Minds of the Movement
An ICNC blog on the people and power of civil resistance
Nuits Noires is the translation of one French edition of The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck. A few different French translations and editions popped up independently of each other during occupation.
Disclaimer: This text does not aim to oppose armed and civilian resistance, nor to mechanically transpose historical experiences onto the current Ukrainian context. The Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II differs from that of Russia in Ukraine. The similarity lies in the fact that both are asymmetrical conflicts between an occupying force and a people defending their freedom. Certain strategic dynamics of resistance are similar.
This text offers a reflection based on two works of fiction published in 1942, in order to illuminate complementary dimensions of resistance by peoples under attack: non-cooperation, collective dignity, and social emancipation in the face of occupation. It is offered as a space for shared reflection, not as a prescription.
To collaborate or not to collaborate
Long before civil resistance was formalized as a field of research and political strategy, Vercors's Silence of the Sea and John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down offered a remarkable literary intuition.
Published in 1942, Silence of the Sea and The Moon is Down are situated within this historical moment when military occupation seemed permanent, armed victory unattainable, and the question of possible forms of civil resistance, without weapons, was acutely posed.
These two texts, very different in their narrative form, nevertheless share a common political thesis: the power of the occupier rests less on armed force than on the tacit acceptance of its presence, and it is this acceptance that must be rejected.
These two works demonstrate that, faced with an overwhelming military occupation, the crucial question is not whether to resort to symmetrical violence, but rather whether to collaborate or not: what are we willing to give the occupier, and above all, what can we take away by refusing to yield to their demands?
Mute resistance as relational disobedience
Both texts illustrate, each in their own way, the fundamental principle of civil resistance: since the oppressor's power depends on the obedience of the oppressed, the liberation of the oppressed depends on their ability to withdraw this obedience.
In Silence of the Sea, resistance takes the form of a radical refusal to speak. The narrator states this explicitly: "We decided not to speak to him." This extremely simple decision constitutes a fully political act: refusing to speak means refusing to enter into a shared symbolic space with the occupier. Speech is thus identified as a means of mutual recognition; to evade this is to maintain an insurmountable moral boundary.
The German officer occupying the home of a family in a French village nevertheless makes numerous attempts at reconciliation, particularly through culture. He evokes music, literature, and the idea of a spiritual fraternity between Germany and France. But the silence of the daughter and her father, the rightful inhabitants of the house, offers a mute resistance to this discourse, preventing any illusion of normalcy or complicity. The final scene, when the officer understands the moral impasse of his own words, confirms that silence is not a void, but a counter-argument.
This non-cooperation is both radical and minimalist. By refusing to speak, the characters refuse to enter into the relationship of domination itself. Silence, here, is a form of relational disobedience, leading the occupier to question his legitimacy.
Diffuse and cumulative resistance
The Moon is Down adopts a reverse narrative strategy. Steinbeck disseminates resistance throughout the daily life of an occupied city. Non-cooperation here takes the form of a multitude of modest, often anonymous, but strategically convergent acts.
One character clearly articulates this logic: “They can take our houses, but they cannot take our will.” Resistance, here, is patient, often invisible. Sabotaging a bridge, slowing down work, passing on information, maintaining local solidarity—all these actions make the occupation costly and unstable. Steinbeck thus shows that military power encounters a structural limit as soon as society ceases to cooperate. After all, military power assumes there is a proper battlefield or at least some armed confrontation.
Steinbeck precisely describes what the theory of civil resistance would later analyze as a functional collapse of the political authority of occupation: the occupier commands, but is no longer reliably obeyed.
Humanizing the enemy without legitimizing domination
Both works are careful to avoid good-guy/bad-guy caricature. In Vercors's novel, the German officer is genuinely enamored with French culture, convinced that conquest can lead to spiritual reconciliation. In Steinbeck's novel, some officers, finding obstacles to fulfilling their carnal and social desires, begin to have doubts about whether it was a good idea to have joined the conquest. “Flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!” the occupying force lieutenant concludes, hysterical.
