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Citation: C N Trueman "The French Resistance"
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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.

The surrender of France in June 1940, was a major blow to many French people in terms of their pride. Many believed that the government had let the people down. The creation of a Nazi-approved Vichy government, primarily in the centreand south of the country, was, in the minds of many, further proof that politicians had let down France. The resistance movement developed to provide the Allies with intelligence, attack the Germans when possible and to assist the escape of Allied airmen.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 1940 surrender, France went into a period of shock. The public had been assured that the French army, along with the Maginot Line, was more than strong enough to resist a German attack. The speed and severity of Blitzkrieg had shocked the French people. The non-occupied region of France, known as Vichy France, was set up by the Germans and governed by Marshall Pétain. His reputation was still high and in the early days of Vichy, his leadership gave it some stability and kudos. Also in the days after the British attack on Mers el Kébir, there was a degree of anti-British sentiment in France. Therefore, there was no immediate drive to create a resistance movement en masse in central and southern France.

On June 18th, 1940, Charles de Gaulle addressed the people of France from London. He called on the French people to continue the fight against the Germans. This message hit hard in occupied France but initially it was less well received in Vichy France. Regardless of what many thought of the Vichy government, the area they controlled was run by French people. However, when the Vichy government began to openly collaborate with the Germans, attitudes hardened.

The French Resistance movement is an umbrella term which covered numerous anti-German resistance movements that were based within France. There were resistance movements that took direct orders from the Special Operations Executive, there was the communist resistance, groups loyal to de Gaulle, regional resistance movements that wanted independence etc. In the north, the target was simply the Germans while in the south, the Vichy government was a target as well as the Germans. The first resistance movements were in the north, such as the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire) and by the end of 1940, six underground newspapers were being regularly printed in the north. In May 1941, the first SOE agent was dropped into northern France to assist the work of the resistance.

Because of the peculiar political complexities of France, the resistance movement got off to a difficult start. However, by June 1941, the resistance movement had become more organised and its work against the Germans increased accordingly. Two dates are important in explaining the work of the resistance movement in France.

On June 22nd 1941, all the communist groups within France joined forces to create one group. This simple act greatly increased its potency. On November 11th 1942, German forces occupied the whole of France. This meant that the whole country was occupied and the attitude of the north quickly transferred itself to the south.

The German attack on Russia - Operation Barbarossa - led to many French communists joining the resistance movement. Politics took a back step and the French communists gained a reputation for being aggressive and successful resistance fighters. Many French people joined as the support for Vichy quickly waned. Many in the south were angered by the compulsory labour service that had been brought in. But the treatment of the Jews was a major cause of resentment towards the Vichy government and many joined the resistance as a means of fighting against a policy that the vast majority found abhorrent.

The relationship between Britain and the French Resistance movement was vital. Britain, via the SOE, supplied the French with equipment and trained agents. The French Resistance, in turn, supplied vital intelligence reports. As an example, the British attack on the radio base at Bruneval in 1942 could have been a lot more costly in terms of lives lost, if the British had not received intelligence reports from the resistance with regards to the building of new blockhouses there. With such information, the British paratroopers could plan accordingly.

Though the British government and de Gaulle could have a difficult relationship at times, in October 1941, both reached a compromise with regards to resistance operations in France. de Gaulle set up a Central Intelligence and Operations Agency with the support of the British. This acted independently but planning was carried out in co-operation with the SOE which supplied equipment. Agents sent into France started a general re-grouping of all resistance movements and a Conseil National de la Résistance movement was established which was subordinated to de Gaulle. By the end of 1942, de Gaulle became head of the Comité Français de Libération Nationale which headed all resistance movements in France. As a result of this greater organisational security, the resistance became more effective in 1943. Attacks on the French rail system increased greatly. Between January and June 1943, there were 130 acts of sabotage against rail lines each month. By September 1943, this had increased to 530. The disruption to the Germans ability to move equipment was massive.

