French Resistance

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This article is about the World War II resistance movement. For the professional wrestling stable see La Résistance (Wrestling stable), and La Resistance for the South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut reference.

The French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. Resistance groups comprised small groups of armed men and women (referred to as the maquis when based in the countryside),^[2] publishers of underground newspapers, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers.^[3] The Resistance was pulled from all layers and groups of French society, from conservative Roman Catholics (including priests), to liberals, anarchists, and communists.

The French Resistance played a valuable role in facilitating the Allies' rapid advance through France following the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, by providing military intelligence on the Atlantic Wall and Wehrmacht deployments and coordinating acts of sabotage on power, transport and telecommunications networks.^[4] It was also politically and morally important for France both during the occupation and for decades after as it provided the country with an inspiring example that stood in marked contrast to the collaboration of the Vichy Regime.^[5]

After the landings in Normandy and Provence, resistance combatants were organized more formally into units known as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Estimated to have a strength of 100,000 in June 1944, the FFI grew rapidly, doubling by the following month and reaching 400,000 in October of that year.^[6] Although the amalgamation of the FFI was in some cases fraught with political difficulty, it was ultimately successful and allowed France to re-establish a reasonably large army of 1.2 million men by VE Day in May 1945.^[7]

[edit] Risks and Background to Involvement

Further information: German occupation of France during World War II

The German occupation authorities and the collaborationist Vichy Regime did not hesitate to employ brutal means in order to subdue the French population, and from the terms of the Second Armistice at Compiègne to the racial laws that they implemented later on, many of the Germans' unpopular acts provoked active and passive resistance.

One of the conditions of the Armistice was to pay the costs of the three-hundred-thousand strong German occupational army, which amounted to twenty million Reichsmarks per day. The artificial exchange rate of the German Reichsmark currency against the French franc was consequently established as one mark to twenty francs.^[8] This allowed German requisitions and purchases to be made into a form of organised plunder and resulted in endemic food shortages and malnutrition, particularly amongst children, the elderly, and the more vulnerable sections of French society such as the working urban class of the cities.^[9] Labour shortages also occurred due to hundreds of thousands of French workers being requisitioned and transferred to Germany for Obligatory Work Service (‘’Service du Travail Obligatoire or STO’’) and the large number of French prisoners of war being held in Germany. The occupation became increasingly unbearable with the numerous regulations, censorship and propaganda in place during the day, and the forbiddance to go out without authorization during the night. The amalgamation of all these factors, as well as a general jealousy or anger at the Germans for the theft of resources, culminated in increasing involvement in active resistance and an even greater amount of passive resistance. The risks were high for those involved in resistance and also for those surrounding them, since the Germans soon established practices of retaliation against innocents to punish anti-German activity.

• The German military authorities would execute guerrillas and suspected guerrillas.
• They would take hostages from among the general population to be executed in the event of resistance activity, executing several French people for a single German death. Sometimes, the hostages were taken from the same group as the presumed resistance fighters or saboteurs (e.g. railroad workers for railroad sabotage); a large number were among those accused by the Germans of being communists. Others, perhaps, were merely unlucky. The Gestapo and the SS tortured suspected guerrillas and sent them to concentration camps. Threats would also be made on the relatives of captured guerrillas; for instance, the Gestapo might threaten parents with torturing their children or sending off their daughters to be sex slaves in a military brothel.
• Occasionally, German troops would engage in massacres, such as the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane, where an entire village was razed and the population killed for resistance activities in the vicinity.^[10]

In addition to the German forces stationed in both Northern and Southern France by the end of the war, the Vichy government established paramilitary groups, primarily the Milice, in order to fight the Resistance. These groups collaborated closely with the Nazis and were the Vichy equivalent to the Gestapo security forces in Germany. Their actions were often very brutal and included the torture and executions of suspected resistance members. After the liberation of France many of the estimated 35,000 Miliciens were executed themselves for collaboration, and the ones who escaped arrest were forced to flee into central Germany, where they were incorporated into the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.^[11]

[edit] Sociology of the Resistance

The French resistance involved men and women of all ages, social classes, occupations, religions and political movements.

In the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, the famous resistance member Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie gave the retrospective image of the resistance having been made up of social outcasts on the fringes of society. Although many did adhere to this bohemian description, including d'Astier himself, studies show that the vast majority of resistance participants were married, employed and had families, and that, contrary to popular belief, only a minority lived in complete hiding from the authorities.

