The decision not to fight in Paris ect. in WW2 is kind of an opposite example.
Not fighting to preserve cultural works.
Yeah well, that one lands rather squarely in Philippe Pétain personally. He wanted to end the fighting since he was aghast over the dustruction wrought on the French towns touched by the war. (Which in retrospect was very minor compared to the kind of destruction later meted out.)
The PM Reynaud wanted to fight over Paris, so did de Gaulle, but Pétain managed to sway the rest of the cabinet as to the futility of continued resistance, and made Reynaud resign.
Where does a situation like that go from being about "politics" and become one of "culture"?
And the decision not to fight over Paris was a military one as well. "With what?" was a legitimate question to the suggestion Paris be fought over by the French in 1940. The positioning of the remaining French army in relation to the Germans bearing down on the capital pretty much meant there was no one to defend Paris anyway.
There rarely are "pure" cultural, military or political reasons anyway. They tend to come all rolled together.
As for the preservation of Paris there might be a better case for the "cultural angle" in 1944, when the Germans had the explosives planted and Paris all wired to be blown to Kingdom Come, but never threw the switch.
Apparently the demolition expert von Choltitz had been A-OK with levelling Warsaw without compunction, but he got cold feet at the prospect of doing the same to Paris. The clincher would seem to have been a phonecall to his superior General Hans Speydel (one of two generals directly subordinate to Rommel), where Choltitz was asking Speydel to give the go-ahead and order him to blow up Paris, and Speydel, who had lived and studied there, looked at his 18th c. prints of Paris street life over his desk, and withheld the order. (Eventually in the late 1960's Hans Speydel became Commader in Chief of all NATO forces in Europe.)
