After the French Communist Party (PCF) joined the ”armed struggle”, the occupier reinforced its policy of repression. The judicial process became more radical. From summer 1941, arrested members of communist armed groups were judged by German military tribunals and sentenced, usually to death. This was the context in which the trial of the young communist irregulars of the 11th arrondissement took place.

The German services had been on the trail of senior Armée secrète officers since spring 1943. The investigation quickly took them to the La Muette metro station and to Caluire as they reached the top of the ”shadow army”'s leadership structure. After the arrests of General Delestraint, the head of the AS, and Joseph Gastaldo, the deputy chief of staff and head of the 2nd bureau, in Paris on 9 June 1943, the telegram from Claude Bouchinet-Serreules to London reveals the scale of the latest haul by the SIPO-SD and the Abwehr twelve days later, in Caluire.

In the national memory, Klaus Barbie has two faces. From the Occupation to the 1970s, he was the man who decapitated the French Resistance by arresting Jean Moulin on 21 June 1943. Between 1970 and 1980, he was seen more as a cog in the Final Solution in France, who had deported thousands of Jews from France, including the children of the Izieu children's home, a crime against humanity for which he was finally tried and condemned in 1987.

The German military tribunals constitute one of the primary instruments of repression and intimidation in the system of occupation established by the invader in France between 1940 and 1944. Long considered the poor relation in historical research due to the very patchy nature of the sources available, the history of this repression with a legal face has recently benefited from a renewed landscape of archives.

What was the demographic situation of France as it entered into war on 3rd August 1914? For several centuries, right up to the 1860s, France was the most populated country in Europe, even ahead of Russia at certain times. Then, mainly due to the effect of a low birth rate at the end of the 18th century, when France entered into war it occupied fifth position in demographic terms in Europe, behind Russia, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, closely followed by Italy. In 1914, the population of France was still very rural, stagnant and ageing. The 1914 war struck a country which was struggling demographically. The enforced effort was huge, and the consequences after the war weighed heavy.

World War II, unlike World War I, was very deadly for civilians. In France, nearly 400,000 civilians were killed between 1939 and 1945.