Comedy is often tasteless, but the BBC’s hugely popular 1980s sitcom ’Allo ’Allo jarred the nerves of anyone with the slightest sense of history. The German wartime occupation of France was one of the most traumatic experiences to befall a European nation in modern times. The horrors of fraternal strife, collaboration, betrayal, sacrifice and resistance could only become objects of mirth in a society that did not experience them.

Boris Vildé, a résistant shot by the Germans at a hill fort outside Paris on a cold February afternoon in 1942, wrote a valediction in prison: “I love France. I love this beautiful country. Yes, I know it can be small-minded, selfish, politically rotten and a victim of its old glory, but with all these faults it remains enormously human…For the true France to be reborn one day, sacrifices will be needed…We must know how to wear our destiny like a crown.”

The principal purpose of Matthew Cobb, who has lived most of his adult life in France, is to pay tribute to the nobility of such men and women as Vildé, who risked and sacrificed so much. He tells the tales of well-known martyrs such as Jean Moulin, but also of other heroic French men and women unknown to English readers, most familiar with the agents of Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Cobb avows a desire to shift the balance of historical study, which has tilted towards recognising the overwhelming reality of French collaboration or at least acquiescence with the occupiers. Today, he says, “We are less deferential than in the past…tales of bravery and self-sacrifice are more likely to provoke a cynical smile than awed regard. Popular views…have also been affected by the widespread suspicion that the true reality of the occupation was not the heroic acts of the resistance, but rather the behaviour of a population that apparently accepted the order of the new fascist masters.”

One difficulty for historians in striking the right balance is that strategically the accomplishments of resisters were entirely marginal. Western Europe would not have been liberated one day later had the resistance never existed. Only in Russia and Yugoslavia did partisan operations significantly influence Axis wartime deployments.

This was not the fault of the occupied nations. Churchill, when he famously instructed SOE in 1940 to “set Europe ablaze”, failed to perceive the futility of inviting civilians to harass ruthless and heavily armed regular forces. When the Nazi military commandant was shot by communists in a Nantes street in October 1941, Hitler ordered the reprisal shooting of 98 hostages.

Cobb quotes the last letter written by the youngest of these, 17-year-old Guy Moquet, to his parents: “I am going to die! All I ask you, in particular my dear Mother, is to be brave…what I want with my whole heart is that my death serves a purpose…17 and a half years! My life has been short! I have no regrets, apart from leaving you.”

The ferocity of German reprisals, which persisted until August 1944, convinced most French people that violent action against the occupiers was not worth the candle. De Gaulle agreed. In his broadcasts from London, he warned his nation to hold back from revolt until the time was right.

Churchill, however, dissented. Fearful that, left to themselves, the peoples of Hitler’s empire would lapse into acquiescence with their conquerors, he never wavered in his conviction that the blood of the innocent was a price worth paying to promote resistance. He thus sponsored the delivery of arms to Europe through SOE, though only in 1944 did these become substantial.

Cobb admirably traces the evolution of local resistance groups, which in the early years of occupation sought merely to meet, forge links with the like-minded and disseminate anti-Nazi news and propaganda. Even for these activities, the price of discovery was death, and thousands of patriots paid it.

From 1943 onwards, maquis bands in the countryside expanded dramatically, as young men fled their homes to avoid forced labour in Germany. Communist groups, especially, generated an increasing tempo of violence, which provoked the Germans to accelerate their atrocities.

The author suggests that 100,000 résistants died during the occupation, compared with earlier estimates of 24,000. He also says that past claims for the numbers of executions carried out during the post-occupation settling of scores, the épuration, are much too high. Scholars now suggest 9,000 as a realistic figure.

In truth, every large number relating to the second world war is unreliable. It seems safest to treat all statistics merely as indicative. Sufficient to say that France suffered appallingly, not least the 70,000 civilians killed by allied bombing and in the liberation campaign.

Cobb is an academic, and most of his narrative is impeccably sourced. But, in his determination to redress the balance against the cynics, at times his advocacy seems overtinted by romanticism. He makes the case for the courage and nobility of the resisters in vivid and moving terms. But the other side of the story, of the mass of people — above all the “haves” of French society — is equally real, and indisputably ugly.

I have always believed that, if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis, our own society would have behaved not much differently from the French. Popular sentiment would have fragmented between a minority willing to resist at any cost, and a majority making prudent calculations about the safety of their own homes, families, communities. In Marcel Ophüls’s remarkable film about occupied France, The Sorrow and the Pity, Anthony Eden justly remarks that no nation that has not suffered the experience of occupation possesses a right to pass moral judgment on one that has.

Cobb’s book is a fine piece of work, illustrated with excellent photographs, a number of them un-familiar. I quibble with some of his details, and remain convinced that any judgment on resistance should defer to its impressive moral force, while recognising its military insignificance. But the author has fulfilled with notable success his own purpose, of paying tribute to men and women who did extraordinary things in the face of one of the most hideous tyrannies in history.

A BBC executive at a television festival once exulted at the enthusiastic reception given to ’Allo ’Allo by his German counterparts. “They love it!” he said. “It’s the first show we’ve done that shows them as ­lovable idiots rather than absolute bastards.” Yet reality was far too terrible for the Nazi occupiers of France to deserve depiction, even in a sitcom, as anything but “absolute bastards”.

The resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis by Matthew Cobb

Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp416

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