Inevitably, there is the question of how many active resistance participants there were. While stressing that the issue was sensitive and approximate, François Marcot, a Professor of History at the Sorbonne, proposed the total figure of those involved in active resistance as 200,000, with a further 300,000 people who had substantial involvement.^[12] Pierre Laborie, a Professor of History at the University of Toulouse II and Director of Studies at the EHESS, who specializes in the Vichy Regime, confirmed Marcot's figures of less than one percent.^[13] The Historian Robert Paxton estimated the number of active resistants to be "about 2% of the adult French population [or about 400,000]", going on to say that "there was no doubt, wider complicities, but even if one adds those willing to read underground newspapers, some two million persons, or around 10% of the adult population, seem to have been willing to take that risk."^[14] The Euroculture Intensive Program, which analysed the post-war relationship between France and Germany, contended that the resistance "had remained a small group of at most one percent of the society until the end of the war. Nevertheless, the myth of résistancialisme lasted untouched for a long time."^[15] The statistics reflect the fact that only a small minority of the French population participated in the resistance, in contrast with the post-war portrayal of a broadly resistant France.

[edit] Women in the Resistance

Although inequalities persisted under the Third Republic, the cultural changes that followed World War I allowed the gender gap in France to be gradually minimized, with women acceeding to political responsibilities by the 1930s.^[16] The defeat of France in 1940 and the appointment of the Vichy Regime's conservative leader Philippe Pétain undermined feminism, and France began a traditional restructuring of society based on the "femme au foyer" or "women at home" imperative. Despite opposing the collaborating southern zone, the French Resistance generally sympathised with its antifeminism and did not encourage the participation of women. Consequently women in the resistance were less numerous than men and represented about 15-20% of its members and 15% of political deportees to concentration camps.

The women involved were usually confined to a subordinate role. Lucie Aubrac, the iconic resistant and co-founder of Libération-Sud, was never assigned a specific role in the hierarchy of the movement. Hélène Viannay, the wife of the founder of Défense de la France, was never permitted to write an article for the underground newspaper, despite attending all of its editing meetings and possessing more university degrees than her husband.

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the only female leader of the resistance and was head of the Alliance network. The Organisation Civile et Militaire had a female wing headed by Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, who was also a member of the Comité Parisien de Libération and who would later become a député and then a senator. No women were leaders of the eight major resistance movements, and after the liberation of France the Provisional Government appointed no women as Ministers or Commissaires de la République.

[edit] Jews in the Resistance

The Vichy Regime had legal authority in both the northern zone of France, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, and the unoccupied southern "free zone", where the regime's administrative center of Vichy was located. It voluntarily and wilfully collaborated with Nazi Germany to a high degree and adopted a policy of persecution towards the Jews, enacting anti-semitic legislation as early as October 1940, with the Statute on Jews which legally redefined French Jews as a lower class and deprived them of citizenship.^[17] According to Pétain's chief of staff, "Germany was not at the origin of the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy. That legislation was spontaneous and autonomous."^[18] The laws led to confiscations of property, arrests and deportations to the concentration camps. As a result of the fate they were promised by Vichy and the Germans, Jews were over-represented at all levels of the French resistance. Studies show that although Jews in France only amounted to one percent of the French population, they comprised about 15-20% of resistance members, about the same as women.^[19][20]

The threat that hung over all Jews prompted some to come together and help those held in the French internment camps (Camp des Milles, Camp Vernet, Camp Gurs etc.) by forming escape lines, manufacturing false documents and pressing for their release. The first clandestine networks were formed in 1941 by Robert Gamzon and the Jewish youth movement Eclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF) and by Dr Joseph Weill and Georges Loinger's Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants.^[21] A military resistance was formed by Jacques Lazarus as the Jewish Army, which originally carried out operations with the maquis in Montagne Noire near Castres and later became known as the Organisation Juive de Combat (OJC). By 1944, it had grown large enough to participate in the liberations of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Grenoble and Nice.^[22]

[edit] The BCRA Networks

Further information: Operation Jedburgh

In July 1940, after the defeat of the French armies and the consequent surrender of France to Germany, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked the Free French government-in-exile of General de Gaulle to set up a secret service agency in the occupied territory, to counter the threat of Operation Sealion - the possible cross-channel invasion of Britain. Colonel André Dewavrin, who had previously worked for France's military intelligence service the Deuxième Bureau, took on the responsibility of creating such a network, with the main goal of informing London of German military operations on the Atlantic coast and the English Channel. The Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) was thus formed, and its actions were carried out by volunteers who were parachuted into France to create and unify local resistance networks.^[23]

