The French Resistance: a romantic ideal for most

For many years, I accepted the idea in the old joke that the French Resistance was an oxymoron. Every French family I spoke to seemed to have a war hero who was shot by the Gestapo for sabotaging trains. I often wondered exactly how many people were in the French Resistance, but no one knows.

I do know that many families were divided. I remember when I first went to my husband's family home in the Vercors, an Alpine region which witnessed horrific fighting during World War II and was one of the main Resistance pockets. He took me for a walk in the countryside and showed me two small crucifixes underneath some blooming chestnut trees. They bore the dates of June, 1944 and commemorated two of his cousins, both Resistance fighters who were shot in the nearby gully a few months before the liberation of Paris.

But not everyone in that family were good guys. Like most French families, there were those who loathed the occupation and those who kept their noses clean. I don't think anyone in his family actually collaborated, but I think many of them wanted to feed their families and stay alive. So they looked the other way. I have had so many philosophical debates about the Resistance since I moved to France. I would like to think I would have been one of those people blowing up trains and harbouring Jewish families. But I have a small child. Would I have, instead, remained quiet, kept my head down and ignored the horror around me simply to stay alive or more importantly, keep him alive? Would I have slept with a German officer to get food if my family were starving?

It is easy to be highly principled during peacetime. But I have lived in war in several countries and I have seen ordinary people do extraordinary things. And I have seen ordinary people do extraordinary acts of evil simply because they were following orders.

Sophie Marceau's new film Female Agents is released in the UK on June 27. It's a good film, based on the true story of an extraordinary Frenchwoman, Lise Villameurs, a successful French operative in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). The plot is rather silly, but it's fun to watch. Marceau leads a group of three rather ditzy girls who go on to become great assassins in the course of a few weeks.

The film opens with Marceau as a sniper trying to pick off a German officer. The German officer unfortunately picks off her husband, another Resistance fighter, first. We see her pain, but guess what - she keeps shooting. Her operative mission, rather than love, comes first.

The film shows Lise tortured, losing a much longed-for baby with her dead husband (she did live to be 98 but never had children), and seeing her beloved brother, another operative, being tortured to death in front of her. Throughout the film she takes unbelievable risks that most of us would have run away from.

It is true not everyone behaved like Lise did during the war. The wonderful book, Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemerovsky, who was deported and died in the camps, is a terrible indictment of life in a small French village during the war, and how little people did to save the Jews. But there were plenty of men and women like Louise, men and women who died young and senselessly to save their country from the Nazi occupation. When I walk through my neighbourhood, I see plenty of plaques on buildings testifying that someone once lived there, but was gunned down by the Gestapo.

I always like to think that I would do the right thing in a situation. But war is scary. And when you are a parent, it's scarier - you want bread and water and medicine and a place to keep your family safe.

So the film changed my mind. Was the Resistance an exaggerated myth? I don't think so. Certainly, I don't think there were nearly as many members as the French would like us to believe, but I think that every single one who took those risks and fought for what they believed in was an extraordinary human being.
Janine di Giovanni's latest book, The Place at the End of the World, is published by Bloomsbury. ·