Hi all,
I was hoping any of you WW2 history buffs could recommend me some reading material on the French Resistance. I usually read when traveling so no voluminous tomes, please. I am looking to acquaint myself with important operations, people, or events where the French resistance played an important role. I am especially interested in the role of foreign fighters (I read Adam Hochschild's Spain in Our Hearts and loved that book, so anything similar) who fought with the French resistance, or important operations done by the resistance. I am also interested in understanding how the SOE and/or OSS worked alongside the French Resistance. - I always have an interest in material related to covert operations and intelligence gathering. I don't speak French so in English please. I work in political science so I would also be interested in understanding organizing, ideology, and strategy. Thank you!
Olivier Wieviorka's The French Resistance is a good political history of the Resistance. As you have likely learned, there were lots of different groups with a bewildering variety of origins, goals, ideologies; some run by England, some run by the Free France government in exile in England, some Communist, some Catholic, some just assembled from a few annoyed Frenchmen and a printing press. Wieviorka does a pretty good job of sorting out who, what and where ( there's a helpful key in the front for acronyms) and their general fates. However, if you've already read something that focuses on daring missions ( like Kessel's Army of Shadows) and are expecting detailed narratives of exciting exploits, you may be disappointed. Wieviorka drops a lot of that in order to focus on the higher questions of what the Resistance actually did and was able to achieve, what the various groups tried to do, and sort out much of the myth ( especially the myths created after liberation) from the reality. Because although there was a lot of heroic preening afterwards, during the war the Resistance had the same problem as any guerrilla movement- it had to hide among an unarmed civilian population, and those civilians bore the brunt of any reprisals.