Résistance: Contes de la Seconde Guerre mondiale en France

Édith Thomas (1909-1970) accompanied me on my first steps as a researcher. After encountering her in an undergraduate class, I decided to study her texts written during the Nazi Occupation of France during my early graduate work. I was fascinated not only by her accounts of life during the Occupation, but also by the way in which writing became a means of making sense of what was happening around her. Working with her archives in Paris was an added bonus! This collection of short stories, about everyday French people resisting the Occupation, was originally published clandestinely under a pseudonym in 1943. Her short stories testify to the importance of writing, of reading, and of storytelling, especially during times of instability, and are a reminder that literature can be a powerful form of resistance.