Not everybody in the world become a Pétainist after the debacle and not all the resistance movements were infiltrated by communists working for the benefit of Moscow. Drawing upon numerous archives, Laurent Dazou explains why several men and women as diverse as a freewheeling navy officer, a normalien philosopher obsessed with maths, a young militant communist from the Latin Quarter and a founding banker from an anti-Semetic league, refused to crack under pressure. And so it was that Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, Jean Cavaillès, Lucie Aubrac and Georges Zérapha as well as many others joined the ranks of disenchantment, and learned to resist by organizing themselves to fight and to blaze the trail of disobedience.

An associate researcher at the Institute of History of Modern Time, Laurent Douzou is a specialist in the history of the Resistance.