That’s a handy little tool. I can go much further than I thought because I was calculating road miles, not as the crow flies. I’m going to print off my map and keep in the car in case of over enthusiastic controls.
Hi John,
Yes, it makes a big difference. That’s what I plan to do too. There are several similar tools including one that the government uses. I’ve compared a few and they all say more or less the same thing so you should be good with this one. Happy Sunday 
There’s an app for iOS called Radius On Map which does the same.
The UI is a bit clunky and the display is a little cluttered, but it works and it’s free if you don’t mind an advert at the bottom of the screen.
Have you ever seen the masterpiece L’armée des ombres (Army of Shadows) by the terrific and maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville?
It chronicles the activities of an ordinary Resistance network, warts and all.
It’s very much like what you’re writing, it’s an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s eponymous book written in 1943. It’s based on real events, first-hand experiences and accounts. It simultaneously manages to be both emotional, stirring and matter-of-factly.
Obviously as the book was written during WWII, Kessel risked death for that, like the few books published at that time and distributed/sold “sous le manteau” (illegally, secretly) eg Le Silence de la mer by Vercors, which was printed and published secretly by the newly-created underground publisher Les Éditions de Minuit. It was their very first book and they had to proceed so carefully that it took 2 months to print 350 copies of Le silence de la mer (it was then published in London if memory serves). Printing it and getting it out of the small printing business in Paris was very complicated and extremely risky (the book was also adapted to film by J-P Melville in 1949, and more recently in 2004).
French-Russian Joseph Kessel, 1898-1979, was an extraordinary man and writer, wartime journalist, adventurer, WWI aviator, resistant fighter etc.
[Originally made in 1969, this recently reissued classic is a masterful examination of the inner workings of the World War II resistance efforts.
This adaptation of the book by Joseph Kessel paints an understated, unglamorous portrait of the French Resistance during World World II. Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.](Army in the Shadows | Rotten Tomatoes)
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There is a monument to the people who were a support network for Resistance groups in this bit of the SW on the road between le Buisson de Cadouin and Domme - each group needed upwards of 200 people to support it. The Soleil group put the monument up, I was told it is the only one of its kind (and I haven’t heard of others, which isn’t the same thing, obv!!)
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just found this on a French gov web site (its in English)
Roughly half-way down the document it states:
"At Home
DON’T have people round. DON’T go to other people’s houses."
Wonder whether this is mandatory or advisory??
how can they check it?? It does say
Restrictions and Requirements in Metropolitan France
Does say you can meet outside but you are not supposed to eat or drink! So you can have peeps around for an apero in the garden, but no drinking or eating 
That sounds fascinating. Thank you, I shall follow up your leads.
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Seems common sense to me.
Judging by the amount of large pieces of lamb on sale at the butchers, and the numbers of cars in front of most of our neighbours houses they are all having their normal family easters.
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You can order the DVD on amazon (comes with English subs), about £5 second-hand on amazon.co.uk
Ditto on amazon.fr but you get a new DVD for the same price, about €5:
If your French is good, I also recommend the Que sais-je ? on the History of Resistance in France (I have older versions, excellent):
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OK, thanks. I’ll have a root around. There are so many reminders of the Resistance around here, I am very conscious of the gaps in my knowledge.
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A good starting point are the many Musées de la Résistance dotted around France (they go under different names).
The Musée de la Résistance Nationale in Champigny near Paris is also part of a network with several similar sites throughout the country.
If you prefer to read first on this topic in English but not whole books, I’ve got several books in English on French history (which I’ve taught for 30 years in high schools here in England, for A Level) with chapters or sections on the French Resistance, and I recommend in particular The Cambridge Illustrated History of France by Colin Jones (1994) and Jonathan Fenby’s The History of Modern France (2015), they’re both excellent.
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I can wholeheartedly recommend the resistance museum of Vercors in the Drome. Well worth the visit.
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I won’t use Amazon so I’ll have to have a look elsewhere.
I’m a bit ignorant about it all (to be fair ‘bush’ schools in Oz didn’t teach us a lot about it!!!) but absolutely fascinated! There were a few Aussie women that had big roles in the French resistance, I’d love to find our more - a new project maybe!
I was VERY shocked last year we had apero’s with our new neighbours - they have a lovely courtyard between thier house and an outhouse that backs onto the road and we are opposite. I had NO inkling that the Germans were here but apparently they were told when they bought that there were Germans shot in thier courtyard 
We have also found a bullet in our garden from WW2 - we have heard that there were some soldiers from the north billeted in part of our house so presumed they were from there but now wondering if there is more to it!
