*Includes pictures
*Includes contemporary accounts
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished." - General Charles de Gaulle, radio broadcast from London, June 18, 1940
"A great man? Why, he's selfish, he's arrogant, he thinks he's the center of the universe...you're right, he's a great man!" - Winston Churchill on General Charles de Gaulle
The French Army crumbled swiftly under the powerful blows delivered to it in 1940 by Nazi Germany's confident Wehrmacht. Launching a massive feint into Belgium to lure mobile French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) away from the actual point of attack, the weakly protected Ardennes Forest, the Germans struck past the Maginot Line. In a lightning campaign, Heinz Guderian's panzers punched through to the coast, dividing Allied forces with a steel cordon across France and forcing the evacuation of the BEF from the port of Dunkirk.
French morale collapsed very quickly in the face of the Third Reich's onslaught. The French population had not yet recovered from World War I's immense bloodshed, and many French preferred surrender to a second decimation of their young men. Accordingly, the Germans seized the northern French territories directly, while permitting Marshal Petain, an elderly war hero and right-wing fanatic, to found a rump state centered on Vichy. History dubbed the quasi-independent client state's government the Vichy Regime.
Not all French people proved willing to surrender to the Nazi invaders, however. While large numbers "collaborated" - working for German or Vichy companies to provide for themselves or their families - and some wholeheartedly backed the new regime out of opportunism, fascist conviction, or other motivations, many courageous French resisted the Nazis and the quisling Vichy state. "De Gaulle described them as being bound together by a taste for risk and adventure [...] national pride sharpened by the suffering of their nation and 'an overwhelming confidence in the strength and cunning of their own plot'. [...] 'With him, it is [...] serving the Resistance and national honour, uncompromisingly demanding, ' wrote one. 'With him, we would have to get used to breathing the rarefied air of the summits.'" (Fenby, 2012, 109).
While all Free French forces shared the same goal - opposition to the Germans their Vichy pawns - they viewed each other with some suspicion and sometimes cooperated only grudgingly. One of the biggest divides ran between the Gaullists (and those who favored de Gaulle simply as a convenient, but temporary, "banner" to provide a unifying influence) and the communists of the PCF (Partie Communiste Francais). De Gaulle and his followers viewed the communists with profound suspicion, believing they harbored a wish for violent revolution and a totalitarian Soviet-aligned state, yet they also needed their paramilitary skills and extraordinarily large cache of weaponry. While de Gaulle's suspicions proved overblown, the communists also tended to overstate their own role. They asserted, for example, that 75,000 communist Resistance members died in the struggle. During the war years, however, the Free French kept the spirit of an independent and defiant France alive, waiting for the opportunity to emerge again, regardless of the precise political beliefs of its members.
Free France: The History and Legacy of the Exiled Free French Government during World War II examines the creation of Free France over the course of World War II. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Free French like never before.