The clandestine press of the French Resistance was collectively responsible for printing flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, and even books in secret in France during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The secret press was used to disseminate the ideas of the French Resistance in cooperation with the Free French, and played an important role in the liberation of France and in the history of French journalism, particularly during the .

History

Counterpropaganda such as leaflets, broadsheets (such as the first pages of the ), brochures, posters, and clandestine newspapers began to appear in France. In September 1941, German police in Paris reported discovering leaflets written in German and co-signed by the Communist Parties of Germany (KPD) and Austria (KPÖ). On 10 July 1942, General Karl Oberg posted a notice in every town hall in the Occupied zone announcing penalties applicable to the families of anyone convicted of disseminating propaganda against the occupying force (writers, typographers, middlemen, distributors), recalling ancient German Sippenhaft-style collective punishment measures. These measures didn't stop the spread of information by the Resistance, and by 1944, 1,200 underground newspaper titles were being published with a total circulation of two million copies, totaling nearly twelve million copies over the course of the war.

The first French underground newspapers emerged in opposition to German and Vichy control over French radio and newspapers. In the German-occupied zone, the first underground titles to emerge were Pantagruel and Libre France, which both began in Paris in October 1940. In Vichy France, the first title to emerge was Liberté in November 1940. Few produced issues for both German and Vichy zones, though Libération was an early exception. In early newspaper issues, individuals often wrote under a number of pseudonyms in the same issue to convey the impression that a team of individuals was working on a newspaper. Initially underground newspapers represented a wide range of political opinions but, by 1944, had generally converged in support of Gaullist Free French in the United Kingdom.

The four major clandestine newspapers during the German occupation were Défense de la France, Résistance, Combat and Libération. Défense de la France was founded by a group of parisian students in the summer of 1941. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, these were joined by a number of communist publications including L'Humanité and Verité. These newspapers were anti-Nazi propaganda, but practiced propaganda themselves by misreporting events, and glorifying and enlarging Allied victories. The reporting in these newspapers was often subjective, as they aimed to capture and shape public opinion rather than accurately represent it. The extent to which underground newspapers actually affected French popular opinion under the occupation is disputed by historians.

Profession-specific newspapers also existed. Le Médecin Français advised doctors to immediately approve known collaborators for Service du travail obligatoire while medically disqualifying everyone else. La Terre advised farmers on how to send food to resistance members. Bulletin des Chemins de Fer encouraged railroad workers to sabotage German transportation. Unter Uns ("Among Us"), published in German for the occupiers, printed stories of German defeats on the eastern front.

A small number of underground presses were also active in printing illegal books and works of literature. The most notable example of this was Le Silence de la mer by Jean Bruller published illegally in Paris in 1942. This marked its publisher, "Les Éditions de Minuit", as an emerging clandestine publisher of Resistance material; they later became a successful commercial literary publisher in post-war France.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) began a project in 2012 to digitise surviving French underground newspapers. By 2015, 1,350 titles had been uploaded on its Gallica platform.

Censorship and repression

Censorship in France was the enemy of the underground press during the Second World War. Under the German occupation and the laws of the Vichy regime, freedoms of the French people were suppressed, particularly with the end of freedom of the press. The decree-law of 24 August 1939 authorising seizure of newspapers and their suppression as well as the official establishment of censorship on 27 August led to the disappearance of newspapers which had been denouncing the German occupation. The only media that survived under the occupation were ones that served the propaganda needs of the German occupier and of Vichy.

It also spelled the end of freedom of speech, and any citizen caught reading the foreign press or listening to foreign radio were judged as opponents and enemies of the regime.

The occupying force and the police paid particular attention to counterpropaganda printed matter from the outset. One of the first missions of the police was to discover clandestine newspaper printing locations, and their leaders. The first arrests were therefore those of journalists involved in counterpropaganda such as Jean-Baptiste Lebas, who launched "" (The Free Man) and who died after being deported, or Claude Bourdet, director of the clandestine newspaper Combat arrested in March 1944. Out of 1200 workers 400 were killed (deported, decapitated, shot).

Printing and distribution methods

In the face of repression, underground newspapers faced many problems with supplies. Paper, ink and typewriters were scarce, expensive and their sale was meticulously controlled. Printing centres were also few and far between and were used for propaganda newspapers.

The first clandestine newspapers were therefore handwritten with very few copies. However, two processes were useful for clandestine production: the "roneo" Gestetner and the spirit duplicator, which was small in size and therefore easy to transport and hide. It was operated by a small crank handle, and could print between 700 and 800 copies per hour.

