With a few famous exceptions, no history has been written of the fighting soldiers and civilians of May–June 1940. Yet resistance – whether it be the military resistance of Colonel de Gaulle, the resistance of the administration or the resistance to torture with which Jean Moulin opposed the invader – required an infrastructure and the support of troops, civil servants and citizens. The memory of these pockets of resistance has since been engulfed by the fact of defeat, Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime to such an extent that it has seriously skewed the history of the “débâcle,” understood as comprising both exodus and defeat. Missing from this portrait is any appreciation of the readiness to fight, whether patriotic or/and republican.