In Resistance and Liberation, Douglas Porch continues his epic history of France at war. Emerging from the debâcle of 1940, France faced the quandary of how to rebuild military power, protect the empire, and resuscitate its global influence. While Charles de Gaulle rejected the armistice and launched his offshore crusade to reclaim French honor within the Allied camp, defeatists at Vichy embraced cooperation with the victorious Axis. The book charts the emerging dynamics of la France libre and the Alliance, Vichy collaboration, and the swelling resistance to the Axis occupation. From the campaigns in Tunisia and Italy to Liberation, Douglas Porch traces how de Gaulle sought to forge a French army and prevent civil war. He captures the experiences of ordinary French men and women caught up in war and defeat, the choices they made, the trials they endured, and how this has shaped France's memory of those traumatic years.
- Definitive new history of France at war showing how de Gaulle sought to forge a new French army, prevent the country falling into civil war and reassert French power on the world stage
- Goes beyond the binaries of resistance and collaboration to show French society as a whole experienced war, defeat, occupation and liberation
- Reveals how de Gaulle attempted to establish a triumphalist French “memory” of the war by emphasizing the role of resistance in France's liberation while minimizing that of the Allies and the colonial forces of the l'Armée d'Afrique
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Reviews & endorsements
'In this groundbreaking work, Douglas Porch illuminates France's complicated wartime history from the confused political and military response to the invasion of North Africa, through resistance and liberation, to France's struggles to achieve a global position in the postwar world.' Mary Kathryn Barbier, author of Spies, Lies, and Citizenship: The Hunt for Nazi Criminals
'Moving deftly from the battlefield to grand strategy and from the metropolitan 'hexagon' to the reaches of empire, Douglas Porch has given us a striking new picture of France at war that is both comprehensive and analytically incisive. It is a masterpiece!' Andrew N. Buchanan, author of American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean during World War II
'Douglas Porch is a master storyteller: engrossing, enlightening and entertaining. He does full justice to an important dimension of the Second World War that is unfamiliar to many Anglophone readers.' Richard Carswell, author of The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory
'An impressive achievement.' Julian Jackson, Times Literary Supplement
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Product details
- Date Published: January 2024
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781009161145
- length: 832 pages
- dimensions: 235 x 164 x 48 mm
- weight: 1.31kg
- availability: In stock
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Tunisia
2. 'A sort of resurrection of France.'
3. Triumph and dishonor in Italy
4. Resistance on the eve of D-Day
5. The supreme battle
6. Anvil-Dragoon
7. L'Amalgame
8. Les Vosges
9. Rhine and Danube
10. Conclusion.
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Author
Douglas Porch, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California
Douglas Porch is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His previous books include Defeat and Division, France at War, 1939–1942 (2022), Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (2013), The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (published in the UK as Hitler's Mediterranean Gamble, 2004), and The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (1995).