In Europe

sneered back at him: ‘And what about you? How do you expect us, the British, to adopt a position separated from that of the United States? We are going to liberate Europe, but it is because the Americans are with us to do so. For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’
    De Gaulle would never forget those words. In 1963 he used his veto as president of France to block British admission to the European Economic Community: by admitting them, Europe would also be admitting the Trojan Horse of America. In 1966 he withdrew France from the military organisation of NATO: the American troops were to leave Europe, and certainly to leave France. About 26,000 GIs were sent home. The American secretary of state, Dean Rusk, cynically asked de Gaulle whether ‘the dead Americans in the military cemeteries’ also fell under the evacuation orders.A cartoonist drew a GI on his way out, shouting to the president: ‘If you need us again, our number is 14–18 — 39–45!’ That year, de Gaulle travelled to Moscow to establish new ties with Eastern Europe.
    And time after time, in intimate circles, he would recount Churchill's words from June 1944.
    Finally there is the story of all those millions of French citizens in occupied France. After the confusion, the fleeing and the humiliation, they felt the impact of foreign occupation chiefly in their stomachs. On an unheard-of scale, the Germans quickly picked their part of the country to the bone, and that soon became felt. In October 1941, the Parisian authorities were warning against the use of cat meat in daube provençale.
    In addition, as from 1942, millions of men from the occupied territories were transported to Germany to perform forced labour there at the factories and farms, and this new manhunt drove people all over Europe into the arms of the Resistance. Former Vichy supporters also now became convinced that, in practical terms, Hitler's European
Grossraumwirtschaft
amounted to nothing less than a European economy dedicated solely to the service of Germany.
    In the Lozère, the Cevennes, the Creuze, Auvergne, the Massif Central, in all those huge, sparsely populated mountainous regions, the ‘unregistered’, the refugees and those dodging the
Arbeitseinsatz
, quickly formed resistance groups of their own, operating more or less independently of the official Resistance. As early as summer 1942, the word
maquis
– Corsican for rough, wooded terrain – had become a normal part of the French vocabulary. ‘
Prendre le maquis
’ was the expression used both for going into hiding in the French interior and joining the Resistance. In autumn 1943, the southern French Resistance estimated the number of
Maquisards
at 15,000.
    Unlike the official Resistance, the Maquis was and remained a spontaneous movement taken part in primarily by young people. They formed something like Robin Hood clans, each with its own subculture, its own jargon and its own leader, always on the move, always busy surviving. Each group carried out its own war against Vichy and the Germans. Most of them were hardly involved in any coordinated resistance activities, such as espionage for London, systematic sabotage or support for the Allies.
    The leader of the Maquis in the Drôme, L'Hermine, wandered the countryside in a black cape decorated with his own coat of arms. When the British philosopher A. J. Ayer arrived as an undercover agent in southwest France just before the liberation, he found the region, in his own words, to be ‘in the hands of a series of feudal lords whose power and influence were strangely similar to that of their fifteenth-century Gascon counterparts.’
    In January 1943, the Vichy regime launched the
Milice Française
, a large countermovement of at least 30,000 blackshirts. Their oath of honour made no bones about the true business at hand: ‘I swear to fight against democracy, against the Gaullist revolt and against the cancer of Judaism …’ From the start to the very finish, of course, the Maquis and the
Milice Française
were arch-enemies, although it became increasingly unclear who was hunting whom. As it had in Italy, all this rage and desperation finally resulted in a civil war of unknown cruelty,
la guerre franco-française
.
    A total of some 30,000 French Resistance fighters were executed