Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. By Robert Gildea.Belknap; 608 pages; $35. Faber & Faber; £20.
GUY MOQUET was just 17 years old when he was executed by firing squad in Nazi-occupied France. In a poignant letter to his family before his death in 1941, the young Communist résistant wrote: “My life has been short, I have no regrets, if only that of leaving you all. I am going to die…Mummy, what I ask you, what I want you to promise me, is to be brave and to overcome your sorrow.” Môquet swiftly entered French history as a Resistance martyr, and remains a potent symbol. In 2007, on the day of his inauguration as president, Nicolas Sarkozy vowed that Môquet’s farewell letter would be read out each year in every French high school.
That a Gaullist president should devote his first day in office to the memory of a Communist is a measure of how far the narrative of the Resistance continues to shape France’s sense of itself. Môquet, said Mr Sarkozy, embodied more than a patriotic belief in France: he showed that “the greatness of man is to dedicate himself to a cause greater than himself.” To this day, French history textbooks dwell on such Resistance heroes. Men in berets, rifles slung over their shoulders, have become in the collective imagination an emblem of the national spirit, uncrushed by terror, defeat or occupation. The greatest mythmaker of them all, Charles de Gaulle, wartime leader of the Free French in London, declared to cheering crowds at the city hall in the summer of 1944 that Paris had been “liberated by its own efforts”. “France in combat”, he exclaimed, was “the only France, the true France, eternal France.”
Yet, as Robert Gildea puts it in an important new book, “Fighters in the Shadows”, “de Gaulle’s resistance myth was military, national and male.” The general’s founding narrative was not only part of a skilled rebuilding exercise designed to restore pride to a battered nation. This much, and the fact that many of the French edged in reality towards some form of compromise with occupied or Vichy France, has been written before. Mr Gildea’s point goes further: that de Gaulle’s account pushed aside not only women but any sense that resistance in France was part of an “international struggle against fascism and Nazism”, which drew in Spanish republicans, eastern European Jews and others.
A historian at Oxford University, Mr Gildea is not the first scholar to document the diverse nature of what has come to be known collectively as the Resistance. He draws on work by many French historians, such as Rolande Trempé and Denis Peschanski (on foreign résistants), or Anny Latour, David Diamant and Annette Wieviorka (on the role of Jews). Mr Gildea’s skill has been to weave these together into a scholarly account that blends top-down history with the bottom-up stories of those who schemed, improvised, grabbed chances and risked their lives.
The women who emerge from these pages range from cautious pragmatists to defiant idealists. Even decades later, some underplayed their part. “I don’t have much to say,” said one elderly French résistante when interviewed 40 years later. Her job in the coal-mining north of France had been to transport dynamite sticks and weapons, hidden under lettuce and leeks in her basket. Some defied the social codes and got to see action. Anne-Marie Walters was described in a paramilitary-training report as “inclined to get overexcited and is slightly hysterical”. Despite these apparent deficiencies, she was successfully parachuted into France in 1943. Another, Colette Nirouet, fought underground in Auvergne and was shot dead in late 1944 when trying to force a German unit to surrender. It was not until this year that female résistantes, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle, the general’s niece, were admitted for the first time to the Panthéon, the resting place for French heroes.
A similarly mixed cast of foreign résistants peoples the book: Jewish Bolsheviks, Spanish refugees, Italian anti-fascists, immigrant Russian and Polish Jews. Among them was Marcel Langer, a Polish-born Jew, who led a unit of immigrant fighters in Toulouse known as the 35th brigade, before being arrested, sentenced to death by a Vichy court and guillotined. Or Vicente López Tovar, a Spanish-born Communist guerrilla well used to “battle and hardship” from fighting Franco’s regime, who led the liberation of Périgueux and Agen in the French south-west.
Mr Gildea is good too on the competing aspirations of Communists and Gaullists, and the distrust between de Gaulle and the Allies, in the run-up to liberation and after. Communist résistants sought national insurrection; de Gaulle intended to “reassert the authority of the French state”. A week before General Leclerc led his tanks into Paris, a concession secured from the Allies by de Gaulle, the Communist-led Paris Liberation Committee ordered a popular uprising. Insurgents ignored the truce with the Germans negotiated by the Gaullists; chaos ensued. Right up to the end, in other words, resistance in France was far more complex and divided than the linear legend of liberation allows.