This Cracked article seems to imply that the French deliberately went out of their way to use white soldiers to liberate Paris, even at the cost of using non-French citizens.
However the Wikipedia article on the Liberation of Paris doesn’t mention any of that, while Spanish soldiers under French command did liberate Paris first no mention of that being a deliberate decision or if they were the closest ones ready for battle. Also it only mentions that the US objected to black Senegalese soldiers being used in the victory parade, nothing about ALL non-white soldiers being deliberately singled out to not participate.
The liberation of Paris was to put it mildly, an organizational shitshow.
The original plan was for the city to be the ultimate objective of Allied armies.
As the Northern France campaign developed, that changed and Eisenhower decided to bypass the city instead of hammering his head against it and its garrison.
Then as the German collapse in France continued, Parisians rose up against their occupiers. De Gaulle begged Ike to change his mind, when the later refused, add Gaullists directed the French troops who were nearby to shift their focus away from the Allied advance and to Paris.
Doing so is complicated. The Free French Forces were an integrated part of the Allied Armies, not a separate grouping. As a result it was total mad house as they struggled to smuggle enough supplies and men to be able to launch an unauthorized attack.
In the event, Eisenhower came around and directed Paris to be taken.
I am guessing that rumor is a mixture of remembrance of both the pre liberation chaos and the Alies institutional racism.
DeGaulle was notoriously resistant to requests made by the Americans or British, even when it was Roosevelt or Churchill personally making the request. So the idea that he would meekly accept directions from some staff officers is way out of character. As far as Degaulle was concerned, he outranked everyone in SHAEF, including Eisenhower.
And it was a huge political and psychological issue for DeGaulle that Paris had to be liberated by French soldiers. I don’t see how he would have accepted the idea of allowing Spanish soldiers pretending to be French to have the honor.
It seems not improbable that some of the Spanish republicans who had joined various resistance groups in France were incorporated into the Free French army. But De Gaulle as a traditional professional soldier was more than a bit sniffy about non-professionals. I doubt if he was too keen on the left-wing partisan tradition, either: indeed I wonder if he and the other professional generals were so keen on French troops liberating Paris in order to make sure the Communists didn’t take charge, as in1870.
The first allied unit into Paris was the American 102nd Reconnaissance Squadron. I was in the unit many years later of course and was able to speak to some of the veterans. The account was cleared up for the history books but they got into a little bit of trouble for jumping the gun.