Passionate about contemporary history, eager for confidences and concerned with truth, Jacky Berge and Jean-Yves Pineau have just released, published by La Geste, their second joint work: Our villages in the resistance 1940-1944, subtitle Networks and people.
Nearly 18,000 archival documents
Attentive to objectively reconstruct the facts, to report the events in detail, they scoured no less than 18,000 archival documents, met witnesses from the time, in order to produce a faithful, chronological and substantiated account of this dark period of our common history.
Their book gives pride of place to the large structured Deux-Sévrian networks, such as the Notre-Dame brotherhood, in Thouars, with Colonel Rémy, or the civil and military organization (OCM) which, from 1940, acted in the shadow and discretion.
“What I would have done in these conditions”
« The latter have often been obscured by legend and collective memory, which has given them the place left by notorious feats of arms or local characters, whose actions have been crowned by the population. We preferred to stick to an objective analysis of the facts, studying each action in detail,” underline the two co-authors, who highlighted around ten active networks in Deux-Sèvres.
“While writing, I often asked myself what I would have done if I had been confronted with these situations under these same conditions. This leads to a lot of modesty and prudence”adds Jacky Berge.
The work, illustrated with period documents and photos of all the protagonists, has 450 pages. It is on sale for €30 at the Antidote bookstore and in the cultural spaces of the two hypermarkets. The two authors admit that they are considering publishing a third work, which will deal with the war of harassment and sabotage led by these same networks after the landing.
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