Jean Moulin

And then I was very fortunate, as many of us have been, to have had the opportunity to do an Erasmus here.

And I did mine at the Université of Jean Moulin in Lyon in France, which was probably the best year of my life.

It was just a fantastic and wonderful experience.

And I think from there, being in Lyon was really at the heart of Europe and just got to travel and see and experience so much.

We'll see the Nazis' submarine or U-boat domination in the Atlantic come to its demise, thereby enabling crucial lend-lease goods to make it to the USSR, goods that the Soviets desperately need as they battle at great sacrifice in the East.

And then we'll return to France to find a growing resistance maturing, a resistance that, thanks to Jean Moulin's bravery, is coordinating just enough for Charles de Gaulle to assert his leadership in exile.

And with Allied secret agents parachuting in, it's a France preparing for its liberation, for Operation Overlord's D-Day, which is what we're really pointing to.

In fact, you could say this is the pre-pre-D-Day episode.

Needs to, in fact, if he's going to join FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the big boys' table and completely edge out his remaining competitor, Henri Giraud.

But how does one convince the independently-minded, politically divided French people, a reality that Charles himself will allegedly quip about decades from now by asking, "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" to pull together now.

Well, the general has a lot of help, most memorably from Jean Moulin.

Born and raised not far from southern France's Mediterranean coast, handsome and talented Jean Moulin was a likable, if lackadaisical, student who grew up to become an effective civil servant, serving as France's youngest prefect in history.

And so, if you have a priest who says, enough of this stuff, he can throw his weight and do good things.

And, well, again, look at Père Jean, Father Jean, tonight.

Again, the situation of the Catholic Church is extremely complicated.

And the real explosion of work on the resistance has been dominated by the stories of ordinary people taking very unordinary choices.

That was because it was easier to round up people to be sent in the STO, that is the Obligatory Labor Service, if you were from a city where you had all sorts of soldiers who'd come out and pick you up.

And so, you know, I mean, the Limousin probably is the classic example, that is, in the area which Hordes du Ségolène takes, where it became, it was not a mass, mass movement, but where you still have all sorts of people that are part of underground organizations, or part of the Gaullist resistance.

And Jean Moulin, the reason I have his name up here, he was a former prefect of the Heure-et-Loire, which is the department of Chartres in the Beauce, south of Paris, beautiful cathedral town, and then he ends up himself getting denounced and tortured and all of that.

But the resistance, whether they were Gaullists or whether they were Communists or whether they had no affiliation at all, party affiliation, the resistance depended on neighborhood, small town, and above all, village networks, thus the role of the school teacher or some kind of local leader.