The Maquis Fighters – Fighting in Occupied France

The legend of the maquis is well known: that of the young men who, from 1942 onwards, chose to go underground to fight the occupier. The battles of the Glières and the Vercors. The resistants who liberated entire towns before the Allied armies even arrived.

Beyond these romanticised images, however, the maquis fighters remain largely unknown. What backgrounds did they come from? What motivated them? How were they trained, and how did they conduct themselves in the face of the enemy? How did they live together — sometimes for nearly two years — in often very precarious material conditions? What support were they able to draw on from local populations? Did they recklessly expose those populations to German reprisals?

The answers are far from straightforward. For, from late 1942, when the first camps appeared, through to the fighting of the Liberation, the experience was not the same across all periods and contexts — varying considerably depending on the date a maquis was formed, the territories involved, the level of leadership within the camps, or the type of actions undertaken. And at every turn, the realities on the ground gave rise to every kind of fantasy, in the relentless psychological war that pitted London against Vichy…

The first major synthesis of the history of the maquis fighters across the whole of France, drawing on more than ten years of research in numerous national and departmental archive collections and on the testimonies of the last surviving witnesses.