Resistance and Betrayal
The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“Enthralling and intelligent, a masterly exploration of
the sinister labyrinth that was wartime France . . .
It is a remarkable book, utterly fascinating.”
—Allan Massie
Not long after 2:00 p.m. on June 21, 1943, eight men met in secret at a doctor’ s house in Lyon. They represented the warring factions of the French Resistance and had been summoned by General de Gaulle’s new envoy, a man most of them knew simply as “Max.”
Minutes after the last man entered the house, the Gestapo broke in, led by Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon.” The fate awaiting Barbie’s prisoners was torture, deportation, and death. “Max” was tortured sadistically but never broke: he took his many secrets to his grave. In that moment, the legend of Jean Moulin was born.
Who betrayed Jean Moulin? And who was this enigmatic hero, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? After the war, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon—France’s highest honor—where his memory is revered alongside that of Voltaire and Victor Hugo. But Moulin’s story is full of unanswered questions: the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend conveniently manufactured by de Gaulle.
Resistance and Betrayal tells for the first time in English the epic story of France’s greatest war hero, a Schindler-like character of ambiguous motivation. A winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, praised by Graham Greene and Julian Barnes, Patrick Marnham is a brilliant storyteller with a keen appreciation for the complex maze of moral compromises navigated in times of war. Told with the drama and suspense of the best espionage fiction, Resistance and Betrayal brings to life the dark and duplicitous world of the French Resistance and offers a startling conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Second World War.
NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"As far as he was concerned, the entire world was on a 'need to know' basis," notes journalist and biographer Marnham (The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon) of his notoriously secretive subject, celebrated French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Here Marnham chronicles the life of the civil servant who escaped to London in 1941 and became General DeGaulle's emissary to the Resistance, charged with organizing a collection of scrappy political factions into a cohesive movement. This he did until he was arrested by Klaus Barbie in 1943; despite subsequent torture, Moulin revealed no information and was soon killed. The partisan, whose private life largely remains a mystery, is both a hero and lightning rod in France, where he's been pilloried for his Communist sympathies and where there is still much speculation about who betrayed him to the Gestapo. Marnham has put together a lively and nuanced account, elaborating the role that Moulin's staunchly republican, anticlerical upbringing played in his later political activities.
