Army of Shadows

Joseph Kessel

A novel about Resistance during World War II.

Gerbier, the chief of a resistance group is sent to a French concentration camp. He stays a few months there, before escaping with the help of Legrain, a young Communist. Then begins the story of his commitment to the Resistance, but also the story of thousands of French people - peasants, students, civil servants, chatelaines - involved in the same fight for liberty, and part of the army of the shadows.
“France no longer has bread, wine, fire. But mainly it no longer has any laws. Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland. The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw.
[...] Never has France waged a nobler and more beautiful war than in the basements where it prints its free newspapers, in its nocturnal lands, and in its secret coves where it received its free friends and from where its children set out, in torture cells where, despite tongs, red-hot pins, and crushed bones, the French died as free men.”
- Joseph Kessel wrote Army of Shadows in 1943, a symbol of the Resistance which follows a small group of Resistance fighters: ordinary people, who fought with a great courage despite fear, hunger, violence and the constant threats that weighed on them.
- More than a book about resistance, a humble and true story told by a man who was a member of a resistance group himself.
- The book was adapted into an iconic movie by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969, featuring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret.
- Over 200.000 copies sold.

Joseph Kessel was born in 1898 in Argentina, in a Jewish family. He spent the first years of his childhood in Russia, before coming to Paris where he studied before enrolling in the air force in 1916. His experience of war, his travels and life abroad (in the US and in Asia), his knowledge of the Parisian ghettos, influenced his first reports and novels, among which L'équipage (1923) and Fortune carrée (1930). During the Spanish Civil War, he was a reporter before joining the Free France Forces. An adventure reflected in his work, in which fraternity and compassion are expressed, for example in Chats des Partisans written with Maxime Duron, or Un témoin parmi les hommes (1956). Le Lion (1958) remains his best seller, showed that after Belle de jour (1928), he knew how to include dreams and innocence in his work.
In 1963, he was elected at the Académie Française. For the latest years of his life, he never stopped travelling the world, and left with Les Cavaliers (1967) a document on the little known customs of Afghans. He died in 1979 in Avernes (Val-d'Oise), leaving behind him a prestigious work composed of nearly 80 books.