Caring and resisting. The Free French Health Service around the world (1940-1943)

After the defeat of 1940, the Free French Forces rebuilt a medical support service for their troops, with a small, motley cohort of medical staff and very disparate equipment. In many ways, this service overturned the traditional distinctions between regular and irregular armies, between legality and “dissidence”. Firstly, we need to understand how, in a context of extreme precariousness brought about by the “breaking off” from metropolitan France, the medical staff mobilised the knowledge they had acquired in previous conflicts to adapt to the reality of complex military theatres. We then need to analyse the factors that held this extremely heterogeneous healthcare community together, and the tensions that ran through it. Although medical units were often seen as surrogate families, they were also subject to hierarchies that reflected the racial and gender norms of the time.