[42] The résistant Joseph Barthelet told the British SOE agent George Miller that he made up his mind to join the resistance when he saw German military police march a group of Frenchmen, one of whom was a friend, into the Feldgendarmerie in Metz.

[81] The assassin did not turn himself in, and so another 50 hostages were shot, among them Léon Jost, a former Socialist deputy and one-legged veteran of the First World War, who was serving a three-year prison sentence for helping Jews to escape into Spain.

[93] In April 1942, the PCF created an armed wing of its Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée ("Migrant Workforce") representing immigrants called the FTP-MOI under the leadership of Boris Holban, who came from the Bessarabia region, which belonged alternately to either Russia or Romania.

[99] At times, ordinary people would show sympathy for Jews; as a Scot married to a Frenchman, Janet Teissier du Cros wrote in her diary about a Jewish woman wearing her yellow star of David going shopping: She came humbly up and stood hesitating on the edge of the pavement.

[62] One of these corbeaux, a Frenchwoman displaying the typically self-interested motives of her ilk, read: Since you are taking care of the Jews, and if your campaign is not just a vain word, then have a look at the kind of life led by the girl M.A, formerly a dancer, now living at 41 Boulevard de Strasbourg, not wearing a star.

[137] One of the most famous Resistance actions took place on 11 November 1943 in the town of Oyonnax in the Jura Mountains, where about 300 maqusiards led by Henri Romans-Petit arrived to celebrate the 25th anniversary of France's victory over Germany in 1918, wearing improvised uniforms.

[144] The Milice were loathed by the resistance as Frenchmen serving the occupation and unlike the Wehrmacht and the SS, were not armed with heavy weapons nor were especially well trained, making them an enemy who could be engaged on more or less equal terms, becoming the preferred opponent of the Maquis.

[141] The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had rejected this plan under the grounds that the disparity between the firepower and training of the Wehrmacht vs. the maquisards meant that the Resistance would be unable to hold their own in sustained combat.

[146] By February 1944, the maquisards numbered about 460 and had only light weapons, but received much media attention with the Free French issuing a press release in London saying "In Europe there are three countries resisting: Greece, Yugoslavia and the Haute-Savoie".

[163] During the Normandy campaign, the Resistance was so effective in blowing up telephone lines and cables that the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS largely abandoned the French phone system as too unreliable and used the radio instead, thereby allowing Bletchley Park to listen in.

Some lucky ones had scraps of uniforms and British battledress, but predominantly their clothes consisted of drab colored shirts, blue overall trousers and German field boots, whose owners no doubt had ceased to require them for obvious reasons.

[130]Sometimes, the maquis wore armbands featuring the tricolor with either a Cross of Lorraine or the initials FFI stamped on them, so they could maintain that they had insignia and thus a sort of uniform, making them entitled to legal protection under the Geneva and Hague conventions.

[172] Speaking of an atrocity committed outside of Nice in July 1944, one man testified at Nurnberg: Having been attacked ... by several groups of Maquis in the region, by way of reprisals, a Mongolian detachment, still under the SS, went to a farm where two French members of the Resistance had been hidden.

Between July and October 1940, de Gaulle rejected the unconstitutional, repressive and racist laws instituted by Pétain, and established his own bona fides (good faith) as the principal defender of republican values.

The FFI in Normandy and the Île-de-France region surrounding Paris began to harass German forces intensively, cutting roads and railways, setting ambushes and fighting conventional battles alongside their allies.

Some in the PCF wanted to launch a revolution as the Germans withdrew from the country,[208] but the leadership, acting on Stalin's instructions, opposed this and adopted a policy of cooperating with the Allied powers and advocating a new Popular Front government.

The same year, André Philip became commissaire national à l'Intérieur of the Free French (France libre), and Félix Gouin joined Charles de Gaulle in London to represent the socialists.

Bénouville and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade became députés in the French parliament after the war; François Mitterrand moved towards the left, joined the Resistance and eventually became the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic, Henri Frenay evolved towards European socialism,[220] and Daniel Cordier, whose family had supported Charles Maurras for three generations, abandoned his views in favor of the ideology of the republican Jean Moulin.

[245] In 2012, 95-year-old Arsene Tchakarian, the last survivor of the Manouchian resistance group who fought against occupying Nazi German forces during the Second World War, was decorated as Officer of the Legion of Honour by the president of France.

[265] The Organisation Civile et Militaire had a female wing headed by Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux,[266] who took part in setting up the Œuvre de Sainte-Foy to assist prisoners in French jails and German concentration camps.

[274] The spy network was called the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), and its actions were carried out by volunteers who were parachuted into France to create and nourish local Resistance cells.

Also participating were the painter Sándor Józsa, the sculptor István Hajdú (Étienne Hajdu), the journalists László Kőrös and Imre Gyomrai; the photographers Andor (André) Steiner, Lucien Hervé and Ervin Martón.

[290] Most French men and women put their faith in the Vichy government and its figurehead, Marshal Pétain, who continued to be widely regarded as the "savior" of France,[291][292] opinions which persisted until their unpopular policies, and their collaboration with the foreign occupiers, became broadly apparent.

The liberation of Corsica in September 1943, a clear demonstration of the strength of communist insurgency, was accomplished by the FTP, an effective force not yet integrated into the Secret Army and not involved with General Henri Giraud, the Free French or the political unification of the Resistance.

[299] At the end of 1940, a group of 10, including Humbert, Cassou, Marcel Abraham and Claude Aveline founded a clandestine newsletter called Résistance, respecting and supporting De Gaulle but circumspect in references to "that ridiculous old fool Pétain".

The commandos were drawn from the foreign branch of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, and the most famous of them was the Manouchian Group.Defining the precise role of the French Resistance during the German occupation, or assessing its military importance alongside the Allied Forces during the liberation of France, is difficult.

[339] This period ended when the aftermath of the events of May 1968, which had divided French society between the conservative "war generation" and the younger, more liberal students and workers,[340] led many to question the Resistance ideals promulgated by the official history.

[355][356] La Bataille du rail (1946) depicted the courageous efforts of French railway workers to sabotage German reinforcement trains,[357] and in the same year Le Père tranquille told the story of a quiet insurance agent secretly involved in the bombing of a factory.

François Truffaut's 1980 film Le Dernier Métro was set during the German occupation of Paris and won ten Césars for its story of a theatrical production staged while its Jewish director is concealed by his wife in the theater's basement.

'Allo 'Allo!, a British sitcom featuring Resistance activities, was conceived as a parody of the earlier BBC drama series Secret Army,[378] and a number of characters in the Star Trek television franchise are members of the maquis.