Everything was done with the utmost secrecy governments and also of people not involved in the clandestine work. The penalties for being involved in the printing and distribution of a resistance newspaper were very strict.

For the delivery and distribution of newspapers, Resistance members assumed the risk of being arrested and imprisoned. From the beginning, railway workers played an essential role in long-distance transport. The bicycle was also one of the best means of transport for delivering printed material. Other means were also used to distribute newspapers, allowing the anonymity of the distributors to be maintained: slipping the issues into letterboxes, under doors, or in a pocket, or dropping them on a bench or table.

In spite of strong repression and censorship nearly 1200 titles totaling over ten million copies of underground newspapers were printed between 1940 and 1944.

Radio Londres and the underground press

After the Fall of France in 1940, the BBC opened its studio to the first members of the Resistance who fled Occupied France. was born and would become the daily rendezvous of the French people for four years. It opened its transmission with, "" ("This is London. The French speaking to the French...") It was the voice of Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle, who, on 18 June 1940, made a speech known as Appeal of 18 June, inviting his compatriots to resist the occupation, and rise up against it.

The press was constrained on French territory to considerable supply difficulties and strong political repression. Radio, which broadcast mainly from abroad, was not subject to the same forms of repression. Radio Londres, broadcast by the French section of the BBC seemed better placed to make the voice of the French Resistance heard and to have a psychological influence on the French. Its broadcasts could be listened to both throughout the country and within the homes themselves, but in 1940 there were only five million receivers and the transistor hadn't yet been invented. Moreover, the broadcasts only provided a view of events from the outside, and had limited knowledge of what was happening within French territory.

Radio London and the clandestine newspapers thus had complementary functions in their common objective of bringing as many French people as possible to the Resistance. The radio was able to reach the entirety of the French population, while the press had the mission of fighting directly on the home front until it was able to spread more and more to the territory as a whole.

Calling for resistance

The content of clandestine newspapers focused exclusively on the motivations and nature of the Resistance struggle, and why it was necessary.

The duty to act is clearly stated in the first issue of Libération of July 1941 which stated that the newspaper per se is an action and that the situation can only be changed "by action and through action". Combat followed it by giving in January 1942 "guidelines for action".

There was only one cause common to all underground newspapers: to appeal to as many French people as possible to join the fight against the occupier, to "chase away the invader" as Libération wrote in August 1941, with the aim of liberating French territory. The first form of action targeted by the underground press was the call to read and circulate copies of the clandestine press. It also encouraged the reader to become a distributor. It was a form of "combat through words", as Combat wrote in December 1941. The situation at the time only allowed for resistance via verbal struggle. "We will take part in the crushing of Germany, even at the risk of our own lives," wrote the August 1941 issue of

The clandestine press worked to counter the ideas of the Vichy regime and Nazis by taking up the key themes of the official propaganda. By 1943, the watchwords of the counterpropaganda struggle taken up by all of the underground press, were opposing the Service du travail obligatoire, the Nazi-imposed obligatory work program, and calling for demonstrations, strikes and sabotage of French-made goods destined for Germany.

Top-circulation titles

Combat

The ("Little Wings") appeared in the Forbidden Zone in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. In the Occupied and Free zones, it became known as . In August 1941, its title changed: in the northern, Occupied zone, to ; in the southern zone, to (Truth). The group in the north was destroyed. In the south, during the merger of the (MLN) with the Resistance group, became , a new newspaper common to all three zones; its title was adopted by the MLN group, thenceforth known as , whose first issue came out in December 1941 under the influence of Bertie Albrecht and Henri Frenay. Production of was directed by André Bollier. Thanks to the structures put in place, circulation reached 1000 copies in 1943, and attained 5,000 with issue number 50 of 1 November 1943. and 30,000 in December 1943.

After the Liberation, was led by Albert Ollivier, , and especially Pascal Pia, who dragged his friend Albert Camus there in the fall of 1943. Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Emmanuel Mounier also contributed, and later Raymond Aron and Pierre Herbart.

Défense de la France

A few Parisian students decided to found a clandestine newspaper to denounce the occupation of France. Benefiting from the support of industrialists and printers, the young Resistance fighters managed to produce an increasingly professional newspaper which ended up having the highest circulation of any underground paper as of January 1944.

The first issues were printed on a Rotaprint offset press hidden in the cellar of the Sorbonne, to which Hélène Viannay held the key as a volunteer fire fighter, with the following sentence from Blaise Pascal: "I only believe stories whose witnesses would have their throats cut".