The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French and Belgian Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Initially, they were composed of young, mostly working-class, men who had escaped into the mountains and woods to avoid conscription into Vichy France's Service du travail obligatoire which provided forced labor for Germany. To avoid capture and deportation to Germany, they became increasingly organized into active resistance groups.
Jean Pierre Moulin was a French civil servant and resistant who served as the first President of the National Council of the Resistance during World War II from 27 May 1943 until his death less than two months later.
The French Resistance was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many different parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The proportion of French people who participated in organized resistance has been estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, left-wing politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II. He ran an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance at the Rue de la Pompe, before serving as a liaison officer in London, where he also was a radio anchor for the BBC. Arrested in Brittany as he was trying to reach the UK on a mission back from France alongside Émile Bollaert, Brossolette was taken into custody by the Sicherheitsdienst. He committed suicide by jumping out of a window at their headquarters on 84 Avenue Foch in Paris as he feared he would reveal the lengths of French Resistance networks under torture; he died of his wounds at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital later that day. In 2015, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon with national honours at the request of President François Hollande, alongside politician Jean Zay and fellow Resistance members Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz.
Henri Frenay Sandoval was a French military officer and French Resistance member, who served as minister of prisoners, refugees and deportees in Charles de Gaulle's Provisional Government of the French Republic.
The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the Resistance Organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.
Combat was a large movement in the French Resistance created in the non-occupied zone of France during the World War II (1939–1945).
La Voix du Nord is a regional daily newspaper from the north of France. Its headquarters are in Lille.
Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was a member of the French Resistance and served as president of ATD Quart Monde. Her uncle was General Charles de Gaulle.
The Musée de l'Ordre de la Libération is a military museum located in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. The museum is dedicated to the Ordre de la Libération, France's second national order after the Légion d'honneur, which was created in 1940 by General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces. In 1967 de Gaulle moved the Order of the Liberation into Les Invalides.
Émilien Amaury was a French publishing magnate whose company now organises the Tour de France. He worked with Philippe Pétain, head of the French government in the southern half of France during the second world war but used his position to find paper and other materials for the French Resistance. His links with Jacques Goddet, the organiser of the Tour de France, led to a publishing empire that included the daily sports paper, L'Équipe. Amaury died after falling from his horse; his will led to six years of legal debate.
Women in the French Resistance played an important role in the context of resistance against occupying German forces during World War II. Women represented 15 to 20% of the total number of French Resistance fighters within the country. Women also represented 15% of political deportations to Nazi concentration camps.
Various kinds of clandestine media emerged under German occupation during World War II. By 1942, Nazi Germany occupied much of continental Europe. The widespread German occupation saw the fall of public media systems in France, Belgium, Poland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Northern Greece, and the Netherlands. All press systems were put under the ultimate control of Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda.
Maxime Blocq-Mascart was a French banker, economist and lobbyist who became a leader of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45). He had antisemitic sympathies. He headed the conservative Organisation civile et militaire (OCM) in the later part of the war. After the war he was involved in various organizations to assist resistance members and families who had been disrupted by deportations. He supported eugenic approaches to revive the falling birthrate. He was a Conseller d'Etat from 1951 to 1962.
The Empire Defense Council was a deliberative body established within Free France in 1940. It was subsequently superseded by the French National Committee.
The clandestine press of the French Resistance was collectively responsible for printing flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, and even books in secret in France during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The secret press was used to disseminate the ideas of the French Resistance in cooperation with the Free French, and played an important role in the liberation of France and in the history of French journalism, particularly during the 1944 Freedom of the Press Ordinances.
The liberation of France in the Second World War was accomplished through diplomacy, politics and the combined military efforts of the Allied Powers, Free French forces in London and Africa, as well as the French Resistance.
The French National Committee was the coordinating body created by General Charles de Gaulle which acted as the government in exile of Free France from 1941 to 1943. The committee was the successor of the smaller Empire Defense Council.
The Provisional Consultative Assembly was a governmental organ of Free France that operated under the aegis of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) and that represented the resistance movements, political parties, and territories that were engaged against Germany in the Second World War alongside the Allies.
