Clare Mulley

Reliving the most famous last stand of the French Resistance

A review of The Cruel Victory, by Paddy Ashdown. The last days of the Free Republic of the Vercors sounded with ‘the screaming of unmilked cows and the rattle of the machine guns’

Appalling retributions and atrocities marked the end of the Free Republic of the Vercors. A French Resistance fighter is hanged in 1944 [LAPI/Roger Viollet]
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  • The Cruel Victory

    Paddy Ashdown

    William Collins, pp. 472

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance in the second world war, there is an awful inevitability to this book. Tragedy looms like the great plateau itself, overshadowing the individual stories of the people who lived, fought and died in these mountains.

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