Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert
Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death…?’ In practice, most of the writers and academics who remained in France after 1940 simply kept their heads down and went on with their own work. Sartre himself had several of his plays staged. There was, however, a number of these men and women for whom collaboration of any kind was immediately intolerable. One of these was a 46-year-old art historian and ethnographer, divorced mother of two adult sons, called Agnès Humbert.
The Musée de l’Homme was one of Paris’s most prestigious museums. On its staff, and working closely with it, was a group of gifted curators, scientists, teachers and writers, politically to the Left, who, discovering a shared sense of fury against the invader, decided to set up one of the first resistance networks in occupied France.
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