IT WAS a splendid myth. France, defeated on the battlefield but unbowed in spirit, fought on magnificently in the Resistance against the Nazi beast and played a major role in its own Liberation. As one man, the French fought the German conqueror bitterly, bleeding him white, until France’s Second Armored Division invaded Normandy and restored the country to freedom. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Hoist the tricolore. Let freedom ring.
Year by year pieces of this fiction have fallen away. But it is only now, with most of the active participants gone from the scene, that France is finally coming to terms with its wartime history.
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