Rags to Strikes to Blood: Confusions Coalesce in Liberation

Paul Fischer

10/2/2017

Professor Zdatny

Gildea, Robert. Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015.

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 Moulin, who convened the National Council of Resistance in 1943, was arrested (286). Metropolitan resistance and the Free French Army would remain at conflict in interest throughout Operation African Torch, as European resisters felt abandoned.

Supply drops at the time were intermittent, and relief or escape infrequent, though groups such as the Shelburn Network did provide some avenues for both (312). One of the most visually gripping points in the book is the meeting of two very different types of guerrilla following the march across Tunisia. Paul’s plan, intended to slow German counter-movements, resulted in a maximum slow-down of guerrilla movements, and the Free-French army was dirty, disheveled and rugged upon meeting their Vichy counterparts who would now join them, even though they had previously fought one another. In a manner symbolic of the general resistance, however, that army had won the coherent respect of Allied commanders and their vanquished foes alike. The brutality of Nazism not only served to sharpen the Allied identity, but also forged new patriotism amongst Frenchmen from the ashes of humiliation.