Please help, I have developed a deep thirst for knowledge of this kind!
When the world is run by fools it is the duty of intelligence to disobey
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Oh, I wasn't. I am actually English, so I tend to find any point of view fascinating, but thanks for those reccommendations, and I will look them up.
When the world is run by fools it is the duty of intelligence to disobey
I recently saw a very good film about the French Resistance - within the Paris filmmaking community (!) - by the great Fr. director Bertrand Tavernier, called SAFE CONDUCT (or, LAISSEZ PASSER in Fr.)
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Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has just made "Black book", which is a very interesting piece, showing the ups and downs of the Dutch resistance during WWII.
Melville has also directed "Le silence de la mer" in 1949 -- a very good and impressive film, although very simple.
It's been a long time since I've read these books BUT
Soldiers of the Night, by David Schoenbrun, Dutton, 1980, a CBS correspondent's history of the French resistance
A Night of Watching, by Elliot Arnold, Scribner's, 1967, as the Nazis crack down on Denmark, the Danes sent the Jews living there to Sweden overnight
I've also got a paperback somewhere called The Danish Resistance but can't find it to get the publication info; more if I can find it...Happy reading
Lacombe Lucien is about collaboration but really worth watching.
shareIs Paris Burning?, directed by René Clément, deals with the various factions of the Resistance forcing the Allies' hand in liberating Paris -- the book is more successful than the film, but if you run the DVD with the French-language track and English subtitles, it works a lot better than the dubbed version.
Clément's first film was La Bataille du Rail, about the Resistance work done by French railroad workers.
The film Lacombe Lucien (or some similar spelling) deals with these events. A teenage boy in rural France wants to be in the Resistance. The adults reject him as too young, so he joins the Nazi secret police and collaborators instead--with mixed results, betraying the Resistance organization that rejected him.
This film was not intended to be about history so much (the director said he wanted to set it in Mexico originally, but the repressive gopvernment there at the time rejected this project) as about human nature. --Why people from many different "backgrounds" are so easily swayed by authoritarian power and how they sometimes become the instruments of very bad acts. (And the ambiguous intersection of the personal and the political in human lives.)
Since the US is bombing the crap out of several third world countries right now, and feels very morally empowered to do this, perhaps this film is relevant to today's world too.--BW
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See a film called Monsieur Klein dir. by Joseph Losey and featuring Alain Delon. The focus is not on the French Resistence, although it does figure into the story, but the film presents a pretty stunning image of the nightmarish, bureaucratic menace of occupied France.
shareIf you're looking for academic history (i.e. fairly weighty, complex, and non-popular), check out Robert Paxton's "Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order," which is a landmark 1969 book on occupied France that has informed everything that's come since. More recently, H.R. Kedward's "In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France" (1993) is an excellent book that discusses why men joined the Maquis (bands of fighters who hid out in the country--think the Spanish rebels in Pan's Labyrinth--as opposed to the urban resistance groups commonly seen in the movies) and how they carried out operations against the Germans.
One of the problems that you tend to run into while studying the resistance is the lack of good sources because they obviously didn't write anything down or keep any records of what they were doing, lest the Germans get their hands on those records and compromise everything.