Of the nearly 2000 volunteers who were active by the end of the war, one of the most effective and well-known was the agent Gilbert Renault, who was awarded the Ordre de la Libération and later the Légion d'honneur for his deeds.^[24][25] Known mainly under the pseudonym of Colonel Rémy, he returned to occupied France in August 1940, not long after its surrender. He went on to organize one of the most active and important resistance networks of the BCRA: the Notre-Dame Brotherhood. From 1941 onwards, multiple networks such as this allowed the BCRA to send weapons and armed parachutists into France to carry out missions on the Atlantic coast.

[edit] Networks and Movements

It is customary to distinguish the various organisations of the French Resistance between movements and networks. A resistance group or network was an organization created for a specific military purpose (intelligence, sabotage, helping prisoners of war escape and preventing shot-down pilots from falling into the hands of the Germans). In contrast, the main goal of a resistance movement was to educate and organize the population.

The majority of resistance movements in France were unified after Jean Moulin's formation of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) in May 1943. CNR was coordinated with the Free French Forces under the authority of the French Generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle and their body, the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN).

[edit] The Eight Major Resistance Movements

• Ceux de la Libération (CDLL) (Right-leaning)
• Ceux de la Résistance (CDLR) (Apolitical)
• Combat (Christian democratic)
• Franc-Tireur (Left-leaning)
• Front National (Communist)
• Libération-Nord (Left-leaning)
• Libération-Sud (Left-leaning)
• Organisation civile et militaire (OCM) (Right-leaning)

[edit] Unifications of the Major Movements

• L'Armée Secrète (AS) was formed in 1942 to combine the military organisations of the major resistance movements of the Southern Zone. The organisation had a particularly strong presence in the Vercors, Lyon and Massif central départements of the Rhône-Alpes region.
• Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) was formed in January 1943 as the civilian branch of the Armée Secrète.
• Le Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN) was formed in early 1944 to combine the MUR of the Southern Zone with several movements in the Northern Zone. Many of the volunteers involved in the MLN went on to found the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance.
• The Bataillons de la Jeunesse militant communist youth movement was incorporated into the Francs-tireurs partisans (FTP).

Ultimately, unification of the movements took place from late 1943 to early 1944 when the Armée Secrète, the Francs-tireurs and other organisations gave birth to the French Forces of the Interior (FFI).

[edit] Other Movements

• The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British and Free French military organisation directed from London. It parachuted more than four hundred agents into occupied France to establish escape routes, coordinate acts of sabotage and set up radio communications.
• Défense de la France was a resistance group in the Northern zone that was centred around the distribution of a clandestine newspaper, whose circulation had reached 450,000 by January 1944.
• The Groupe du musée de l'Homme was formed by Parisian academics and intellectuals in 1940 after General de Gaulle's Appeal of 18 June. It distributed clandestine newspapers, but with a more patriotic conservative position than others. It also transmitted political and military information to Britain and helped to hide escaped Allied Prisoners of Wars (POWs). Vichy agents eventually infiltrated the group and many members were arrested and later executed.
• The Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (NAP) was a resistance organisation launched in 1942 with the mission of infiltrating the administration of the Vichy regime. The main intelligence missions it carried out on behalf of the Free French were providing false papers and preparing for the seizure of power after the liberation of France.
• The Mouvement National des Prisonniers de Guerre et Déportés (MNPGD)

[edit] Networks

• Alliance
• The Brutus Network
• The Notre-Dame Brotherhood
• The Carte Organisation
• Comité d'Action Socialiste (CAS) - Founded in January 1941 by Daniel Mayer, member of the French Socialist Party.
• Comité Départemental de Libération (CDL or Departmental Liberation Committee)
• Comité de libération du cinéma français
• Interallié - An intelligence organization formed by Roman Sziarnowski and Mathilde Carre. It was crushed in 1942.
• Pat O'Leary Network

[edit] Activities

[edit] Sabotage

Sabotage is a form of resistance that was taken by groups who wanted to go further than the distribution of the clandestine press. Many laboratories were set up to produce explosives. In August 1941, Jules Dumont and the chemist France Bloch-Serazin assembled a small laboratory to provide explosives to communist resistance fighters. The lab also produced cyanide capsules to allow the fighters to evade torture if they were arrested. France Bloch was arrested in February 1942, tortured, and deported to Hamburg where he was decapitated with an axe in February 1943. In the southern occupation zone, Jacques Renouvin engaged in the same activities on behalf of groups of francs-tireurs.

