The spy network was called the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d ' Action ( BCRA ), and its actions were carried out by volunteers who were parachuted into France to create and nourish local Résistance cells.

After the landings in Normandy and Provence, the paramilitary components of the Résistance were organized more formally, into a hierarchy of operational units known, collectively, as the French Forces of the Interior ( FFI ).

Their actions were often brutal and included torture and execution of Résistance suspects.

" Although many, including d ' Astier himself, did fit this description, most members of the Résistance came from traditional backgrounds and were " individuals of exceptional strong-mindedness, ready to break with family and friends " in order to serve a higher purpose.

Inevitably, there is the question of how many were active in the Résistance.

Eventually, leaders of all of these separate and fragmented Résistance organizations were gathered and coordinated by Jean Moulin, under the auspices of the National Council of Resistance ( CNR ), De Gaulle's formal link to the irregulars throughout occupied France.

The poster emphasised the group's membership, many of whom were Jews and communists, in order to discredit the Résistance as not being sufficiently " French " in its fundamental allegiance and motivations.

As a result of the fate they were promised by Vichy and the Germans, Jews were over-represented at all levels of the French Résistance.

" Consequently, women in the Résistance were less numerous than men and represented an average of 11 % of the members in the formal networks and movements.

Those who were involved in the Résistance were usually confined to subordinate roles.

No women, however, were chosen to lead any of the eight major Résistance movements, and, after the liberation of France, the provisional government appointed no women as ministers or commissaires de la République.

The CTE permitted prisoners to leave the internment camps if they agreed to go work in factories in Germany, but as many as sixty thousand Republicans who were recruited to the labor service managed to escape, and, instead, they joined the French Résistance.

Early acts of violent resistance were often more motivated by instinct, a fighting spirit, than by any formal ideology, but, later, several distinct political alignments and visions of post-liberation France developed among the Résistance organizations.

These differences sometimes resulted in conflicts, but the differences among Résistance factions were usually papered-over by a shared opposition to Vichy and the Germans.

Many of the networks recruited and controlled by the British and Americans were not perceived by the French as being especially interested in establishing a united or integrated Résistance operation, and the guerrilla groups controlled by the communists were only slightly more engaged by the idea of a Résistance " umbrella " organization.

The majority of resistance movements in France were unified after Jean Moulin's formation of the Conseil National de la Résistance ( CNR ) in May 1943.

The intelligence networks were by far the most numerous and substantial of Résistance activities.

In August 1941, the Parisian chemist France Bloch-Serazin assembled a small laboratory in her apartment to provide explosives to communist Résistance fighters.

) He succeeded to the extent that the first three of these resistance leaders and their groups came together to form the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance ( M. U. R.

Many Spanish escapees joined French Résistance groups ; others formed their own autonomous groups, which became known as the Spanish maquis.

Coldwave described groups such as KaS Product, Martin Dupont, Asylum Party, Norma Loy, Pavillon 7B, Résistance, Clair Obscur, Opera Multi Steel, The Breath of Life, and Trisomie 21.

Two major Résistance groups adopted the name Franc-Tireur during the German occupation of France during the Second World War.

The RCK is also a member of the RSRA ( Réseau Supporter de Résistance Antiraciste ), an anti-racism group composed of a network of other supporter groups in French football.

A number of smaller Mai Mai groups, such as the Mudundu 40 / Front de Résistance et de Défense du Kivu ( FRDKI ) and Mouvement de Lutte contre l ' Agression au Zaïre / Forces Unies de Résistance Nationale contre l ' Agression de la Républíque Démocratique du Congo ( MLAZ / FURNAC ), were reported to cooperate with the Rwandan military and RCD-Goma.

Also, in 1941, Colonel Pierre-Georges Fabien shot and killed a German soldier in the station, marking the beginning of the armed Résistance in Paris.

The men and women of the Résistance came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés ; conservative Roman Catholics, including priests ; members of the Jewish community ; and citizens from the ranks of liberals, anarchists, and communists.

The French Résistance involved men and women representing a broad range of ages, social classes, occupations, religions, and political affiliations.

Joseph Epstein was assigned responsibility for training Résistance fighters across the city, and his new commandos of fifteen men allowed a number of attacks that would not have previously been possible to be carried out.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote in his memoirs of the role the Résistance 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.

Two weeks later, however, in a three-way tag team elimination match, William Regal and Eugene were the last men standing, beating both La Résistance and the team of Tajiri and Rhyno.

This saw Conway defeat a jobber and Val Venis, while Grenier was defeated by both Val Venis and Chris Jericho before both men competed in a triple threat match ( with Intercontinental Champion Shelton Benjamin for the title ), Benjamin won the match after the La Résistance members began to argue and fight with each other.

