Factory workers could also help with sabotage in facilities that produced equipment or supplies for the Germans. It was quick and pretty safe to throw a handful of sand into some machinery to damage it, and the British Special Operations Executive later sent special oils and abrasive powders to resistance groups to help with the job. For example, the axle oil of a railway car could be drained and replaced by a powder to make the axle seize up, or the right substances could be left inside airplane fuel tanks to damage the finished plane’s engine. Another option was to slightly change blueprints or loosen manufacturing tolerances: a size difference of just a millimeter or two was practically impossible to detect and led to the finished machine wearing out much more quickly. Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the head of Citroën, had the oil dipsticks of his trucks altered so they would show sufficient oil levels even when it was running low – the oil would run out and the engine seize up.

An unusual case of industrial co-operation occurred in the summer of 1943. The Royal Air Force (RAF) attempted to bomb a Peugeot factory producing tank turrets and engine parts of the Wehrmacht. The bombing raid ended up hitting the residential neighborhood next to the factory, killing hundreds of French civilians. Following the fiasco, an agent from the British Special Operation Executive contacted industrialist Rudolphe Peugeot and asked if he would be willing to sabotage his own factory instead of risking another deadly RAF mistake. The agent established his bona fides by telling Peugeot of a secret message the BBC was going to broadcast to the French resistance that night. After hearing the message on the radio, Peugeot agreed to co-operate; he shared the plans of the factory and pointed out the best spots to detonate explosives at. The resulting sabotage action knocked out most of Peugeot’s factory and it never recovered during the war.
 
Jews
It’s little surprise that many Jews ended up in the Resistance. Jews faced legal discrimination, the confiscation of property, arrests and deportation to concentration camps under the Vichy regime. With nowhere to run, many Jews sought relative safety in Resistance groups. Jews made up only 1% of France’s population at the time, but 15-20% of the Resistance (including Jewish émigrés from other countries).

Foreigners
A surprising number of foreign nationals joined the Resistance. France’s population was approximately 42 million before the war, 2.5 million of whom were from abroad. Most were economic migrants who moved to France to take advantage of the labor shortage after World War II. Many of them had their own reasons to hate the Nazis, such as the numerous Polish miners in Northern France who were Resistance members.
 
Some 250,000 Republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War lived in France when the war broke out. Despite most of them having poor housing in camps, some 60,000 became fierce resisters and brought along their own civil war experience with guerilla warfare. Armenians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Czechs, Italians and people from France’s overseas colonies also fought in the Resistance. There was even a group of anti-Fascist Germans in Southern France. While not Resistance members, many French-speaking Cajun soldiers of the U.S. Army went plainclothes and helped channel American assistance to Resistance groups by pretending to be local civilians after the Normandy landings.

Women
Pre-World War I France was a very conservative society in many ways, including its treatment of women. Gender-based social inequalities were slowly being narrowed between the wars, but Pétain’s Vichy government dealt a heavy blow to feminism with its femme au foyer (“women at home”) directive. The Resistance was also saddled with paternalistic, conservative attitudes, and while women made up 15-20% of it, they were usually relegated to underground roles.
 
Women organized housewives’ demonstrations early in the occupation, and supported strikers and maquis guerillas (more on them below). In the Resistance proper, they were often used as typists, liaison agents and to bring guns to the men who needed them – the latter two because they were less likely to be stopped by the Germans than men. Some were eventually allowed to fight, but no woman ever became the leader of a Resistance group. As recognition of their service, de Gaulle declared in April 1944 that women would be granted the right to vote after the war.

Maquis
One of the most important categories of French Resistance members, encompassing many separate groups, were the maquis.
 
The Nazis established the Service du travail obligatoire (“Mandatory Work Service”) program under which 600,000 French men were rounded up and deported to Germany to perform slave labor, with another 250,000 French prisoners of war also “transformed” into civilian workers. Thousands of young men evaded forced enlistment by escaping into the countryside.
 
“Maquis” is the French equivalent of the Corsican Italian slang word macchia, referring to the scrublands that often served as home to bands of outlaws. In France, maqui came to mean both the backcountry where the forced labor dodgers hid, and the groups themselves. An individual member of a maqui group was a maquisard.

Maquisards came from a wide spectrum of political, ethnic and social backgrounds, but many of them were urban boys with little knowledge of wilderness survival, who initially felt their escape was like a romantic excursion. Security was lax at first, and a single German spy could potentially expose the entire group. As time passed, British SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents dropped into France to help organize and equip the maquis managed to beat some sense of discipline into them, and countless small groups became a true force for the Germans to reckon with in the countryside.
 
Maquisards had no uniforms. They wore whatever clothes they ran away in, a few spare articles they brought along, garments they could scrounge up or were given by the locals, and boots and pieces of uniforms taken from dead Germans. Many chose to wear a Basque beret cap, which was uncommon enough to serve as an identifying mark, but common enough to be inconspicuous. Some Maquis groups chose to wear armbands in the colors of the French flag adorned with either a Cross of Lorraine or the letters “FFI” for Forces françaises de l'Intérieur (French Forces of the Interior”), the collective name for armed resistance groups in the late years of the war.

The maquis were most efficient when using guerilla warfare, striking quick with light weaponry and disappearing again. Large alliances of groups attempted to openly seize and hold territory on several occasions, but the lightly armed resisters had no chance against the inevitable German attack with tanks and aircraft, and were always forced to flee with heavy casualties.
 
By early 1944, there were parts of the Southern French countryside that were more under the control of the maquis than the authorities. Equipped via airdrops and trained by British agents, many maquis helped the D-Day landings by sabotaging railroads and slowing down German forces on their way to Normandy to reinforce the defenses.