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N-Z born Nancy Wake, aka “La souris blanche”, was arguably the most famous Australian résistante, she died 10 years ago in London.
There were many Germans billeted in homes in France, try to watch the film I recommended in a previous post: Le silence de la mer (this is the 2004 version, watchable on YT) and also a much more recent and excellent film (in English) called
Suite Française, it’s a superb film, the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-9B1gfvqLE
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[quote=“Fred1, post:156, topic:34421”]
called
*[Suite Française. it’s a superb film
Read the book! Much better. An incredible woman with everything she achieved in less than 40 years before being murdered.
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My mother, who spent her childhood in Prohibition-era Detroit, had many tales about going dancing as a teeneger in Manchester during the Blitz, and then walking home for several miles in her bare feet because her high heels hurt too much. A particularly poignant story was walking home from a Manchester dance hall and having to make a detour around what is now Piccadilly because the heat from the burning buildings was too great.
At a similar age, I was walking home across the Pennine moors from village discos.
Many US journalists term these people the Great Generation, and it’s difficult to argue with that. I think we live in the shadows of everyday giants.
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As a boy in 50s/60’s Manchester, I remember cycling round some of those areas of complete devastation from the war that had not yet been rebuilt and later, being able to park my car just outside the city centre and walk to where I worked close to Piccadilly. Memorable days!
About the Resistance during WWII, this is as good a start as any (it is a vast topic…):
Anyway, I don’t teach the French Resistance any longer but I taught it for a good while. So here is a potted history of the French Resistance (and this is a good start: French Resistance - Wikipedia).
One thing that is important to bear in mind is that there were many different types of Resistance and as the movement developed it branched out in many different directions, until it was unified, see below. First, it started with two types of Resistance: The “external/Overseas Resistance” and the “Internal Resistance”.
The External/Overseas Resistance ( La résistance extérieure ) was symbolised by De Gaulle who launched it from London, it was called the Free France.
They kick-started the Resistance movement it early on, from England mainly (7,000 Frenchmen by July 1940 who somehow managed to join De Gaulle in Britain) and some in Overseas Territories, not many originally as the rest of the French Empire stayed faithful to Vichy France.
De Gaulle’s position at this juncture was weak as the Free France wasn’t recognised by the Allies as a French government-in-exile and had no links with France, with the very first Resistance Movements, it was all very inchoate in the first months. Let’s not forget that very few people knew who this De Gaulle was, he was as the French say “un illustre inconnu”, he was very much an unknown quantity (and also, obviously, no Internet, no media, no easy way to listen to Radio Londres so few listeners, and whatever was said had to be coded of course! So plenty of weird messages that people somehow had to decipher, must have been a dream for fans of cryptic crosswords…
Then, in parallel, an Internal Resistance movement started to take root in France in July 1940, called La Résistance Intérieure, but first it had no link with the Resistance Extérieure headed by De Gaulle. The Resistance Intérieure in France started mainly with propaganda (discrete distributions of tracts, inscriptions on walls etc.), with a few rare isolated acts of sabotage. This initial soft form of Resistance happened mostly in the Free Zone/Zone Libre..
As you probably all know, France was divided into two zones, up until late 1942 (there were others zone too, Eastern France for instance had been annexed by the Germans and there was a small zone within the Free Zone controlled by the Italians but I’m summarising here).
It was easier to start organising the Resistance first in the Free Zone as there were very few Germans (but, of course, the French gvt at Vichy working for the Germans was vigilant so it’s not like the Free Zone Resistants could do as they pleased!).
However, that resistance was disorganised (no resources etc.) it was more a spontaneous form of Resistance. But soon, within 3 months, the first proper networks started to emerge (mainly in Lyon area and then spread) and be far more organised, principally Combat and Franc-Tireur who slowly started to develop and organise the Resistance in the Occupied Zone (Northern half of France).
In the Occupied Zone, there were groups at that stage (late 1940) but not as strong and operating in a very underground way (being captured by the Gestapo meant almost certainly death), so the main Free Zone groups helped them. The first two emerging organised groups in the Occupied Zone late 1940 were Libération-Nord and Ceux de la Résistance.
But up to mid-1941, there was only 1 group that was both operating in the Free Zone and the directly German-occupied Occupied Zone, that was the Front national (Communist resistants), a group created in May 1941 but really active from July 1941.
