The Resistance

"The Resistance in France is this iconic, emblematic moment in French history – but at the same time there’s the uncomfortable fact that most French people did not belong to the Resistance. They weren’t necessarily active collaborators, but a lot of them were just waiting for the war to be over. So it is still quite a touchy political subject in France. Particularly at the end of the war, there were a lot of unjudicial killings by members of the Resistance of people who had been collaborators or were suspected of being collaborators. As a result, some right-wing revisionist historians have painted the Resistance as being a violent and Communist-dominated movement – whereas other people, like my wife’s family in France, who were in the Resistance, if you said a word against the Resistance, the whole dinner party ended, as it were. It’s still quite a live thing. Cobb is a very judicious guide to all that – and it’s got tremendous detail and descriptive material in it too. There is so much written about the Resistance, that you can never capture it all, but I think this book is very fair. At the same time, of course, the danger of writing a book that is very fair is that you’re endlessly saying ‘on the one hand, on the other…’ He doesn’t shortchange the shortcomings of the Resistance, but it was a good thing, and there is no doubt it was a good thing. The irony of it all is that, initially, the Resistance set up inside France without much reference to de Gaulle…"