By the light of the moon, clandestine pilots broke through the boundaries of wartime France to land agents and operators on makeshift landing sites in farmers’ fields. They carried with them weapons, knowledge, and often documents that would change the course of the Second World War and reshape Europe thereafter.

These flights, and the materials transported on them, lay at the heart of a complex and fragile world of wartime resistance: improvised, dangerous, and deeply dependent on the movement of ideas, people and matériel.

In this talk, Dr Andrew Smith will give a sense of how Franco-British cooperation enabled wartime resistance. In these moments of transfer, we can track different levels of resistance activity -from the intellectual, cultural, and political émigrés who created these documents, to the military and intelligence organisations that transported them into Occupied France, and finally to the networks of resisters who interpreted, adapted, and mobilized their content.

NB: This talk is free with standard museum entry, but you must reserve a seat online.