The French Resistance and its Legacy

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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 authors 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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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. Kedwards 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 *
The finest historian of the French Resistance offers us a set of stimulating and personal reflections on resistance and memory, resistance and exile, resistance and literature, resistance and heroism, resistance and locality, resistance and identity. His book, interspersed with interviews conducted with French Resisters over forty years of researching the subject, is also a plea for the importance and relevance of the study of resistance in other contexts, and other countries, throughout the twentieth century and beyond. * Julian Jackson, Emeritus Professor of Modern French History, Queen Mary University of London, UK *

Author Bio

Rod Kedward is 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 lOrdre des Palmes Acadmiques for services to French culture, and in 2011 he was promoted to Commandeur dans lOrdre des Palmes Acadmiques. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.