But this humanization never leads to justification or legitimacy. On the contrary, it reinforces the critique. It is not individual cruelty that is at issue, but the very structure of the occupation, inherently unsustainable due not only to the citizens' deep yearning for freedom, but also the occupier’s natural desires. The occupier may be human, but occupation goes against human nature. One of Steinbeck's characters expresses this with disarming realism: "You cannot govern a people by force alone."
This sentence could serve as a common epigraph for both works. By force, we must understand "armed force," an essential distinction, because these two works speak to us of another kind of force: the force of the people fighting with their bare hands.
Moral sovereignty, the long victory
A central theme links the two texts: that of forced cohabitation. Sharing daily life with the occupier creates a constant temptation: that of normalization. To speak, to exchange ideas, to become accustomed to it, is already to cede a portion of moral sovereignty.
Vercors' silence precisely prevents this backsliding. It maintains the occupation in a state of permanent moral failure. In Steinbeck's work, this role is played by the repetition of acts of resistance. Each act of sabotage serves as a reminder that the imposed order is contested and therefore reversible.
In both cases, resistance aims less at immediate victory than at preserving collective dignity.
Violence refused, conflict embraced
One essential point links the two works to the field of civil resistance strategy: they never deny the conflict, but it does not escalate into armed confrontation.
Vercors' silence is tense, sometimes cruel. Similarly, the resistance described by Steinbeck exposes the population to reprisals, imprisonment, and death. Unarmed resistance to occupation is presented as a demanding form of struggle, one that accepts risk according to a logic of delegitimizing the oppressor.
This point is crucial for understanding that civil resistance is a strategy based on disrupting power rather than on its military destruction.
Depriving the occupier of what it needs to survive
Both texts converge on the same implicit strategy: to render the occupation ungovernable.
In Vercors's work, the occupation fails morally because it cannot generate the personal support and human recognition that would transform conquest into accepted domination. In Steinbeck's work, it fails practically because every order encounters inertia, every decision generates unforeseen consequences, and every military victory produces additional political fragility.
This logic corresponds exactly to what civil resistance would later theorize as a progressive erosion of power through the withdrawal of social, economic, administrative, and symbolic cooperation
Dignity, inner sovereignty, and collective resistance
Another fundamental characteristic links these works to civil resistance: the centrality of human dignity.
Silence in Vercors protects inner sovereignty: to speak would already be to surrender. Acts of resistance in Steinbeck protect collective sovereignty: to obey without question would be to accept political dispossession. In both cases, resistance aims less at immediate victory than at preserving the occupied people’s sovereignty, both individual (or cognitive) and collective (national sovereignty).
This dimension lies at the heart of civil resistance as it unfolded in the 20th century: to resist is to refuse to be reduced to a mere object of domination, even when armed force is overwhelming. In short, subjugation is worse than death.
Two poetic approaches to the same unarmed conflict strategy
The formal differences between the two works illuminate two complementary modalities of civil resistance:
- Silence of the Sea presents a resistance of restraint, absolute refusal, and an insurmountable moral boundary.
- The Moon is Down explores a more proactive, fragmented, cumulative, and socially rooted resistance.
One operates on the symbolic and relational level, the other on the functional and organizational level. Together, they outline a complete dynamic of civil resistance, well before it was named as such, notably by US scholar Gene Sharp from the 1960s forward.
The literary and the political
Reread in light of today’s distinct academic disciplines of nonviolence and civil resistance, Silence of the Sea and The Moon is Down appear as much more than stories about war. They are narrative laboratories where a political philosophy of resistance without weapons is developed, based on the withdrawal of consent and the reconquest of dignity. Thus, these two narratives, commenting on political actions ordinary people had just begun to take in real life in occupied Europe, illustrate through fiction what the political science theory of civil resistance would take several years to formalize.
As such, these two works are not merely part of the literary memory of the World War II. They remain invaluable resources today for understanding civil resistance in the face of contemporary forms of domination, whether military, authoritarian, or structural.
In a future article, Amber French-Griette will delve back into Steinbeck's world in 1942 and analyze the remarkable precision of the story The Moon is Down—which proceeded to spread like wildfire across the European continent via samizdat—even though its author never set foot in Europe.
