Fighters In The Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance - Tapa dura

Fascinating book...vivid and convincing history...often moving and illuminating...perhaps, in this thrilling story of anti-fascist solidarity between Polish Jews, French communists, Spanish republicans and German and Italian (and even Irish) anti-fascists, we can see the seeds of a possible new European identity. (Michael O'Loughlin Irish Times)

The French Resistance remains one of the great moral tests of the 20th century, raising essential and often troubling questions about how ordinary people behave and define themselves in extraordinarily demanding and dangerous circumstances. Read this fine book, and wonder anew where you might have fitted in the kaleidoscope of resistance, defiance, acquiescence and collaboration. (Ben Macintyre The Times)

A serious book that deserves to be taken seriously, both here, and more important, by historians across the channel. (Nicholas Shakespeare Daily Telegraph)

Comprehensive, thoroughly researched book...this rich and dramatic book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the period. (Hanna Diamond BBC History Magazine)

An important new book. (Economist)

'V]ivid with real life and ordinary heroism ... The relentless, persistent way in which Gildea gives voice to a kaleidoscope of men and women of different nationalities and races does more than any author before him to provide a convincingly complex and moving account of the ways in which people in France took up arms against the Vichy state and the Nazi occupation. This book cuts against the grain of classic narratives, not by setting out counter-narratives but by asking for our attention, for a page or two at a time, to listen to the detail: the real-life detail of the frustrations, the suffering and heroism of people who exist at several removes from the grand shapers of history. (Julian Wright TLS)

Gildea's re-evaluation ignores the partisan postwar French histories, and instead examines the testimony of participants...as authoritative an arbitrator of truth and falsehood as we are likely to get, and his depiction of the heroes and heroines of the resistance commands belief, and sometimes awe...Gildea's principal focus is on the moral and political impact of the resistance. He does more than any French writer has achieved to lift the deadweight of mythology oppressing the era. (Max Hastings Sunday Times)

There have been many excellent recent books, both in French and in English...on France during the resistance years. What Gildea has done is to step back and look and the wider picture, thereby providing a context for the individual acts of courage, which he celebrates in moving detail. He gives recognition to the widest range of participants, many of them little known, and to the categories who did not fit well into the postwar myth of heroism, and that is perhaps his most important contribution to the field. (Caroline Moorhead Guardian)

This admirable history goes some way to restoring the more complex truths of the men and women of the resistance whose background and motivation varied more than myth would have you believe. (Jay Elwes Prospect)

Gildea, who made a major contribution to this field with his 2002 work Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation of France 1940-45, here considers the "central myth" of the French Resistance, "a story that served the purposes of France as it emerged from the war". The internal Resistance that this valuable, detailed analysis reveals was far from a single united movement, for it varied in its numbers, aims and effectiveness, and from region to region. A strength of what will come to be seen as a definitive study is that it is based on immense research, in French provincial archives as well as national collections, and on oral history emanating from numerous interviews, both with resisters and the many French citizens ... [A] splendid study. (Times Higher Education)

The story of the French Resistance is central to French identity, but it is a story built on myths. 'La Resistance francaise' was not simply a national effort to free the country from German occupation, but a wider struggle, filled with conflicts and division. It included Spanish republicans, Italian and even German anti-Nazis. The defence against the Holocaust brought in Jewish resisters and Christian rescuers. It involved a civil war for the French Empire in Africa and the Near East. The movement itself was split between those on the far right and the far left, fighting for very different visions of the world. Robert Gildea returns to the testimonies of the resisters themselves, asking who they were, what they believed in and what compelled them to take the terrible risks they did. He brings to the fore the woman resisters, who history neglected. By looking again at the constructions and interplay of the myths surrounding the resistance, Gildea builds a vivid, gripping and entirely new account of one of the most compelling narratives of the Second World War.