" this petrification of men was so intolerable that many threw themselves into the Resistance to escape it. Strange future, barred by suffering, prison, death, but at least we procured it by our own hands. (If there is an excuse or at least an explanation for collaboration, perhaps we should say that it too was an attempt to give France a future.) But the Resistance was nothing more than an individual solution, and we always knew that; even without it, the English would have won the war, with it they would still have lost if they were going to lose. It had, however, in our eyes, a symbolic valor; and that is why so many resisters had a desperate air about them: always symbols. A symbolic rebellion in a symbolic city: only the torture was real. "

― Jean-Paul Sartre , Paris Under the Occupation