By 1944, it is estimated that there were 100,000 members of the various resistance movements that existed in France. Just one year earlier, there were just 40,000 members.. By the spring of 1944, there were 60 intelligence cells whose task was solely to collect intelligence as opposed to carrying out acts of sabotage. In the build up to D-Day, the intelligence they gathered was vital. In May 1944 alone, they sent 3,000 written reports to the Allies and 700 wireless reports. Between April and May, the resistance destroyed 1,800 railway engines. When this figure is added to the 2,400 destroyed by Allied bombers, it is easy to understand why the Germans had such difficulty transporting equipment across France.

Post-war analysis of the success of the resistance shows that the 150 most successful acts of sabotage against factories in France between 1943 and 1944, used just 3,000 lbs of explosives - the equivalent of the bomb load of one single Mosquito plane.

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The French Resistance - History Learning Site

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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.

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France between the Wars

During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jewish immigrants, many of them from eastern Europe. After World War I, thousands of Jews viewed France as a European land of equality and opportunity and helped to make its capital, Paris, a thriving center of Jewish cultural life.

In the 1930s, however, unnerved by a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War, the leaders of the French Third Republic (1870-1940) began to reassess this "open-door" policy. By 1939 French authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up a number of internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France.

German Invasion

When the Third Republic collapsed under German attack in the early summer of 1940, there were approximately 350,000 Jews in France. Less than half of them were French citizens. Many of these individuals were refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the Third Reich; Jews and other endangered persons fleeing oppression in German-occupied Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon joined them in the summer of 1940.

German forces invaded France on May 10, 1940. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany which went into effect on June 25, 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which shared borders with Germany and had long been a bone of contention between the two countries.

The German army occupied the remainder of northern and western France and administered this occupied zone in conjunction with occupied Belgium under the leadership of a "military commander" ( Militärbefehlshaber). From October 1940 until March 1942, General Otto von Stülpnagel held this position. His cousin, General Karl-Heinrich Stülpnagel, became Military Commander of Belgium and Northern France in March 1942 and held this position until his arrest after the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler.

As early as the winter of 1940-1941, however, the SS and police had established an apparatus on von Stülpnagel's staff in occupied France. SS Colonel Helmut Knochen served as Commander of Security Police and SD ( Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, BdS); and SS Captain Theodor Dannecker represented the Jewish affairs office of the Reich Central Office for Security ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), under command of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. In March 1942, with the replacement of the Military Commander in occupied France and Belgium and in preparation for the deportation of the French Jews, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler appointed SS Major General Carl Oberg as Higher SS and Police Header ( Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) for German-occupied France.

Vichy Regime

Until November 1942, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied. A French collaborationist government, headquartered in the city of Vichy, in the Auvergne, governed unoccupied France.

In July 1940, the French National Assembly voted to suspend the constitution of the Third Republic and placed the new "Vichy regime" under the leadership of the aging Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, French hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Pierre Laval, a former Socialist politician who cultivated good relations with Otto Abetz (the German Foreign Office representative in Paris), functioned as the acting chief of government for most of the period of German occupation.

In theory, measures of the Vichy government applied to all of France. However, only in unoccupied France could the new government actually govern autonomously. Officially neutral, Vichy France collaborated closely with Germany. Under Petain and Laval, the Vichy government followed a nationalist and "pre-French Revolutionary" agenda, replacing the ideals of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" [" Liberté, égalité, fraternité! "] with "work, family, and country."

In the autumn of 1940, Vichy administrators promulgated antisemitic legislation, closely patterned on that of German anti-Jewish decrees and ordinances in place in the German-occupied zone. The so-called " Statut des Juifs" ("Jewish Statute"), passed in two sections in October 1940 and June 1941, excluded Jews from public life, regulated their dismissal from positions in the civil service and the military, and barred them from occupations in industry, commerce, and the free professions (including medicine, law, and teaching).

