The Politics of Dancing

FIGHTERS IN THE SHADOWS A New History of The French Resistance Robert Gildea History, at least as it is commonly consumed, is often a compound of disparate facts, half-truths, often in the form of ‘myths,’ and sometimes outright fictions. These fictions are often created to soothe national pride or assuage guilt, as in the latter case the fiction of Austria as ‘Hitler’s first victim.’ Indeed, the Second World War alone has generated a whole plethora of stories that distort reality and obscure painful truths. The greatest, or perhaps more accurately most successful, of these rose coloured narratives is surely that of the ‘French resistance’ and a very strong case can be made for General De Gaulle, the creator and primary peddler of this myth, as the greatest confidence trickster in modern history. France’s defeat in 1940 was the result of a complex interplay of factors that I do not intend to explore here, except to state baldly that the France of 1940 was not the France of t...