This saw Conway defeat a jobber and Val Venis, while Grenier was defeated by both Val Venis and Chris Jericho before both men competed in a triple threat match ( against Intercontinental Champion Shelton Benjamin for the title ), Benjamin won the match, not long after the La Résistance members began to argue and fight.

Despite opposing the collaborating regime, the French Résistance generally sympathised with its antifeminism and did not encourage the participation of women in war and politics, following, in the words of the historian, Henri Noguères, " a notion of inequality between the sexes as old as our civilisation and as firmly implanted in the Résistance as it was elsewhere in France.

After November 1940, he had the idea of teaming up with his former colleague, Gaston Cusin, to identify and contact a number of potential Résistance " centers of influence ", but only during the summer of 1941 was he able to make the most critical contacts, including contact with Henry Frenay, leader of the movement not yet called Combat, but the National Liberation Movement.

While Communist sympathisers were highly present among their ranks ( which explains their history of engagement in the Résistance, and according to some due to a desire to practice entryism ), a purge limited their number after the French Communist Party ( PCF ) took on the role of opposition to postwar governments – following a demonstration in Marseille ( 12 November 1947 ) called by the CGT union and the PCF that the CRS, a majority of whom were Communists, refused to repress, several companies were dissolved and the CRS were reorganised so as to remove Communist influence among their ranks.

After World War II, the PCF called itself the " party of 80, 000 executed people " ( le parti des 80 000 fusillés ); it had great electoral success due to the FTP's prestige as a major part of the Résistance.

Historians still debate how effective the French Résistance was militarily, but for instance the neutralization of the Maquis du Vercors alone involved the commitment of over 10, 000 German troops within the theater, with several more thousands held in reserve, in a period when the Allied invasion was breaking out of Normandy and French Operation Jedburgh commandos were being dropped nearby to the south to prepare for the Allied landing in Provence.

Towards the end of the occupation, the PCF had reached the height of its influence, controlling large areas of France through the Résistance units under its command.

Christian Bouchet had previously been a member of Nouvelle Résistance ( NR ), an offshoot of Troisième Voie ( Third Way ) which described itself as " nationalist revolutionary ".

He left London on 21 March 1943 with orders to form the Conseil national de la Résistance ( CNR ), a difficult task since the five resistance movements involved ( beside the three already in the M. U. R.

* Les Cahiers Français, La part de la Résistance Française dans les évènements d ' Afrique du Nord ( Official reports of French Resistance Group leaders who seized Algiers on 8 November 1942, to allow allied landing ), Commissariat à l ' Information of Free French Comité National, London, Aug. 1943.

In early 1943, the Vichy authorities established a paramilitary group, the Milice ( militia ), to combat the Résistance.

There, in November 1940, he organized one of the most active and important Résistance networks of the BCRA, the Confrérie de Notre Dame ( Brotherhood of Our Lady ), which provided the Allies with photographs, maps, and important information on the German defenses known as the Atlantic Wall.

After the war, the influential French Communist Party ( PCF ) projected itself as " Le Parti des Fusillés " ( The Party of those shot ), in recognition of the thousands of Communists executed for their Résistance activities.

The Vichy Regime's prejudicial policies had discredited traditional conservatism in France by the end of the war, but following the liberation many former Pétainistes became critical of the official résistancialisme, using expressions such as " la mythe de la Résistance " ( the myth of the Résistance ), with one concluding, " The ' Gaullist ' régime is therefore built on a fundamental lie.

The Résistance is also portrayed in Jean Renoir's wartime This Land is Mine ( 1943 ), which was produced in the USA.

Barbara Mellor ), Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, London, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008 ISBN 978-0-7475-9597-7 ( American title: Resistance: A Frenchwoman's Journal of the War, Bloomsbury, USA, 2008 ); Dutch: Resistance.

* Pierre Brossolette, Résistance ( 1927-1943 ), éd.

* La Résistance de 1814, stone, ( 1833 – 1837 ), Paris, arc de triomphe de l ' Étoile, western facade

It was a member of the Conseil national de la Résistance ( CNR ), which federated, under Jean Moulin's authority, various Resistance movements, beginning in the middle of 1943.

When the OAS was replaced by the Conseil National de la Résistance ( CNR ), he joined this new organization as one the heads ( around Georges Bidault, former President of the World War II National Council of the Resistance ).

André Isaac ( August 15, 1893-February 9, 1975 ), better known as Pierre Dac was a French humorist and Résistance activist.

In early 2005 at May's pay-per-view event Backlash, The Hurricane and Rosey won the World Tag Team Championship in a Tag Team Turmoil match after defeating then-champions Tajiri and William Regal, The Heart Throbs ( Romeo and Antonio ), Simon Dean and Maven and La Résistance ( Robért Conway and Sylvain Grenier ) by last eliminating La Résistance.