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.

However belated, this warning directed at American aircrews by their evasion officers is revealing. Enemy civilians had become the greatest danger facing downed airmen, more so even than the Gestapo and SS. They also outdid the Hitler Youth, who were nevertheless heavily involved in hunting down fugitives. The fact that civilians should be the ranking champions of violence against downed airmen took Allied intelligence services by surprise. It took them nearly two years, from 1943 to 1945, to recognize that the usual hierarchy of wartime violence had in this way been inverted.

A posthumous debate pitted Max Weber against Norbert Elias, two pioneering sociologists born in Wilhelmine Germany. In his book Economy and Society, written in the aftermath of the First World War, Max Weber defined “social activity” as a “fundamental concept of sociology.” In his view, “if at the beginning of a shower a number of people on the street put up their umbrellas at the same time … this would not ordinarily be a case of [social] action, but rather of all reacting in the same way to the like need of protection from the rain.”1 To which Norbert Elias in the 1980s responded that one only has an umbrella if one is located in certain civilizations and that opening an umbrella is thus not socially neutral.2 This is not the place to consider whether Weber’s vision of social activity was really so narrow.3 But it is clear that opening an umbrella is also not a politically neutral action. For the decision taken in isolation by thousands of individual actors in France to open their umbrellas to protect Allied soldiers and airmen on the run was at the origin of wartime escape networks and thus of one aspect of the Resistance. An isolated action repeated so many times is a social and political action.

Walking a tightrope, the British government exhorted the people to take up arms while simultaneously seeking to prevent the turmoil that might result from this. One risk of this balancing act was to trigger acts of violence against downed airmen contrary to international law. If Britain mistreated its German prisoners, Germany would not fail to take retaliatory measures against the thousands of British prisoners it already held. It was thus necessary to at once encourage and restrain the population, inciting the citizens to a determination that was both resolute and calm. Doing so was all the more important given the fear that a panic similar to that which seized hold of the Belgians and French during the invasion of their territory would once again happen if the Germans crossed the Channel. The exodus of 1940 had contributed to defeat on the continent. Order and calm must thus reign in men’s minds at all costs. So how was one to fire and dampen, arouse and soothe, incite and pacify at one and the same time?

After losing 500,000 soldiers in Russia during 1812, Napoleon quickly rebuilt his army in early 1813 to stop the pursuing Russians in Germany. His strategic situation took an unfavorable turn after Prussia broke its alliance with him and joined the Russians and British to form the Sixth Coalition. With Austria choosing to remain neutral, the Allies hoped to achieve a victory to convince Vienna to join the Coalition. Although the Allies took the offensive against his raw conscripts, Napoleon remained the master of operations. He drove the Allied army over 200 miles eastward in one month, earning important yet indecisive victories at Lützen and Bautzen. With the Allied army pinned against the Oder River in eastern Silesia, Napoleon agreed to an armistice brokered by the Austrians. Both sides used the time to build up massive forces and to woe Austria but Napoleon’s intransigence drove them to join the Coalition. After the armistice expired on 17 August, Napoleon won his only victory in the campaign at Dresden on 27 August. For the first time in the history of the coalition wars, the Allies had a plan of operations that Napoleon could not overcome. For the next six weeks, he chased phantoms, exhausting his troops, and grinding his army into the ground while the Allies defeated his subordinates in Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony. Finally, tired of running after an elusive enemy, Napoleon allowed himself to be surrounded in the city of Leipzig in the hope of finally waging and winning a decisive battle. The contest started on 16 October and ended with Napoleon commencing the retreat to France with a battered army on 19 October. Germany was lost.

Occurring at the mid-point in Napoleon’s imperial career, the Franco-Austrian War of 1809, or the War of the Fifth Coalition, highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the French emperor and his army as well as the beginnings of improvements among their foes. Austria, driven by a desire to avenge previous defeats and hoping to take advantage of Napoleon’s distraction in Spain, opened hostilities by invading Napoleon’s ally Bavaria, but the French emperor hastened to the theater of war, quickly seized the initiative and entered Vienna only one month after departing Paris. The ensuing conflict was fought across a vast geographic canvas. Combat in the principal theater, the Danube valley, featured Napoleon’s first undeniable repulse at Aspern-Essling (21–22 May), the second largest battle of the entire epoch at Wagram (5–6 July) and a surprisingly sudden armistice at Znaim six days later, but the war also encompassed strategically important actions in subsidiary theaters such as Italy, Poland, Hungary, Germany and Holland. It led to Austrian accommodation with France, Napoleon’s marriage to a Habsburg archduchess and eventually to a Franco-Austrian alliance, but it also deepened Franco-Russian suspicions and thus helped set the stage for war in 1812