Eventually, stealing dynamite from the Germans became preferred to handcrafting explosives. The British also parachuted tons of explosives to the Special Operations Executive for their essential sabotage missions. The railways were a favourite target of saboteurs, who soon understood that removing the bolts from the tracks was far more efficient than using explosives.

Train derailments were of disputable effectiveness as throughout the occupation the Germans managed to repair the tracks fairly quickly. When combined with Allied bombings after the invasions of Normandy and Provence, this form of sabotage became very effective at disrupting the retreating Germans. It also caused less collateral damage and civilian casualties than the bombings.

The sabotage of equipment leaving armaments factories was a more discreet form of resistance, but probably at least as effective as the bombings.

[edit] Intelligence

The intelligence networks were by far the most numerous and substantial of resistance activities. They collected information of military value, such as coastal fortifications of the Atlantic Wall or Wehrmacht deployments. There was often competition between the BCRA and the different British intelligence services to produce the most valuable information from their resistance networks in France.

The first agents of the Free French to arrive from Britain landed on the Brittany coast as early as July 1940. They were Lieutenant Mansion, Saint-Jacques, Corvisart and Colonel Rémy, and did not hesitate to get in touch with the thousands of anti-Germans in the Vichy military, such as Georges Loustaunau-Lacau and Georges Groussard.

The various resistance movements in France had to understand the value of intelligence networks in order to be recognised or receive subsidies from the BCRA or the British. The intelligence service of the Francs-Tireurs Partisans was called FANA and headed by Georges Beyer, the brother-in-law of Charles Tillon. Information from services such as it was often used as a bargaining chip to qualify for airdrops of weapons.

The transmission of information was first done by radio transmitter. Later, when air links by the Westland Lysander became more frequent, some information was also channeled through these courriers. According to Colonel Passy, the head of the BCRA, 1000 telegrams were transmitted daily by radio. Many radio operators, called pianistes, were located by German goniometers. As a result, according to the historian Jean-François Muracciole, "Throughout the war, it was communications which constituted the principal difficulty of intelligence networks. Not only were the operators few and inept, but their information was dangerous."^[27]

After the war, 266 intelligence networks directly related to the BCRA were officially recognised, comprising around 100,000 agents.^[28]

[edit] The Clandestine Press

The first action of many resistance movements was the publication and distribution of the clandestine press. This was not the case with all movements, as some refused civil action and preferred armed resistance, such as CDLR and CDLL.

Most clandestine newspapers were not consistent in their issues and were often just a single sheet, because the sale of all raw materials - paper, ink, stencils - was prohibited.

In the northern zone, Pantagruel, the newspaper of Franc-Tireur, had a circulation of 10,000 by June 1941, and was quickly replaced by Libération-Nord which reached a circulation of 50,000. By January 1944, Défense de la France was distributing 450,000 copies.

In the southern zone, François de Menthon's newspaper Liberté merged with Henri Frenay's Vérité to form Combat, in December 1941, publishing 58 issues by January 1944. During the same period, Pantagruel published 37 issues, Libération-Sud published 54 issues and Témoignage chrétien published 15.

[edit] Notable persons

Main article: List of people involved with the French Resistance

After the war, many Frenchmen falsely claimed to have had connections to the resistance. Some—like Maurice Papon—even manufactured a false resistance past for themselves.^[29]

[edit] The Role of the French Resistance in the Liberation

In determining the role of the French resistance during the German Occupation, or addressing its military importance alongside the Allied Forces during the liberation of France, it is difficult to give a direct answer. The two forms of resistance, active and passive, and the north-south occupational divide, allow for many different interpretations, but what can broadly be agreed on is a synopsis of the events which took place.

A significant example of the strength of the French resistance was reflected in September 1943, when the Corsican resistance, with the assistance of commandos from North Africa, began a movement which eventually liberated the island from the Kingdom of Italy's occupational forces.

