Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance

Robert Gildea

Nov 2015 · Harvard University Press

About this ebook

The French Resistance has an iconic status in the struggle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe, but its story is entangled in myths. Gaining a true understanding of the Resistance means recognizing how its image has been carefully curated through a combination of French politics and pride, ever since jubilant crowds celebrated Paris’s liberation in August 1944. Robert Gildea’s penetrating history of resistance in France during World War II sweeps aside “the French Resistance” of a thousand clichés, showing that much more was at stake than freeing a single nation from Nazi tyranny.

As Fighters in the Shadows makes clear, French resistance was part of a Europe-wide struggle against fascism, carried out by an extraordinarily diverse group: not only French men and women but Spanish Republicans, Italian anti-fascists, French and foreign Jews, British and American agents, and even German opponents of Hitler. In France, resistance skirted the edge of civil war between right and left, pitting non-communists who wanted to drive out the Germans and eliminate the Vichy regime while avoiding social revolution at all costs against communist advocates of national insurrection. In French colonial Africa and the Near East, battle was joined between de Gaulle’s Free French and forces loyal to Vichy before they combined to liberate France.

Based on a riveting reading of diaries, memoirs, letters, and interviews of contemporaries, Fighters in the Shadows gives authentic voice to the resisters themselves, revealing the diversity of their struggles for freedom in the darkest hours of occupation and collaboration.

Ratings and reviews

Rags to Strikes to Blood: Confusions Coalesce in Liberation Resistance had an unsure beginning in the humiliation of the defeat of 1940. False starts plagued a crisis in command and in terms of tangible resources to bog the French resistance to German occupation down. Fighters in the Shadows by Robert Gildea details the brave leaders in France and abroad who initiated and carried out the fight for liberation as well as the distinct sequence of events that brought many early Pétainists from Vichy collaborationist policies to outright guerilla warfare. Three critical developments through the war are discussed in the book that will be highlighted in this review. Together these describe how France fell out of favor with the occupying Fatherland and instead subsumed a sort of “shadowland fraught with danger and often reality struck back with brutal effect” (157). Early in the war, a popular way of demonstrating opposition to the Germans was to publish “rags” or a newssheet such as Défense de la France (71). Among the dozen or so pictures in the book is a sequence of four pictures contrasting wartime and peacetime among the French, including the young flyboy Jean Cavailles. These are demonstrative of the progression of French resistance presented in the book. “Resistance activity was structured, above all, through writing, printing and distribution of underground newspapers,” an undertaking that allowed greater involvement of French women in addition to increasing the breadth of appeal to the general public (143). A snapshot of the larger resistance is provided in the work of Sabine Zlatin, who saved over five hundred Jewish children from camps during the war through the organization of religious youth workers who stayed in camps, often only as teens, and offered services (203). Decades after the war, Serge Klarsfeld would challenge the resistance narrative by declaring during the Barbie trial of 1987, “the fact of being a Jewish child condemned you to death more surely than any act of resistance” (465). Ultimately, it would turn out, the fate of both were hand in hand. While female involvement in the war took many forms, including extraction of both Protestants and Jews from internment camps once deportations began, one of the ubiquitous forms of heroism and sacrifice was in the common strikes undertaken, with encouragement of the Communist Party. The sources of such demonstrations of solidarity with the Allies were many, but all carried the similarity of virtually unprecedented brutality in official response. This in turn created a “cult of martyrs, which served the growing legend of communist heroism and self-sacrifice”; more importantly such strikes initiated the provocation of Germans to deport French men to work camps (175). This action of German belligerence, calling 75,000 young men to work and demanding three workers for every POW returned, did as much as, perhaps more than, any amount of propaganda or even antisemitic actions to stoke the flames of resistance (139). Brutality and execution of striking workers were not the only reason the Germans failed, nor were they limited to France (428). Just as the Nazis spread across Europe, so too did the anti-fascist network of spies and fighters. With American entry in the war, Germany took another action to cement the opposition against them: the occupation of all of France in 1944 and disregard for the Armistice (262). Vichy was finally at war with the Nazis. Not all Vichy were united in resistance, nor were the resisters united. Two newly distinct forms of resistance emerged and were in competition. While some officers in the 100,000 strong Armistice Army formed a secret society, French hopes for liberation lay in the arms of DeGaulle in London and General Giraud, the future commander-in- chief of the reformed French Army. Giraud’s motto: ‘A single goal, Victory’ was appealing to the United States, who did not see Vichy as an inoperable state as the British believed (277). Giraud’s Free French would come to a head when