Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteOak
Classic two plus two response and debate. You lay down a general claim with no evidence that french resistance is over-stated. I present some evidence with counter argument and ask questions . You respond with insult, no evidence, sidestep all my questions, and demand that I cite my sources. This is productive.
You have given no evidence whatsoever.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/wh...robert-gildea/
"Thirstily swallowed by a humiliated France, the dominant narrative of the French Resistance was cooked up by General de Gaulle"
"Yet, as Robert Gildea exposes in this comprehensive survey of the French Resistance, the myth that the French freed themselves is largely poppycock"
http://www.historynet.com/french-res...-resistant.htm
"“The French, understandably, reacted [after liberation] to their ordeal by retreating into a myth,” writes Ian Ousby in Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944. “A myth of a people united in hostility to the Nazi occupiers, of a nation of résistants.” In truth France was far from a nation of resisters. Anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia, Poland and Greece were far more effective and constituted a substantially higher percentage of the population of each country. As Time described Marcel Ophul’s Resistance-debunking 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, the film “tries to puncture the bourgeois myth— or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans.”
Fully 90 percent of France’s population either supported the collaborationist Vichy regime or were too frightened to have anything to do with the underground. Most civilians evidently no longer wanted to be part of any war, and many French soldiers lacked the will to continue the fight. German soldiers were stunned when some of the French they captured in June 1940 danced jigs and sang folksongs, delighted to be done with warfighting."
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/...th-3160032.php
"One of the most persistent wartime images has selfless French men and women in berets and leather jackets blowing up bridges and ambushing columns of German soldiers on lonely country roads.
But a new book by historian Douglas Porch, "The French Secret Services," contends almost nothing of the sort actually happened. His account has set the French seething - all the more so since many of them are aware that what he says is absolutely true. "
"Albert Speer, who headed German war production, was asked after the war about the effect of the French Resistance. He replied, "What French Resistance?" "
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-gildea-review
"The French resistance, as Gildea writes, has always been both central to the identity of France and a subject of myths. When France was liberated in the summer of 1944, it needed a myth of grandeur to allow the French to take their place at the table of victors."