The liberation of France in 1944 was a major military objective in the Allies' first major offensive. But in order to reduce Germany to the point of surrender, the Allied strategy would probably have proved to be insufficient without the will of the French people to free themselves of the occupiers through clandestine resistance movements. Due to the blend of a historian's respect for facts and human warmth, the film, made up of archive footage, puts us in the middle of the last battles for liberation.