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Lead book review

The facts behind France’s most potent modern myth

In Fighters in the Shadows, Robert Gildea dares to suggest that the struggle in France against the German Occupation — so central to French identity — was too disparate even to be called ‘the French Resistance’

29 August 2015

9:00 AM

29 August 2015

9:00 AM

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance Robert Gildea

Faber, pp.593, £20, ISBN: 9780571280346

In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed.

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