Travellers zooming up or down the Rhône Valley in the TGV Méditerranée, when passing through the area on a reasonably clear day, will undoubtedly notice an impressive mountain range suddenly rising from the low-level terrain of the Rhône Valley east of Valence. When this reviewer crossed on foot what is now known as Le Vercors in a week-long gruelling hike in 1984, the ubiquity of historical markers denoting the precise locations where resistance fighters had been shot and killed impressed itself upon the two trekkers holding German passports already during the very first day. In France, the Vercors has become a lieu de mémoire and incorporates a great variety of aspects and interpretations of the French resistance experience in an almost exemplary manner.

Curiously enough, despite a plethora of publications on the Vercors, until the publication of Gilles Vergnon's meticulously researched and carefully constructed volume, no academic study of this topic had seen the light of day. Le Vercors not only admirably fills that gap on the moment of resistance itself, but literally half the book's pages are devoted to the various images and myths constructed vis-à-vis the Vercors in the postliberation period, all the way up to the present. Thus, the reader benefits not only from a careful reconstruction and analysis of the resistance in the Vercors, but they likewise gain a thorough insight into the workings of France's memory industry and the various strands within the latter vying for attention from the French public and/or the memory elites. Vergnon's study is, to the best of my knowledge, the best piece of historical writing on a specific case of French resistance activism combining historical footwork and a critical analysis of subsequent interpretations of the actual events.

Introductory chapters depict the socio-political prehistory of the Vercors, at the same time that they draw a vivid picture of the geography of this contested terrain. Here Vergnon, early on, begins to unravel the post-1944 myth of the Vercors as an impregnable fortress accessible to few. He also admirably demonstrates the very many politico-administrative rivalries between the inhabitants of different portions of this supposedly unified terrain. Last but not least, he highlights the fact that the Vercors as a geographic unit is, for the most part, a postliberation construction, which papered over the preexisting independent identities of various geographic portions of what later on became known as, simply, the Vercors.

Still, if Vergnon is refreshingly ruthless in exposing the multiple ways in which the experiences of the maquis in the Vercors has given rise to various interpretations, the author never succumbs to the postmodern temptation to dissolve all that is real into wilful or unwitting products of the human mind. The resistance in the area now known as the Vercors was very real, as was the brutal repression by the German army shortly before liberation ultimately arrived.

The book is therefore in part also a story—and a story well told. Vergnon recounts, for instance, how pre-war networks of sociability were often decisive for recruitment into the local maquis. He also has a keen eye for the language of symbols. The French Boy Scout tradition, for example, left a major imprint on the symbolism of the maquis: “shorts, neckerchiefs, arrows, patrols, outdoor cooking, peeling potatoes, bonfires” (69). Likewise, the peculiar syncretism of the maquis could be witnessed frequently across the Vercors as, for instance, at a Christmas celebration in 1943 when, one participant later remembered, “communists read from Marxist texts, and Christians read from the Gospel. There emerged between us a certain kind of communion (82).”

But perhaps the most interesting section of Vergnon's discussion of the actual maquis experience itself is his reconstruction of daily life and practices in the liberated zone created in the Vercors for, roughly, six exhilarating weeks after June 9, 1944. Indeed, it was in the Vercors that the French resistance constructed during those weeks the closest equivalent (if ultimately on a lesser scale) to what became almost a regular feature of Second World War resistance movements in portions of Northern Italy, but even more so in Greece and Yugoslavia: an island of freedom, a mountain mini-republic, here in the Vercors complete with its own newspaper, border guards and a functioning civilian and military administration, all the while surrounded by Vichy and German military might in the valleys below, the latter a superior force to which the maquis eventually succumbed.

It would go too far to reconstruct the various reasons for the emergence of the Vercors Republic, or to explicate the factors behind its ultimate bloody demise. Suffice it to say that, already in the dying days of this island of freedom, accusations of betrayal (by the Allies, by the French government in exile, etc.) began to be openly aired. Vergnon deals authoritatively with the various claims, and the reader may be referred to the pages of this handsome volume for what appear to this reviewer definitive answers. But it is in part precisely the unusual and ultimately tragic trajectory of the maquis du Vercors that has resulted in its eventual selection as a prime target for post-war mythmaking and the culture of official commemorations.

Already between 1944 and 1947, the Vercors obtained “a national notoriety” (149) in this respect. All the various tropes of the mainstream commemoration industry could already then be observed in nuce. Civilian casualties were left mostly unaddressed. The destruction of up to 97 percent of all homes and 96 percent of livestock by Nazi terror in some communities was downplayed; but the supposedly exemplary character and determination of valiant resistance fighters whose sacrifice contributed to the Allied recognition of the French government-in-exile was underscored instead. Severe internal rifts were papered over, such as the bitter telegram sent by the civilian head of the Vercors Republic, Eugène Chavant, to the French Army Headquarter in Algiers in the final days of the mountain republic, where Chavant categorically stated: “Those in London and Algiers have understood absolutely nothing about the situation we find ourselves in, and we consider them to be criminals and cowards. I repeat: criminals and cowards” (14).

Until the autumn of 1947, an unspoken consensus governed all commemorative activity. Individuals at the center of controversies, such as Eugène Chavant, kept quiet. From late 1947 onwards, a massive rift emerged in the wake of cold war dissensions between Gaullist and communist visions of the Vercors, with the Communist Party going so far as to stage counter-commemorations. But the communists, never strangers to celebrations of French grandeur, did not manage to attract any noticeable non-party support, and the crudely instrumentalist nature of their sudden discovery of alternative interpretations of the Vercors experience did not help matters. For the most part, even in the 1950s, “the Vercors continuously serves to illustrate national unity in all its dimensions” (135).

For some decades, then, only a few die-hard non-conformist observers managed to publish critical views but, until the 1960s, they remained lone voices in a sea of patriotic ardour. Only when the events of May 1968 shook up the torpor of French society did alternative interpretations of the Vercors experience gain central attention, exemplified by Gilbert Joseph's 1972 publication of Combattant du Vercors. Yet, in more recent years, a new development has shifted the focus of the official memory industry. Increasingly so, not only the social revolutionary aspect of the experience of the island of freedom, but even the national liberation dimension of the Vercors is relegated to the footnotes of history. In accordance with the new demands of the contemporary age, even patriotism is giving way to invocations of “the duty to be vigilant,” general and abstract warnings about “barbarism” and “intolerance,” and the solemn invocation of universal “human rights” (190).

Still, there exist some noteworthy continuities over time. Thus, for instance, even in the best of days, official memory of the Vercors favoured important sites of the military history of the Vercors at the expense of (even key) locations of the civilian administration of the “mountain republic.” Thus, Saint-Martin-en-Vercors, the administrative center of the zone libérée, was curiously “forgotten” in commemorative activities right from the start. Today, Saint-Martin, the political “capital” of the Vercors Republic, has still no noteworthy monument indicating its chief role at the time. Indeed, Saint-Martin-en-Vercors is not even listed as a site historique on official inventories of lieux de mémoires in the embattled Vercors.

Gilles Vergnon's study deserves wide distribution and recognition as a keynote contribution to the study of Second World War resistance forces and their warped echoes in subsequent decades, not only in France. Methodologically, his book will hopefully inspire similar work of this kind, for other countries as well. A translation into English would be most appropriate.