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.
The Société nationale des chemins de fer français is France's national state-owned railway company. Founded in 1938, it operates the country's national rail traffic along with Monaco, including the TGV, on France's high-speed rail network. Its functions include operation of railway services for passengers and freight, as well as maintenance and signalling of rail infrastructure. The railway network consists of about 35,000 km (22,000 mi) of route, of which 2,600 km (1,600 mi) are high-speed lines and 14,500 km (9,000 mi) electrified. About 14,000 trains are operated daily.
The Battle of the Rails is a 1946 French war film directed by René Clément. It depicts the efforts by railway workers in the French Resistance to sabotage German military transport trains during the Second World War, particularly during the Invasion of Normandy by Allies. Many of the cast were genuine railway workers. While critics have often historically treated it as similar to Italian neorealism, it is closer to the traditional documentaries on which the director had worked on.
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.
The Francs-tireurs et partisans français (FTPF), or commonly the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), was an armed resistance organization created by leaders of the French Communist Party during World War II (1939–45). The communist party was neutral at first, following the Soviet Union's official view that the war was a struggle between imperialists, but changed to a policy of armed resistance against the German occupation of France after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Three groups were formed, consisting of party members, young communists and foreign workers. Early in 1942 they were merged to form the FTP, which undertook sabotage and assassinations of the occupation. The FTP became the best organized and most effective of the French Resistance groups. In March 1944, before the Allied forces returned to Normandy, the FTP was theoretically merged with the other Resistance groups. In practice, it retained its independence until the end of the war.
The Train is a 1964 war film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield and Jeanne Moreau. The picture's screenplay—written by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis, and Walter Bernstein—is loosely based on the non-fiction book Le front de l'art by Rose Valland, who documented the works of art placed in storage that had been looted by Nazi Germany from museums and private art collections. Arthur Penn was The Train's original director, but was replaced by Frankenheimer three days after filming had begun.
Combat was a large movement in the French Resistance created in the non-occupied zone of France during the World War II (1939–1945).
The French Popular Party was a French fascist and anti-semitic political party led by Jacques Doriot before and during World War II. It is generally regarded as the most collaborationist party of France.
The National Council of the Resistance directed and coordinated the different movements of the French Resistance during World War II: the press, trade unions and political parties hostile to the Vichy regime, starting from mid-1943.
Louis François Armand was a French engineer and senior civil servant who managed several public companies, as well as had a significant role in World War II as an officer in the Resistance. He became the first president of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) as chair of the Armand Commission from 1958 to 1959 before he was elected to the Académie Française in 1963.
Libération-sud was a resistance group active between 1940-1944 and created in the Free Zone of France during the Second World War in order to fight against the Nazi occupation through coordinated sabotage and propaganda operations.
The Maquis du Limousin was one of the largest Maquis groups of French resistance fighters fighting for the liberation of France.
The armée secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone.
Alexandre Parodi [aliases Quartus and Cérat] was a French senior civil servant, a member of the French resistance, General de Gaulle's appointee in charge of the French provisional government during World War II, a politician, permanent representative to the United Nations and NATO and the first French ambassador to Morocco.
Vichy France, officially the French State, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
"Résistancialisme" is a neologism coined by historian Henry Rousso to describe exaggerated historical memory of the French Resistance during World War II. In particular, résistancialisme refers to exaggerated beliefs about the size and importance of the resistance and anti-German sentiment in German-occupied France in post-war French thinking.
Lauterbourg station is a railway station in the town of Lauterbourg in the département of Bas-Rhin in the French region of Grand Est.
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.
Following the creation of SOE's F Section in the summer of 1940, it became eventually apparent that French anti-German sentiment was not as simple as once thought and effectively fell into two camps - those who supported de Gaulle and those who did not. To keep these camps apart, RF Section (pro-Gaullists) was mooted in late 1940 and came into being in early 1941. By May 1941 it was established at 1, Dorset Square and initially headed by Capt Eric Piquet-Wicks. The complexities of the interplay between F and RF Sections and between RF and BCRA is covered in MRD Foot's book "The SOE in France". The operations listed below are effectively, jointly mounted by SOE-RF and BCRA with the former supplying, or access to, the materiél with the BCRA supplying personnel. The men and women who made their ways to London to join BCRA came from a wide background both in terms of profession and location. To assume they were French and lately of the remnants of the French military is an over-simplification - civilians as well as foreign-born pro-French sympathisers make up a notable proportion of the agents prepared to fight for France.
