officer”, by which they meant he was fat, be-monocled and loud. But he wasn’t the most monstrous Nazi. In the summer of 1944, he knew the game was up, and Bishop suggests that he deserves some credit for his relatively restrained response to the Resistance uprising. After the war, he tried to claim the credit for saving Paris from Hitler’s wrath. He had supposedly disregarded an order, sent by telegram from the boss, to incinerate the city (“Is Paris burning?”), but that was probably just another liberation myth.

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Paris did to some extent “liberate itself”, in that the Resistance fighters, emerging from the shadows in 1943, began the job the allies felt compelled to finish. They were extraordinarily brave, usually young and, this being Paris, glamorous. The devoted Gaullist, and tennis champion, Jacques Chaban-Delmas would later be played on film by close lookalike Alain Delon. He retained 30 rooms, all equipped with means of quick exit (service staircases, skylights, etc); his rule on the Métro was “to get into the carriage at the very last minute and dart out again just as the doors slid shut”. And we follow the stirring adventures of Madeleine Riffaud, whose beauty would be captured after the war in a sketch by Picasso, and who joined the Resistance after having her bum kicked by a German officer at Amiens railway station.

Another recurring character is Hemingway, who, as a sort of war tourist-cum-journalist, followed the allies to Paris, liberating much booze on the way. He kept bumping into the “sleek” young GI, Jerry (or JD) Salinger, who advanced with typewriter close at hand and Holden Caulfield evolving in his mind. The two got on well but, as Bishop notes, one idea of masculinity was giving way to another.

That Bishop can break off from war for some literary reflections is testament to his relaxed confidence as a writer, and Paris ’44 is a wonderful book: droll, moving, with a cinematic eye and not a boring line in it.

The Night in Venice by AJ Martin is published on 11 July by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

• Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop is published by Penguin/Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.