In March 1941, the Vichy government created a central agency, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs ( Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), to coordinate anti-Jewish legislation and policy. Anxious to ensure that material goods and assets confiscated from the Jewish population did not fall into German hands, the Laval government, in July 1941, instituted an extensive program of " Aryanization," appropriating Jewish-owned property for the French state. Aryanization left most Jews in France destitute, affecting foreign Jews particularly severely. French authorities interned thousands of Jews under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps-Gurs, Saint-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, and Les Milles-where at least 3,000 individuals died during the war years.

Deportations

Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, German authorities prepared for the deportation of Jews from France and other western European countries. The appointment of Oberg in March 1942 accelerated the process: an initial transport of more than 1,000 Jews left from Compiègne for Auschwitz on March 27, 1942. On May 29, 1942, German authorities issued a decree-to take effect on June 7-that Jews in occupied France wear the yellow star.

After securing the agreement of the Vichy government, German officials and French police conducted round-ups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. Under the direction of Rene Bousquet, Secretary General of the Vichy police, French police arrested 13,000 Jews in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, interning them for several days under appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports arena. As Vichy policy dictated that initial deportation convoys from France carry only adult Jews to the East, police razzias literally tore families apart, as parents, grandparents, and elder siblings were separated from younger children at collection points and at French or German assembly camps.

By late summer, French authorities altered their policy in favor of deporting whole families. After this time transports included children and juveniles in convoys to the east.

By the autumn of 1942, some 42,000 Jews had passed through the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. Nearly one third of these individuals came from unoccupied France. A significant percentage of these victims were foreign or stateless Jews, sacrificed by the Vichy government in a vain attempt to spare France's indigenous Jewish population. The final destination of these deportees was Auschwitz, where the SS murdered the vast majority by means of poison gas shortly after their arrival.

Deportations of Jews from France in the summer and fall of 1942 spurred significant protest within the Catholic Church, a mainstay of the Petain regime, and among the general population. The brutal nature of the roundups, such as the razzia and incarceration in the Velodrome d'Hiver, stirred public anger. The initial decision to separate children from their families during the deportation process met with particular criticism.

The calculated strategy of the Vichy administration to collaborate with German deportation efforts in order to gain more independence for unoccupied France had failed. The Petain government's willingness to surrender foreign Jews in hopes of shielding French Jewish nationals had increasingly obligated Vichy officials to fill all deportation quotas demanded by German authorities, who did not concern themselves with the niceties of nationality and citizenship.

Italian Zone

In November 1942, German troops occupied Vichy's formerly "free zone." As German allies, Italian forces had occupied the southeastern corner of France in 1940. As elsewhere in territories they controlled, Italian authorities refused to enforce antisemitic legislation seriously, or to hand over Jews to Germans officials, despite repeated German demands. Thousands of Jews sought and received protection in the Italian zone until its occupation by German forces with Italy's surrender in September 1943.

Resumption of Deportations

German authorities reinstituted transports of Jews from France in January 1943 and continued the deportations until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps and killing centers-the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz-or died in detention on French soil. One third of these victims were French citizens.

While French officials did not hesitate to meet German quotas for deportations with foreign or stateless Jews living on their soil, they were less enthusiastic in sacrificing French Jews to German demands. As deportations resumed in 1943, German administrators noted that French police seemed less committed to rounding up indigenous Jews, while Laval himself refused to strip French Jews of their citizenship to facilitate deportation. Thanks to the obstruction of French officials, the vast majority of Jews with French citizenship survived the Holocaust.

Yet the cost paid in lives was still enormous. Historian Michael Marrus has noted that although the "'Final Solution' in France was a Nazi project from beginning to end," it is unlikely that German authorities would have been successful in deporting such a large number of Jews from France without the aid and cooperation of French police and administrators.

Liberation of France

The Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, initiated the liberation of France. The French Résistance played a significant role in aiding Allied armies in this effort. Members of the French resistance movement came from every economic milieu and from every element of the political spectrum: conservative nationalists; Catholic and Protestant clergymen; members of the beleaguered Jewish community; liberal republicans, and activists from the socialist and communist Left.

