Oct 5, 2015 06:42 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to...rt-gildea/
EXCERPT: Thirstily swallowed by a humiliated France, the dominant narrative of the French Resistance was cooked up by General de Gaulle – “Joan of Arc in trousers”, Churchill testily called him – when he addressed the crowds outside the Hôtel de Ville on August 25, 1944. [...] Robert Gildea exposes in this comprehensive survey of the French Resistance, the myth that the French freed themselves is largely poppycock, like de Gaulle’s boast that only “a handful of scoundrels” behaved badly under four years of Nazi occupation. (One example: by October 1943, 85,000 French women had children fathered by Germans.) Most of the population didn’t engage with their revolutionary past until the last moment [...]
The magnitude of the French defeat in June 1940 [...spurred prediction...] that the Germans might stay on in France for a century. [...] the Resistance [...] “mobilised only a minority of French people. The vast majority learnt to muddle through under German Occupation [...]" It bears repeating that an astonishing one and a half million French soldiers remained POWs in Germany until 1945, putting pressure on political activists back home, notably communists, to form the opposition. But French Communist Party bosses, answerable to Moscow, “always controlled an agenda that had little to do with the Resistance”.
Neutralised for the first two years of the war by the Nazi-Soviet pact [...] Not until Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 did a more convincing resistance emerge [...] The truth is that the Resistance was always deeply divided...
EXCERPT: Thirstily swallowed by a humiliated France, the dominant narrative of the French Resistance was cooked up by General de Gaulle – “Joan of Arc in trousers”, Churchill testily called him – when he addressed the crowds outside the Hôtel de Ville on August 25, 1944. [...] Robert Gildea exposes in this comprehensive survey of the French Resistance, the myth that the French freed themselves is largely poppycock, like de Gaulle’s boast that only “a handful of scoundrels” behaved badly under four years of Nazi occupation. (One example: by October 1943, 85,000 French women had children fathered by Germans.) Most of the population didn’t engage with their revolutionary past until the last moment [...]
The magnitude of the French defeat in June 1940 [...spurred prediction...] that the Germans might stay on in France for a century. [...] the Resistance [...] “mobilised only a minority of French people. The vast majority learnt to muddle through under German Occupation [...]" It bears repeating that an astonishing one and a half million French soldiers remained POWs in Germany until 1945, putting pressure on political activists back home, notably communists, to form the opposition. But French Communist Party bosses, answerable to Moscow, “always controlled an agenda that had little to do with the Resistance”.
Neutralised for the first two years of the war by the Nazi-Soviet pact [...] Not until Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 did a more convincing resistance emerge [...] The truth is that the Resistance was always deeply divided...