Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. By Robert Gildea.Belknap; 608 pages; $35. Faber & Faber; £20.
GUY MOQUET was just 17 years old when he was executed by firing squad in Nazi-occupied France. In a poignant letter to his family before his death in 1941, the young Communist résistant wrote: “My life has been short, I have no regrets, if only that of leaving you all. I am going to die…Mummy, what I ask you, what I want you to promise me, is to be brave and to overcome your sorrow.” Môquet swiftly entered French history as a Resistance martyr, and remains a potent symbol. In 2007, on the day of his inauguration as president, Nicolas Sarkozy vowed that Môquet’s farewell letter would be read out each year in every French high school.
That a Gaullist president should devote his first day in office to the memory of a Communist is a measure of how far the narrative of the Resistance continues to shape France’s sense of itself. Môquet, said Mr Sarkozy, embodied more than a patriotic belief in France: he showed that “the greatness of man is to dedicate himself to a cause greater than himself.” To this day, French history textbooks dwell on such Resistance heroes. Men in berets, rifles slung over their shoulders, have become in the collective imagination an emblem of the national...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1EZtikG
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