What’s interesting to note is that for most of the Nazi occupation (up to the last several months before the American/British forces pushed them back into Germany) is that the French Resistance was overwhelmingly made up of communists and socialists whose long-term objective was to establish a workers republic to replace the bourgeois one once the Nazis were beaten.
Meanwhile, the British Special Operations Executive, which was the wing of the British military responsible for corresponding and supplying resistance movements across Europe, was the Resistance’s primary source of supplies and wider intel on the Nazis’ war in Europe.
The SOE also sent 500 agents (as it turns out exactly 500) into France during the occupation to support, train, and organize the array of resistance groups there (again remember, which were mostly, but not entirely communist).
Who the SOE sent is interesting. In order to blend in, they had to speak French flawlessly and naturally be apart of the culture, as well as look French. The primary source of these agents were a combination French soldiers who escaped to England with Charles de Gaulle and subsequently signed up with the British army to fight and were then secretly recruited to the SOE and the other source were a combination of French, Swiss, and English civilians who’d also escaped to England once the invasion and occupation started.
The apparently common background of these previously civilian SOE agents was no accident. They were by and large the sons and daughters of Anglo-French capitalists, mostly from Paris. They were sending the children of the French bourgeoisie to organize French communists. As a result, frequently, these bourgeois children would land in France, make contact, then within a week or so disappear and reappear a hundred miles away, contacting London to tell them that the cell they were assigned was “compromised”, or “ideologically incompatible” with the SOE’s goals and these renegade agents largely began organizing brand new cells and networks on their own - with surprising success, sometimes recruiting several thousand people into their network, which largely explains why the pro-de Gaulle/British Resistance forces began to outnumber the communists and socialists and why the Soviet-planned communist insurrection at the end of the war never happened, because the French communists knew they were impossibly out-gunned by the Allies, the same Allies who were supplying their Resistance groups, knew all their locations, and most of their members.
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