Alone among almost all of his expatriate peers in Paris, Samuel Beckett joined the Resistance to fight against the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. The anomaly of his act remains striking to this day. Why would a foreign artist, a citizen of the neutral country of Ireland, faced with life under the unstable, violent, and authoritarian Vichy regime, stay in Paris at the outbreak of war in 1940? Even more: why would Beckett join the French Resistance to fight against the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators? Beckett joined the Resistance more or less at its inception and this is a crucial point, one that might be overlooked by those who assume that the Resistance was a far more widespread and common phenomenon than in fact it was. As historian Robert Paxton writes, at its high point (which is often seen as the months in 1944, when the Germans were already clearly headed toward defeat and the Vichy regime was in shambles) the Resistance comprised only 1–2 percent of the French population. Most of those individuals joined in 1943 or 1944. The number of individuals who joined the Resistance at its inception, in 1940–41, was a miniscule fraction of all résistants. Furthermore, most writers and intellectuals at the time shied away from joining the Resistance until it became politically unpalatable not to do so. Representative of these années noires is a writer like Simone de Beauvoir, who famously explained her actions after the war with the phrase, ‘il fallait survivre’—whether this meant occasional low-grade collaboration with the enemy, pragmatic attentisme, or removal from politics altogether.

Beckett, in this instance, seems the exception that proves the rule. As an Irish citizen in France during the war, Beckett could have gone about his business with only the deprivations of daily life during wartime to concern him. Instead, he and his French companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil became members of a small but fearless Resistance cell called ‘Gloria’ in September 1941, acting as secretaries and couriers typing and translating Resistance reports from French into English.