The French Resistance began with slashed tyres and a museum newspaper
In summer 1940 French resistance meant cutting phone lines, defacing posters and letting air out of German truck tyres. Only one to three percent of the population ever joined organised groups. Yet by October 1944 the armed wing counted 400,000 members, and France ended the war fielding a very large army.
The armistice carried a humiliating bill: France had to pay for its own occupation, about 20 million Reichsmarks a day. An artificial rate of twenty francs to the mark let the occupiers buy and requisition goods at what looked like fair prices while draining the country. Prices soared, food ran short, and hundreds of thousands of workers were sent east for compulsory labour, with prisoners of war worsening the shortage.
Early resisters described something the writer Jean Cassou called an absurd refusal, declining to accept German victory even as inevitable. The academics Paul Rivet and Boris Vildé, an émigré from Russia, started an underground paper at the Musée de l'Homme in July 1940, and a Catholic law professor, François de Menthon, founded a group called Liberté in Lyon. Henri Frenay built Combat from May 1941, recruiting with questions about whether Britain could hold out, and organised it into cells that knew nothing of each other. Railway workers helped stranded soldiers slip into the unoccupied zone or Spain and became the main couriers of clandestine newspapers. Even the French intelligence service, nominally under Vichy, kept feeding the Allies and protected the secret that Polish codebreakers had devised a machine to attack Enigma.
Britain's Special Operations Executive, founded on 19 July 1940 with orders to set Europe ablaze, supported the networks through its F Section. Members came from almost every corner of society, from aristocrats and clergy to communists, anarchists, Jews and Muslims. Reprisals were savage, and around 30,000 civilian hostages were shot during the occupation.
The payoff came in 1944. Resisters supplied intelligence on the Atlantic Wall before Normandy and sabotaged power, rail and telephone lines. After the landings they formed the French Forces of the Interior, about 100,000 fighters in June, and that fusion helped France field 1.2 million soldiers by VE Day in May 1945, the fourth-largest force fighting in Europe.
Source: French Resistance