During the time of the occupation, resistance cells had carried out sabotage and guerilla actions against German and collaborationist authorities, circulated identification papers and documents for Jews and other persecutees, and maintained escape networks for Jews, forced laborers, and Allied POWs and troops trapped behind German lines. Now resistance groups helped to speed the Allied advance against German forces. Within three months the country was free.

On August 25, 1944, German forces in Paris surrendered; on the following day, General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces ( Forces Françaises Libres, or FFL) and President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, marched triumphantly into the French capital.

Trials

Directly after liberation, the provisional government disbanded many of the collaborationist organizations, such as the Milice Francaise (French Militia), the most significant paramilitary group created to combat the French Resistance movement.

Following a wave of popular judgments and summary executions of collaborators, the provisional government began a series of trials against leading Vichy officials. Pierre Laval, French Minister of State under Petain, and Joseph Darnand, leader of the Milice, were convicted of treason and executed in October 1945. On August 15, 1945, Marshall Petain was also condemned to death on treason charges. Due to his services in World War I and to his advanced age (Petain was 89 at the time), de Gaulle commuted Petain's sentence to life imprisonment; he would die in 1951.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, French jurisprudence undertook efforts to prosecute several individuals on charges of crimes against humanity for their respective roles in the Nazi genocide. The first successful outcome of these efforts was the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," whom a French court convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment primarily for his role in the deportation and death of Jewish refugee children hidden in the village of Izieu.

More significant, perhaps, were those proceedings against three Frenchmen and former Vichy officials involved in crimes against Jews or in the implementation of the "Final Solution" in France. In 1991, French justice authorities in Paris indicted Rene Bousquet, former Secretary General of the Vichy police, who in July 1942 negotiated the deportation of some 10,000 foreign Jews from the Unoccupied Zone and who in that same month ordered the notorious round-up by French police of some 13,000 Jews at the Vélodrome d'hiver in Paris. Christian Didier, a mentally ill individual who claimed to have made an attempt on the life of Klaus Barbie, assassinated Bousquet in his home in Paris on June 8, 1993, shortly before Bousquet's trial was to take place.

In 1994, a Versailles court convicted Paul Touvier, head of the Milice' s Second Service, or intelligence branch, for the Lyons region, to life imprisonment for the murder of seven Jewish hostages at Rillieux-la-Pape, near Lyon. Touvier died of prostate cancer in 1996 in Fresnes prison near Paris.

In 1998, a court in Bordeaux convicted Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of over 1,600 Jews between 1942 and 1944 in his capacity as Secretary General for Police of the Prefecture of Bordeaux. Papon initially fled to Switzerland to elude his ten-year prison sentence, but was interned after his extradition to France in 1999. The 92-year-old was released on medical grounds in September 2002, and died in February 2007.

These proceedings suggest that the legacy of collaboration during " les années noires," the "Dark Years" of the German occupation, still casts its shadow upon French politics and culture in the present day.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Learn about France during the Holocaust and WWII, the liberation of France, postwar trials, and the legacy of Vichy France's collaboration with Nazi Germany.

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the resistance provided crucial intelligence to the allied forces helping them plan and execute military operations this information was essential for the access of the d-day invasion in 1944. The Existence of the resistance and their activities boosted the morale of the French population . It gave hope to those living under occupation that they were not alone in their opposition to the Nazi.

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the french resistance help smuggling Jews to keep them safe and hidden till other wise while Resistance fighters carried out sabotage operations targeting German infrastructure transportation network and communication  system they destroyed railway lines bridges and factories to disrupt the German war effort.

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the who thing about the french war was mainly speaking he French resistance was a group of individuals and organizations who opposed the Nazi  occupation of France during world war 2. It operated from 1940 to 1944 w the resistance provided crucial intelligence to the allied forces helping them plan and execute military operations this information was essential for the access of the d-day invasion in 1944. The Existence of the resistance and their activities boosted the morale of the French population . It gave hope to those living  under occupation that they were not alone in their opposition to the Naismith various groups and individuals engaging in acts of sabotage espionage  and resistance against the German forces the french resistance was active throughout France with notable activities in cities like paris and Lyon.