Fighters in the Shadows
A New History of the French Resistance
‘He gives recognition to the widest range of participants, many of them little known’
Robert Gildea (Faber & Faber, 608pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)
WHEN GENERAL DE GAULLE addressed the crowds outside the Hotel de Ville on 25th August 1944, he set the tone for how the French would come to memorialise the end of Nazi occupation. ‘Paris liberated!' he said. ‘Liberated by its own efforts, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help of all of France.' In the postwar years, the French took refuge in this myth in which national resistance to the Germans had been continuous and widespread, with only a handful of rotten apples collaborating. Yet, as Robert Gildea shows in his panoramic new history of the French Resistance, most of the population had chosen attentisme — ‘wait and see' — over defiance. Those who did resist constituted a minority made up not only of single-minded patriotic men, as per de Gaulle, but also of communists, Spanish, Jews and, above all, women, almost all of whom were brushed aside in the later narrative. We should not speak of the ‘French Resistance', says Gildea, but of ‘resistance in France'.
‘What Gildea has done is to step back and look at the wider picture, thereby providing a context for the individual acts of courage, which he celebrates in moving detail,' wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Guardian. ‘He gives recognition to the widest range of participants, many of them little known, and to the categories who did not fit well into the postwar myth of heroism, and that is perhaps his most important contribution to the field.' Michael O'loughlin, writing in the Irish Times, agreed that Gildea's use of first-person accounts gave the book ‘a rare freshness and raw emotion', and called the work ‘vivid and convincing'.
Nicholas Shakespeare, writing in the Telegraph, lamented that Gildea failed to capture the laughter or camaraderie recalled by many resisters, ‘preferring in his dispassionate way to dwell on the intricacies of communist committees'. Nonetheless Shakespeare called the overall result ‘a serious book that deserves to be taken seriously, both here and, more importantly, by historians across the Channel'.