Henry Frenay au général de GaulleLettres et rapports sur la Résistance et l’Europe (1942-1953), Lyon, Presse Fédéraliste éditions, 2023

Henri Frenay was not a theorist of European federalism. Rather, Frenay's commitment to Europe came as a result of his fight against Nazi Germany and its policy of hegemony over Europe. Before the war...

Henri Frenay was not a theorist of European federalism. Rather, Frenay's commitment to Europe came as a result of his fight against Nazi Germany and its policy of hegemony over Europe. Before the war, he worked alongside the feminist Berty Albrecht to take in the victims of Nazi-fascism, and at the Strasbourg Centre for Germanic Studies to study the Nazi phenomenon.

During the war, by creating the most important Resistance movement and trying to federate the domestic Resistance. But federalism was also a point of departure after the fall of Hitler and Mussolini, and the pitiful end of the Vichy regime and a certain France. It was as a heroic figure of patriotism and anti-Nazism that he embarked on the second great battle of his life: the union of Europe. He became president of the European Union of Federalists, and was one of the most ardent supporters of the European Defence Community.

It is this organic link between the Resistance and federalism that these letters, notes and reports to General de Gaulle enable us to discover. It is also an opportunity to measure the esteem in which Frenay held the founder of Free France, in the name of a common struggle for the freedom of France, even if their visions of Europe differed.

With this book, we wanted to give readers access to the original documents that are the historian's raw material.