When the Third Reich crumbled and left France in a state of lawlessness, people suspected of collaborating were summarily executed, women who had had relations with German soldiers had their head shaved. But Vichy supporters paid the price for their complicity with the Nazis once the war was won by the Allies. It actively sought to flush out and kill members of the resistance. It sentenced Charles de Gaulle, the de facto leader of the Resistance in exile in London, to death in absentia. It set up milicia to arrest and deport Jews to death camps on French soil. The Vichy government, led by World War One hero Philippe Pétain, not only did what Hitler demanded but sometimes even took the initiative all by itself. While one portion of the French population fought the Nazi occupation, another embraced it. As ‘winners’ of the war, the French resistance was able to write its own history after 1945, and governments since have used – some would say exaggerate – its role as an example of French courage and national pride. Occasionally massacres were carried out to punish the actions of a few résistants. The occupiers would punish resistance activity by executing not just the perpetrators but other civilians they found nearby. These missions they did at great risk – to themselves and to others. They fulfilled missions such as protecting Allied soldiers who found themselves behind enemy lines, providing intelligence to the Allies that proved crucial before, during and after the D-Day landings, damaging the Nazis’ logistics network and publishing underground pamphlets and newspapers. The Résistance was an umbrella term for many disparate groups and members came from all walks of life: young and old, rich and poor, Gaullist and communist.
The French government has officially recognized 220,000 resistance fighters, equivalent to just over 1% of the French population at the time, although many more participated to some degree. Due to the inherently clandestine activity of the Résistance, their numbers can only be estimated but they worked in their hundreds of thousands to help the Allies and hamper the Nazis as much as possible. Those French citizens who resisted the Nazi occupiers have been celebrated in post-war France, their ideals promoted by a governing class that needed to find positives to lift public morale. Photos: the town of Caen in 1944 (left) more than 2,000 German prisoners of war and French volunteers died clearing France’s fields of millions of landmines after the war (right). The post-war years provided a blueprint for the modern French state. Social reform was the reward for personal sacrifice women were granted the right to vote in 1944, social security followed a year later. De Gaulle’s government put in place a massive nationalization programme, funneling investment into heavy industry, as well as the finance, energy and transport sectors. A summer drought and a bitterly cold winter also conspired against the French in 1945. One child in 10 did not survive childbirth. The French population was sick and very, very hungry: rationing would continue until 1949 and two thirds of children were suffering from rickets. The pitiful state of ports, train tracks, roads and bridges meant that those supplies that were available could not be easily distributed in a country where half a million hectares of land still needed to be de-mined. Industrial and agricultural production was running at just 40% of what it had been pre-war.
The Nazis, the Allies and the French resistance had between them assured the destruction of 400,000 buildings with five times that number damaged.
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