Overview

With personal and colourful reflections on tracking down resisters to the Nazi occupation of France, The French Resistance and its Legacy offers a captivating set of insights into the very substance of resistance, and the challenges it poses. The book uses a wealth of stories and testimonies to foreground the importance of imagination and inventiveness at the heart of resistance. The book insists on the primacy of context, not just the contexts of the creation and development of resistance but also those of historical debate at different moments since the war. The language in which we talk about resistance is shown to be enriched and challenged by Holocaust research, by the necessity of gender studies, and by the significance of place and time, of myth, legend and exile. Disguise and secrecy were necessities for those creating resistance in France and still have an alluring mystery, but this book is designed to open up that mystery, and not allow it to be used to keep resistance in the footnotes of military history. Rod Kedward argues with conviction that emergence from the shadows is a vital role of resistance research and, not least, of resistance testimony, whether written or spoken. The scattered extracts from the author’s interviews to be found throughout are a pointer towards specific personalities and circumstance at both the time of resistance and the time of the testimony. Kedward does not interrogate the importance of this time distinction. Instead he implicitly suggests that there is an oral history to all events, whether captured at the time or later, and this should be seen as relevant to our talking and our understanding. The book as a whole celebrates where history, literature, film and testimony interact, to make talking about resistance both an art and a discovery. It ends with a challenging conclusion that is of seminal importance for the history of resistance in and beyond France, across both time and place.

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9781350260436

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Reviews

One of the best scholars of the French Resistance, building on his years of research and engagement in the field, has written a fascinating and compelling work. Beyond a straight history of the French Resistance during the German Occupation of World War II, Kedward explores how we study and think about the Resistance, given its improvised, uncharted, voluntary, invented nature and its variations by place, lives and actions. Kedward's skillful layering of accounts, versions, myths, finger-pointing and historical analysis makes clear how complicated, compelling and continuously relevant the topic of Resistance has been. Bringing the Resistance to life for the reader, each chapter closes with the voices of former resisters, who were real people, not mythical figures, recounting their own compelling stories. * Sarah Fishman, Professor of History, University of Houston, USA *

Author Information

Rod Kedward was Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of several books, including La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (2005), In Search of the Maquis (1993) and Resistance in Vichy France (1978). In 1989 he was honoured by the French Government as Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques for services to French culture, and in 2011 he was promoted to Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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