Resistance members carried handguns for their own safety and went to great lengths to acquire whatever arms they could in preparation for a future assault, from hunting guns that had not been surrendered to confiscated firearms stored at depots to weaponry parachuted to them by Allied forces to arms captured from ambushed German soldiers. Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is at its most vivid in describing these developments, as Halbrook solicited the recollections of Resistance veterans in the late 1990s and early 2000s and allows them to tell their stories.

Halbrook acknowledges that there’s a bit of a paradox to reckon with. If there really were 3 million hunting guns in France before the war, the confiscation regime was astonishingly ineffective, netting only about 800,000 weapons (though some guns were ditched through non-official channels, including the waterways of Paris, rather than kept illegally). His correspondents report that it was common to hide guns rather than turning them in, and German authorities fretted about widespread noncompliance, trying everything from executions to amnesties in response. A report in late 1941 contended that “illegal weapons possession still represents the core of criminal activities of the French. It appears almost impossible to get rid of it.”

And yet the Resistance struggled mightily to find arms. One of the movement’s biggest complaints was that the Allies were failing to supply them enough. And even so, one of Halbrook’s interviewees estimated that 85 percent of the group’s guns came from airdrops, with just 15 percent being guns that civilians brought themselves, often without ammunition.