For many decades research into Second World War France has been stymied by restrictions on access to the French archives. These were partially relaxed in 1979, but dérogations from the Ministry of Culture were still required to see many documents. Further declassification in 2015 has made possible this important collection, the fruit of a conference in Caen in 2021, which explores the first year of resistance activity from the evidence of »the archives of repression«.

Until now, says editor Fabrice Grenard, resistance activities have been known either from the archives of the »liquidation« of resistance movements or from oral testimony, which may be vague about details and dates. Now, he argues, it is possible to write a »scientific« account of resistance, from police and judicial archives, which pin down cases of resistance and their dates.

The focus here is on the period 1940–1941, before the intervention of the Communists in resistance in response to Operation Barbarossa and before systematic involvement of Allied secret services in the construction of resistance networks. This is defined here as the »pioneer resistance« or »first resistance«; sometimes also as »cultural«, »festive« or »passive« resistance. One tricky question to answer is when the war finished and resistance began: were acts like helping Allied military to escape or cutting Wehrmacht telephone lines in the summer of 1940 the last spasms of the Battle of France, as Julian Jackson has argued, or, as Claire Andrieu asserts here, the first acts of resistance denounced by the Germans as Freischärlerei, the activity of franc-tireurs of which they had a horror since 1870?

The collection says a good deal about the operation of escape lines for Allied soldiers and airmen, while Guillaume Pollack investigates an early intelligence network, George-France, busted in October 1941. There is much on the »symbolic« resistance of distributing flyers, scrawling »V« for »Victory« in response to a BBC call of spring 1941, and subverting patriotic demonstrations on Armistice Day or Joan of Arc Day.

Important distinctions are made between the Occupied and Non-Occupied Zones of France. Gaël Eismann shows that in the Occupied Zone German military courts were particularly exercised by any threat to their military security, including insults to German soldiers, and that even in this first year 13 per cent of punishments demanded the death penalty. In the latter zone, the Vichy regime might be more lenient, as in the case of François de Menthon, who was questioned as the founder of the resistance newssheet Liberté, but played a »double game«, since he was also a member of Vichy’s Légion des Combattants and had sworn loyalty to Marshal Pétain. A contribution by Robin Lecomte examines dissidence in the Levant Mandate, in particular the desertion of soldiers of the 24th Colonial Infantry Regiment, and Vichy’s attempt to deal with it. A number of articles highlight the role of women in resistance activity, from Jean-Jacques Gauthé on the Girl Guide-leaders of the Pur Sang-escape network in Strasbourg and the Scius-network in Sarrebourg which helped POWs escape to Switzerland, to Catherine Lacour-Ascol on the role of women in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais who gathered at the graves of British airmen shot down in May 1940 and helped other Allied soldiers to escape.

French historians of the Second World War have never been very keen on oral testimony or first-person testimony, even though the latter abound in series 72 AJ in the Archives Nationales. To be fair, Eismann and Grenard also criticise historians who think »hard« archival evidence as alone valid. And they are carefully critical of their own archival records, which, they admit, do not always give up their secrets easily. Gaël Eismann calculates that a third of cases recorded by the German police and courts were criminal, including public order and black market offences, more than a third were acts of »non-consent«, only some of which were anti-German, and only a quarter threats to their security, such as sabotage and spying, which may be defined as resistance.

Xavier Vallade shows that in the Isère the police struggled to locate »anti-national« sentiments. In the autumn of 1940 they unearthed communist flyers which were anti-Vichy but not anti-German, and then, in the spring of 1941, they prioritised Gaullist propaganda. Jean-Marc Guillon explores flights from the port of Marseille, which was teeming with refugees, but concedes that only a fraction of escapees were resisters who later joined the Allies or Free French. Fabrice Grenard himself admits that the police in Haute-Savoie were obsessed by an escape line that was supposed to be ferrying demobilised soldiers via Switzerland to join the British, but that no such escape line existed and that any resistance was thus »a fantasy resistance«. He rightly concludes that the best history of the French resistance combines archival evidence, which accurately maps time and place, and first-person testimony, much of it archived in series 72AJ of the Archives Nationales. The latter allows the historian to assess motivation, trace networks and follow trajectories, which is done relatively little in this otherwise excellent collection but should not detract from its significance.