Firsthand accounts of the wartime Nazi occupation of France stress the messy, haphazard nature of the resistance. The groups that emerged in the chaotic circumstances following the French defeat of 1940 were fragmented and divided.
They were made up of hundreds of individuals, eventually numbering tens of thousands, brought together by a deep-seated refusal of their unbearable situation. In the words of Claude Bourdet, a member of the Combat group, these were the people who said no, “with all our being.”
Multiple small groups, shot through with various political standpoints, stepped into the breach left by the collapse of the nation’s institutions and parties, in defiance of Nazi occupation and the collaboration of the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Resistance involved refugees, political exiles, Jews, and veterans of struggles like the Spanish Civil War. It took many forms: gathering intelligence, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, or sheltering refugees and Allied service personnel and helping them across borders.
Bourdet wrote of his experience of resistance within France as something far removed from elitist or idealist readings of history. It was a movement that developed independently of Charles de Gaulle and the Free French forces based in London:
No doubt it was difficult, from London, to understand the unexpected nature of the problems faced by the Resistance. We ourselves discovered the nature and scale of the task bit by bit, empirically. To have imagined it, without living it every day, would have required a wide-ranging…
Auteur: Jim Wolfreys