On mainland France itself, from the onset of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the FFI and the communist FTP movements, theoretically unified under the commandment of General Kœnig, fought alongside the Allies to free the rest of France. In September of that year, with the continuation of unloading armies and supplies in Normandy, the Maquis and other sabotage groups intervened behind the lines, either by starting battles to fix German forces in one area, or by disorganizing communication networks used by the Germans. Several different plans were co-ordinated for sabotage; the green plan for railways, the purple plan for telephone lines and the blue plan for electric installations. The overall Paul plan was aimed at destroying German deposits of ammunition and fuel, to badger German reinforcements, and to generally prepare for the arrival of Allied troops.

The Liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, with the support of Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, was one of the most famous and glorious moments of the French Resistance. Although it is again difficult to determine their effectiveness, popular anti-German demonstrations, such as general strikes by the Paris Métro, the Gendarmerie and the Police, took place, and fighting between the opposing forces ensued. The liberation of most of the southwest, central France, and the southeast was finally completed with the progression of the 1st French Army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, which arrived in Provence in August 1944.

One source often referred to is General Eisenhower's comment in his 'Report on Operations of the Expeditionary Forces in Europe':

One infantry division (DI) represented about 10 000 men. The conversion of the resistance forces into infantry divisions had its limits, since the value of information the French resistance provided to the Allies could not be converted into military terms. In any analysis, Eisenhower was likely over-valuing the resistance's military importance with the intent of raising its morale.

[edit] Memories of the Resistance

Immediately following the liberation, France was swept by a wave of executions, public humiliations, assaults and detentions of suspected collaborators, known as the épuration sauvage. This period succeeded the German occupational administration but preceded the authority of the French Provisional Government, and therefore lacked a form of institutional justice. Mock trials took place in the thousands, often carried out by former resistance members, and as many as fifteen thousand summary executions are estimated to have taken place as a result.^[30] Over 20,000 women accused of having collaborated with the Germans had their heads shaved and became known as "les tondues"- "the shorn".^[31]

In coming to terms with the events of the occupation, several different attitudes have emerged in France. According to the historian Henry Rousso,

In contrast to the post-war collective memory of "résistancialisme", that tended to propose a very much resistant France, the extreme right, who had previously supported the Vichy Government of Pétain, became skeptical of the resistance's existence, using expressions such as the "mythe de la Résistance" (the myth of the resistance).

Treating the resistance and the Vichy regime in a historical method did not prohibit the development and maintainment of the myths. The legendary myth was born in reality but had to give significance to an experiment considered to be revealing. It was in this category that it became necessary to classify all kinds of commemorative ceremonies, and to construct museums and monuments. The legendary myth feeds a multiform memory of the resistance, differing according to places, cultures, and moments. The myth retains only some elements of history which it standardizes. The poet Pierre Emmanuel, a resistant himself, asserted in 1945, "It is necessary to dare more, to proceed from the symbols to the myths... in the light of these large flashes of history which reveal the succession of the centuries and the sequence of civilizations". Thus, André Malraux, when he put in scene the ceremony of transfer of the ashes of Jean Moulin to the Pantheon, his tragic incantations concerned the development of a myth, that France identified with "the poor formless face" of a face torture victim.

After the war, the influential Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was dubbed "le parti des 75 000 fusillés" - "the party of the 75 000 shot". In reality the figure was considerably less, and it is now estimated that less than 5000 were shot, of whom an estimated 80-90% were communists.^[33]

The French Resistance has had a great influence on literature, particularly in France. A famous example is the poem Strophes pour se souvenir, which was written by the communist academic Louis Aragon in 1955 to commemorate the heroism of the Manouchian Group, whose 23 members were shot by the Nazis.

[edit] The Resistance in cinema

French cinema of the post-war period testifies to a broad consensus of a resistant France, when members of the resistance were in fact a minority. The official Cinematographic Service with Armies (SCA) defend their thesis that the Pro-communist Committee for the Release of the French Cinema (CLCF), did sometimes embellish facts, in particular at the time of the Cold war, but always in the glorification of the resistance.

The traitors, played by Pierre Brewer in Jéricho (1946) or Serge Reggiani in The Doors of the Night (1946) have a hateful face and seem to be an exception. The STO was rarely evoked, and the French Militia never. The scenario writers like Clouzot or Cayatte sometimes created an image less realistic than what the FFI really was, Autant-Lara was not allowed to illustrate the black market and the general mediocrity in the Crossing of Paris (1956). At the same time, Robert Bresson, indifferent to the air of time, presented Un condamné à mort s'est échappé as a spiritual adventure and got away with it.

