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The French Resistance (French: La Résistance) was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women (called the Maquis in rural areas) who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers.
- June 1940-October 1944
- Occupied France
- Overview
- Liberation
Vichy’s decline was paralleled by the rise of the anti-German underground. Within weeks of the 1940 collapse, tiny groups of men and women had begun to resist. Some collected military intelligence for transmission to London; some organized escape routes for British airmen who had been shot down; some circulated anti-German leaflets; some engaged in sabotage of railways and German installations. The Resistance movement received an important infusion of strength in June 1941, when Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union brought the French Communist Party into active participation in the anti-German struggle. It was further reinforced by the German decision to conscript French workers; many draftees took to the hills and joined guerrilla bands that took the name Maquis (meaning “underbrush”). A kind of national unity was finally achieved in May 1943, when de Gaulle’s personal representative, Jean Moulin, succeeded in establishing a National Resistance Council (Conseil National de la Résistance) that joined all the major movements into one federation.
De Gaulle’s original call for resistance had attracted only a handful of French citizens who happened to be in Britain at the time. But, as the British continued to fight, a trickle of volunteers from France began to find its way to his headquarters in London. De Gaulle promptly established an organization called Free France and in 1941 capped it with a body called the French National Committee (Comité National Français), for which he boldly claimed the status of a legal government-in-exile. During the next three years, first in London and then (after 1943) in Algiers, he insisted on his right to speak for France and on France’s right to be heard as a Great Power in the councils of the Allies. His demands and his manner irked Churchill and Roosevelt and caused persistent tension. The U.S. government unsuccessfully attempted in 1942 to sidetrack him in favour of General Henri Giraud, who immediately after the Allied landings in North Africa was brought out of France to command the French armies in liberated North Africa and to assume a political role as well. De Gaulle arrived in Algiers in May 1943 and joined Giraud as copresident of a new French Committee of National Liberation. By the end of the year he had outmaneuvered Giraud and emerged as the unchallenged spokesman for French resisters everywhere. Even the Communists in 1943 grudgingly accepted his leadership.
When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the armed underground units had grown large enough to play a prominent role in the battles that followed—harassing the German forces and sabotaging railways and bridges. As the Germans gradually fell back, local Resistance organizations took over town halls and prefectures from Vichy incumbents. De Gaulle’s provisional government immediately sent its own delegates into the liberated areas to ensure an orderly transfer of power. On August 19 Resistance forces in Paris launched an insurrection against the German occupiers, and on August 25 Free French units under General Jacques Leclerc entered the city. De Gaulle himself arrived later that day, and on the next he headed a triumphal parade down the Champs-Élysées. Most high-ranking Vichy officials (including Pétain and Laval) had moved eastward with the Germans; at the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany they adopted the posture of a government-in-exile.
De Gaulle’s provisional government, formally recognized in October 1944 by the U.S., British, and Soviet governments, enjoyed unchallenged authority in liberated France. But the country had been stripped of raw materials and food by the Germans; the transportation system was severely disrupted by air bombardment and sabotage; 2.5 million French prisoners of war, conscripted workers, and deportees were still in German camps; and the task of liquidating the Vichy heritage threatened to cause grave domestic stress. An informal and spontaneous purge of Vichy officials or supporters had already begun in the summer of 1944; summary executions by Resistance bands appear to have exceeded 10,000.
Mar 28, 2023 · Découvrez comment les Français ont lutté clandestinement contre l'Allemagne nazie et le régime de Vichy pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Apprenez les formes, les moyens et les conséquences de la résistance, ainsi que son rôle dans la libération de la France.
La Résistance members Sylvain Grenier (right) and Robért Conway (left) as World Tag Team Champions in 2004. La Résistance was a professional wrestling tag team and former stable who performed for World Wrestling Entertainment. The name of the team is a reference to the French Resistance .
May 18, 2015 · The French Resistance played a vital part in aiding the Allies to success in Western Europe – especially leading up to D-Day in June 1944. The French Resistance supplied the Allies with vital intelligence reports as well as doing a huge amount of work to disrupt the German supply and communication lines within France.
Feb 8, 2019 · Jean-Jacques, and Roland, , La Résistance française (Alger: Office français d’édition, 1944) Google Scholar , (published on 30 Apr. 1944). 2. Alongside Combat and Libération, this was one of the three main movements of non-communist resistance in the unoccupied zone of France. 3.
La résistance intérieure française (RIF) ou résistance française de l'intérieur (RFI), appelée en France la Résistance, englobe l'ensemble des mouvements et réseaux clandestins qui durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ont poursuivi la lutte contre l'Axe et ses relais collaborationnistes sur le territoire français depuis l'armistice du 22 ...
