48 Facts About French Resistance

French Resistance was a collection of organisations who fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War.

The Resistance's men and women came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including emigres, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists and communists.

French Resistance played a significant role in facilitating the Allies' rapid advance through France following the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944.

The French Resistance planned, coordinated, and executed sabotage acts on the Nazi electrical power grid, transport facilities, and telecommunications networks.

The French Resistance's work was politically and morally important to France both during the German occupation and decades that followed.

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The actions of the French Resistance stood in marked contrast to the collaborationism of the Vichy regime.

The French Resistance were required to cover the expenses associated with the upkeep of a 300,000-strong army of occupation.

Life in the French Resistance was highly dangerous and it was imperative for good "resistants" to live quietly and never attract attention to themselves.

The problem of informers, whom the French Resistance called indics or mouches, was compounded by the corbeaux.

The writers of the corbeaux were inspired by motivations such as envy, spite, greed, anti-Semitism, and sheer opportunism, as many ordinary French Resistance people wanted to ingratiate themselves with what they believed to be the winning side.

French Resistance insisted on taking full responsibility, saying he wanted to show the French what sort of people the Germans were, and he was shot on 23 December 1940.

On 31 December 1940, de Gaulle, speaking on the BBC's Radio Londres, asked that the French stay indoors on New Year's Day between 3 and 4:00 pm as a show of passive resistance.

In March 1941, the Calvinist pastor Marc Boegner condemned the Vichy statut des Juifs in a public letter, one of the first times that French Resistance antisemitism had been publicly condemned during the occupation.

The SOE preferred to recruit French Resistance citizens living in Britain or who had fled to the United Kingdom, as they were able to blend in more effectively; British SOE agents were people who had lived in France for a long time and could speak French Resistance without an accent.

The executions in Nantes and Bordeaux started a debate about the morality of assassination that lasted until the end of the occupation; some French Resistance argued that since the Germans were willing to shoot so many innocent people in reprisal for killing only one German that it was not worth it, while others contended that to cease assassinations would prove that the Germans could brutally push the French Resistance around in their own country.

On 27 March 1942, the first French Resistance Jews were rounded up by the French Resistance authorities, sent to the camp at Drancy, then on to Auschwitz to be killed.

French Resistance came humbly up and stood hesitating on the edge of the pavement.

The Germans did not want any of the French Resistance to be armed, even collaborators, and initially refused to provide the Milice with weapons.

Between June 1943 – May 1944, the French Resistance damaged 1,822 trains, destroyed 200 passenger cars, damaged about 1,500 passenger cars, destroyed about 2,500 freight cars and damaged about 8,000 freight cars.

One of the most famous French Resistance actions took place on 11 November 1943 in the town of Oyonnax in the Jura Mountains, where about 300 maqusiards led by Henri Romans-Petit arrived to celebrate the 25th anniversary of France's victory over Germany in 1918, wearing improvised uniforms.

The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force had rejected this plan under the grounds that the disparity between the firepower and training of the Wehrmacht vs the maquisards meant that the French Resistance would be unable to hold their own in sustained combat.

In February 1944, all of the Resistance governments agreed to accept the authority of the Free French government based in Algiers and the Resistance was renamed FFI.

French Resistance actually held indoctrination classes as well as his military operations and exercised a degree of almost forced recruitment among the young people of the area, threatening their families.

Until then the Free French Resistance leaders had no idea when and where Operation Overlord was due to take place.

Reference to the "Mongolians" were to Asians serving in the Red Army who been captured by the Wehrmacht and joined either the German Army's Ostlegionen or the SS; the French Resistance called all these men "Mongols" regardless if they were Mongols or not.

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Besides attempting to establish a government, the French Resistance took its revenge on collaborators who were often beaten or killed in extrajudicial executions.

De Gaulle promoted a version of history where France for the entire occupation from 1940 to 1944 had been a "nation in arms" with the Resistance representing almost the entirety of the French people had been waging a guerrilla struggle from the beginning of the occupation right to its end.

French Resistance's concern was then to rebuild France not only on the material and international level, but morally, pushing him to put forward the actions of the Resistance to re-establish national unity and pride, which the war had damaged.

French Resistance involved men and women representing a broad range of ages, social classes, occupations, religions and political affiliations.

French Resistance asked, in his Appeal of 18 June 1940, that every patriot who could reach British territory should do so and join the Free French Army to fight in company with the Allies.

The Free French Resistance forces rallied the various French Resistance overseas colonies to fight back against the Vichy regime.

French Resistance threatened to detach the French 2nd Armored Division and order them to single-handedly attack Paris, bypassing the SHAEF chain of command, if he delayed approval unduly.

Military strength of the communists was still relatively feeble at the end of 1941, but the rapid growth of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, a radical armed movement, ensured that French Resistance communists regained their reputation as an effective anti-fascist force.

Sometimes contact with others in the French Resistance led some operatives to adopt new political philosophies.

Armenian-French writer Louise Aslanian, another French Resistance activist, was arrested among with her husband Arpiar Aslanian on July 24,1944, taken to the Nazi concentration camps by Nazis and killed in 1945.

One of the most renowned figures of the Free French Resistance Forces was Prince Dimitri Amilakhvari, who participated in every important operation that involved French Resistance forces until 1942 and led the Legion etrangere into battle in the Norwegian and later African campaigns against Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps.

French Resistance led his troops by example and died in combat during the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

French Resistance was betrayed, arrested in May 1941, and shot on 29 August 1941.

Mouvements Unis de la Resistance was a French Resistance organisation resulting from the regrouping of three major Resistance movements in January 1943.

French Resistance fought the Nazis directly, as in an April 1944 battle in Saint-Etienne-Vallee-Francaise in which his soldiers destroyed a Feldgendarmerie unit, or in an ambush of the Waffen-SS on June 5,1944.

The majority of the Polish soldiers, and some Polish civilians, who stayed in France after the German victory in 1940, as well as one Polish pilot shot down over France, joined the French Resistance, notably including Tony Halik and Aleksander Kawalkowski.

French Resistance established contact with de Menthon and Emmanuel d'Astier.

Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Occupation of France in World War II.

General Eisenhower estimated the value of the French Resistance to have been equal to ten to fifteen divisions at the time of the landings.

Historians still debate how effective the French Resistance was militarily, but the neutralization of the Maquis du Vercors alone involved the commitment of over 10,000 German troops within the theater, with several more thousand held in reserve, as the Allied invasion was advancing from Normandy and French Operation Jedburgh commandos were being dropped nearby to the south to prepare for the Allied landing in Provence.

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French Resistance has had a great influence on literature, particularly in France.

The French Resistance is portrayed in Jean Renoir's wartime This Land is Mine, which was produced in the US.

French Resistance was assassinated on order of the Iranian Islamic Republic in 1991.