After de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, the portrayal of the resistance renewed itself. The commercial cinema converged in a 'Gaullienne' vision which was not afraid to make a pact with the communist memory. In Paris brûle t-il? (1966), Ainsi said, "the role of the resistant is revalued according to his later political trajectory". One can underline a shy reappearance of the image of Vichy, as in the Le Passage du Rhin(1960), in which a crowd acclaims successively Pétain then de Gaulle. The comic form of films such as La Grande Vadrouille (1966) widened the image of the heroes to average Frenchmen, which ended after May 1968 and the withdrawal of the General.

The most famous, and critically acclaimed, of these movies is Army of Shadows (L'armee des ombres), which was made by French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969, who himself was a member of the Resistance. The film was inspired by Joseph Keesel's 1943 book, as well as memoirs of Melville's experiences, such as his participation in Operation Dragoon. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the French news magazine L'Express repeatedly called it "perhaps the best French film ever made on the [French] Resistance."

The honest manner of the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity in (1971) pointed the finger on anti-Semitism in France and denounced the confiscation of resistance ideals in the official history. TIME magazine's positive review of the film said that director Marcel Ophüls "tries to puncture the bourgeois myth—or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans."^[34]

Cassenti, with L'Affiche Rouge (1976), Gilson, with La Brigade (1975), and Mosco with the documentary Des terroristes à la retraite at the time directed their films on resistant foreigners of the EGO, who were relatively unknown. In 1974, Lacombe Lucien of Louis Malle caused scandal and polemic because of his absence of moral judgment with regards to the behavior of a collaborator. The same man later depicted the resistance of Catholic priests who protected Jewish children in Au revoir les enfants. In the more alleviated 1980s, one can cite Blanche et Marie (1984), as an example of the resistance of working women. Later, Un héros très discret (1996), left the revelations on the past of François Mitterrand, suggesting that many heroes were imposters. One year later, Claude Berri took as a starting point a mythical figure of the resistance to carry out Lucie Aubrac in the manner of American biopics.

[edit] French Resistance in popular culture

• In the British television sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, René Artois is a French café owner who also helps out the French Resistance, which is led by a woman called Michelle, who often thinks up very far-fetched plots.^[35] For much of the series, the Resistance are primarily concerned with helping two British airmen get home to Britain. In the latter part of the series, they are concerned with spreading propaganda messages to the local French people. The town also boasts a chapter of the all-female communist Resistance, who are much more ruthless than the de Gaulle Resistance. Allo Allo is a parody of the Belgian-set BBC drama Secret Army.

• In the first-person shooter game Medal of Honor: Underground, players control French Resistance operative Manon Batiste whereupon she is recruited by the OSS.

• In the multi-platform game Call of Duty 3, the player can fight as a Special Air Service member alongside the French Resistance and the Maquis taking part in sabotage and rescue missions.

• In Highlander, the leading character, the Immortal Duncan MacLeod, was a member of one of the French Resistance organizations.

[edit] See also

• Breton nationalism and World War II
• Chant des Partisans
• Maquis
• Free France
• Les Éditions de Minuit - A French publishing house set up during the Occupation by Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure
• Timeline of women's participation in warfare
• French Forces of the Interior
• La Bataille du rail
• Polish resistance movement (Polish Secret State)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Chronology 1940-1945
• Exiled Spanish anarchists in the French Resistance - account of Spanish refugees from the Spanish Civil War from 1939-1945
• L'histoire de la Résistance française
• Women in the French Resistance
• French Secret Agents - Roll of honour, awards and images.
• A history of the resistance in English
• A history of the resistance in English for children
• European Resistance Archive (ERA) | video interviews with members of the resistance

[edit] Further reading

• Harry R. Kedward, In Search of the Marquis, Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942-1944, Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-821931-8.
• Frida Knight, The French Resistance, 1940-44, Lawrence and Wishart,1975. SBN 85315 335 3
• Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-44, London: Pimlico, 1999. ISBN 0-7126-6513-7
• David Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, The Story of the French Resistance, New American Library, 1980. ISBN 0-452-00612-0
• John F. Sweets, The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944 : A History of the Mouvements unis de la Résistance, Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.

ca:Resistència Francesa de:Résistance es:Resistencia francesa fr:Résistance intérieure française id:Pemberontak Perancis it:Resistenza francese he:ההתנגדות הצרפתית לנאציזם lb:Resistenz nl:Résistance pl:Francuski ruch oporu pt:Resistência Francesa ru:Движение Сопротивления во Франции sv:Franska motståndsrörelsen