So, it’s easy to see the main problem here: up to the end of 1941, these groups were divided, sometimes competed with one another, and badly organised and resourced. Resistance had to be organised and unified to be effective.
At that point, entered the hitherto préfet Jean Moulin.
Moulin was close to De Gaulle and part of De Gaulle’s Free France. De Gaulle tasked Moulin with the organisation and unification of all these movements. From July 1942, Moulin started to link the Resistance movements from the overseas Free France and the Résistance Intérieure, those movements on the French territory, both zones. That was the first stage, coordination, to make all these movements talk to each other.
In January 1943, that unification was done, first in the South (which by now couldn’t be called the Free Zone as in Nov. 1942 that hitherto Free Zone was directly under German and Italian control, with the French Vichy gvt taking a back seat as it were): it was called the MUR organisation, the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. That was the second key stage: unification of the Southern Resitance movement.
In May 1943, De Gaulle and Jean Moulin managed to unify all the French Resistance movements, so including the northern ones. The CNR - Conseil National de la Résistance - was created. They could now kick ass in an organised, coordinated fashion!
Jean Moulin tragically arrested a month later and tortured by the Lyon Gestapo. He died a few days later while being transferred to Germany.
This big unification, the CNR, gave De Gaulle (who by then was stationed in French Algeria, which had been recaptured by the Allies and the Free French Forces) a big boost as it legitimised him to all the French Resistance movements, and to the Allies of course.
So in June 1943, De Gaulle officially became the leader of the French Committee of National Liberation, co-leader actually, with another General, Général Giraud, who was backed by the Americans.
De Gaulle then used his cunning powers to sideline Giraud and in June 1944 became the sole leader of the liberation of France which was achieved by both the Allies, the Free French Forces - notably with the massive Allied invasion of Provence/the South-East of France (the terribly overlooked Operation Dragoon and the French Resistance.
In that month of June 1944, De Gaulle was also appointed as the leader of the Provisional Government of the French Republic. (the - Third - Republic regime had been interrupted in June 1940, and resumed after the war with the creation of the Fourth Republic in 1946, new constitution, elections etc.
As you can see, the Resistance was a very wide movement, it wasn’t homogeneous at all, certainly in the first two years, and it was then unified as we’ve seen.
Unified by De Gaulle, who was keen to bring together all the different Resistant movements - 8 major movements, with many different sub-groups - and different strands in order first and foremost to achieve a greater efficiency, it was much easier to coordinate operations with a unified Resistance movement than several ones.
Needless to say, that unification took time and wasn’t easily achieved. It was really only from late spring 1943 that the French Resistance started to be unified, as we’ve seen it was done via the CNR ( National Council of the Resistance) with Jean Moulin’s MUR movement having done a lot of the legwork and also later and with the integration of the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior.
(as I mentioned earlier Moulin was arrested in Lyon, badly tortured and died during his transfer to a German camp - tortured by Klaus Barbie’s men (see the first seminal film I recommended, Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville, there are connections with Moulin), not just Barbie’s men actually but also Barbie himself.
Barbie’s nickname was “The Butcher of Lyon”. He was extradited from Bolivia in the 1980s by the famous Nazi Hunters the Klarsfeld family and was trialled in Lyon (he died in prison in 1991).
Then there was the issue of how to organise the new unified propaganda, how to finance the Resistance, how to find the necessary weaponry etc… It is a very vast subject!
There was (roughly speaking) a Leftwing and a Rightwing Resistance, with Far right strands, a Communist Resistance, a Gaullist Resistance, a Jewish Resistant movement, an Armenians in France Resistance movement, a -former- PoW Resistance movement (and those who had escaped PoW camps, it was called the M.N.P.G.D.), a female Resistance etc. Resistants came from very different perspectives but had the same goal: to defeat the enemy. So all that had to be unified otherwise it would never have worked.
However, because they came from very different horizons it certainly wasn’t always smooth, it wasn’t one big homogeneous movement that all agreed and got on fine etc. And here what happened in the 1930s just before WWII in France was key, as there had been deep divisions between various components of society - basically between the Communists, and the Leftwing of the Front Populaire movement (which I mentioned a couple of days ago as the was the first time that all the leftwing movement united to form a government, in 1936), the Right and Far Right. They didn’t always see eye to eye, they had different priorities, different strategies etc.
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