The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis by Matthew Cobb

I picked up this book a little while ago with the intention of reading it during the holidays to take my mind off Christmas. Trouble was that once you dipped into it putting it down became difficult. It’s the sort of book that obliges you to read a hundred pages at a sitting.

A problem with the Anthony Beevor and Max Hastings school of writing about war is that they display a little bit too much enthusiasm for the subject. They may not actually think it’s a good thing but they are deferential to the conceits of military thinking.

Matthew Cobb’s main interest is not the movements of big armies. His account of French resistance to the Nazi occupation is often as moving as it is gripping.  It combines the lives and sacrifices of countless ordinary men and women with details of the support they received from British Intelligence and gives some glimpse of the extraordinary commitment even the much modest act of rebellion against the Germans required. Much of it will be unfamiliar to an English speaking audience.

Miners in the Nord Pas-de-Calais went on strike in May and June 1941. It began over pay and demands for more soap. As it escalated the Germans sent in the troops. When it became impossible for the men to picket their wives and daughters picketed for them. The strike was broken with 400 arrests and more than 200 people being transported to Germany.

In Paris in 1941 young supporters of the Communist Party began organising early versions of the flash mob. They would surreptitiously assemble in a street and the walk down the road shouting slogans and giving out leaflets. They were to pay a high price. One student demonstration of about a hundred was fired on and two participants executed the next day.

The early attempts at armed action against the Germans were disastrous. Not just were they utterly useless from a military point of view but they commanded no support among the majority of the population. The fascists exacted a high price for any of their men who were killed. and routinely murdered dozens of hostages.

Predictably enough the movement against the Germans was divided into multiple factions, fissures which sometimes ended up in murder. The plaque in the photos commemorates an escape from Le Puy prison organised by the Communist Party. It does not mention that the PCF shortly afterwards murdered the Trotskyists who escaped with them. It’s a tribute to Matthew’s exhaustive research that some of the victims the official histories would rather forget are recalled.

By contrast to the relentless self sacrifice of the members of the Resistance in France De Gaulle emerges as an authoritarian, egomaniacal puppet master who ended the war as a recycled Napoleon with the active support of the PCF whose leader Thorez declared that the party wanted “one army, one police and one administration”. It’s not often a ruling class gets their country handed back to them on a plate by an organisation representing millions of workers.

Given how many awful historical documentaries are made some commissioning editor somewhere should see about transforming this book into three or four hours of television. It summarises superbly the class conflicts and the connection between the big battles and the movement in France which defeated the Nazis. Not bad for £8.99