page_title: French Resistance
section_title: Role in the liberation of France and casualties
hierarchical_section_title: French Resistance / Role in the liberation of France and casualties
caption_attribution_description: English: La Libération de Paris is a documentary shot by the French Resistance during the battle of Paris in August 1944. On August 15, the French Resistance set an uprising in the capital of France then occupied by the German. On August 25, the partisan snipers received backup as the Free French 2nd Armored Division of general Leclerc enters Paris. Urban warfare ensues involving Free French Forces and the German garrison. German and Vichy loyalists are taken prisoners as general Von Choltitz surrenders to Leclerc on August 25. The US enter the city later and de Gaulle delivers a famous speech. Screenshot from the 5:10 mark, showing ragtag "Resistants" at the Hotel de Ville in Paris.
context_page_description: The French Resistance was the collection of French movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women, who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers, providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind enemy lines. The men and women of the Resistance came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Jews, liberals, anarchists and communists.
  The French Resistance played a significant role in facilitating the Allies' rapid advance through France following the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, and the lesser-known invasion of Provence on 15 August, by providing military intelligence on the German defences known as the Atlantic Wall and on Wehrmacht deployments and orders of battle.
context_section_description: Defining the precise role of the French Resistance during the German occupation, or assessing its military importance alongside the Allied Forces during the liberation of France, is difficult. The two forms of resistance, active and passive, and the north–south occupational divide, allow for many different interpretations, but what can broadly be agreed on is a synopsis of the events which took place.
  Following the surrender of Fascist Italy in September 1943, a significant example of Resistance strength was displayed when the Corsican Resistance joined forces with the Free French to liberate the island from General Albert Kesselring's remaining German forces.
  On mainland France itself, in the wake of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the FFI and the communist fighting groups FTP, theoretically unified under the command of General Pierre Kœnig, fought alongside the Allies to free the rest of France. Several color-coded plans were co-ordinated for sabotage, most importantly Plan Vert (Green) for railways, Plan Bleu (Blue) for power installations and Plan Violet (Purple) for telecommunications. To complement these missions, smaller plans were drafted: Plan Rouge (Red) for German ammunition depots, Plan Jaune (Yellow) for German command posts, Plan Noir (Black) for German fuel depots and Plan Tortue (Tortoise) for road traffic. Their paralysis of German infrastructure is widely thought to have been very effective. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote in his memoirs praising the role the Resistance played in the liberation of Brittany, "The French Resistance Movement, which here numbered 30,000 men, played a notable part, and the peninsula was quickly overrun."
  The Liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, with the support of Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, was one of the most famous and glorious moments of the French Resistance. Although it is again difficult to gauge their effectiveness precisely, popular anti-German demonstrations, such as general strikes by the Paris Métro, the gendarmerie and the police, took place, and fighting ensued.
  The liberation of most of southwestern, central and southeastern France was finally fulfilled with the arrival of the 1st French Army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, which landed in Provence in August 1944 and was backed by over 25,000 maquis.
  One source often referred to is General Dwight D. Eisenhower's comment in his military memoir, Crusade in Europe:
  Throughout France, the Free French had been of inestimable value in the campaign. They were particularly active in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance, the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in Western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.
  General Eisenhower also estimated the value of the Resistance to have been equal to ten to fifteen divisions at the time of the landings. (One infantry division comprised about ten thousand soldiers.) Eisenhower's statements are all the more credible since he based them on his GHQ's formal analyses and published them only after the war, when propaganda was no longer a motive. Historians still debate how effective the French Resistance was militarily, but the neutralization of the Maquis du Vercors alone involved the commitment of over 10,000 German troops within the theater, with several more thousand held in reserve, as the Allied invasion was advancing from Normandy and French Operation Jedburgh commandos were being dropped nearby to the south to prepare for the Allied landing in Provence. One American officer, Ralph Ingersoll who served in SHEAF wrote in his book Top Secret:
  what cut the ice with us was the fact that when we came to France the Resistance was so effective that it took half a dozen real live German divisions to contend with it, divisions which might otherwise have been on our backs in the Bocage. And it made the most cynical sit up and take notice when we learned from German field officers that the Germ
caption: French resistance fighters in Paris at the Hotel de Ville, 1944.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Created with GIMP", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.10.2", "Image DateTime": "2020:08:27 18:58:16", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "256", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "193", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "6", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "316", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9334"}