Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel\'s Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance.
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..
In the catacombs of revolt, people create their own light and find their own law.
It is toward the shadow that its true and unknown face is turned.
France lives, bleeds, in all its depths.
One dies and kills as if it\'s natural.
Prisons, getaways, tortures, bombings, scuffles.
One finds accomplices even in ministries.
Officials and police officers are helping insurgents.
One changes home, name, every day.
Nothing is true any more.
Nothing counts.
Nothing about the order imposed by the enemy and by the Marshal is valid.
The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw.
Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland.
But mainly it no longer has any laws.
What, then, when it comes to recounting the story of France, an obscure, secret France, which is new to its friends, its enemies, and new especially to itself? France no longer has bread, wine, fire.
Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville\'s iconic 1969 film.
Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel\'s Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance
