[1] Oral history formed a central part of Kedward's historical approach, as he interviewed hundreds of ordinary Frenchmen and women about their experience of being in the Resistance.
Joanna Richardson found it "solid and imaginative", Maurice Larkin described it as "stimulating and unpretentious" and John Horne praised its "admirable subtlety".
For G. M. Hamburg the book had captured Vichy France in all of its complexity: "Kedward’s study of French idealism and opportunism gives a more complicated, but a more accurate picture of the motivations behind the resistance than is available in other histories".
One of his book’s main virtues is that he shows how much people of southern France in those years of defeat and despair were conscious of, and sustained by, the knowledge of previous national catastrophes and of the traditional remedies for them."
This view was reiterated by an anonymous reviewer in The Economist: "he thoroughly understands French history, and is able to show how people in a country in difficulties can come to terms with their present by reflecting on their past".
Using oral history had given considerable vitality to the study in the eyes of the Times Higher Education Supplement, "Kedward brings the period alive as a result of his many interviews with former résistants".
Julian T. Jackson explained the long wait by the fact that at that time the French academic community was much more focused on the study of Vichy which Robert Paxton had revitalised than on reviewing the history of the Resistance.
Jean-Pierre Rioux in Le Monde of 20 October 1989 described it as "a work which appeared in 1978 and has become a classic in the eyes of specialists and all praise must go to Champ Vallon for having at last commissioned its translation".
According to John Simmonds "Kedward has written an extraordinary book, which maintains strong elements missing from much history of the times, such as the role of women in the Resistance".
Laurent Douzou in his review of the Maquis book for Le Monde of 10 September found it astonishing that a foreign historian should have such an intimate understanding and knowledge of rural France.