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The theory and practice of urban authority and governance were deeply affected, while the relationship between the city and the crown was strained. In this chapter, the process and significance of the growth of Protestantism in Nantes are assessed, and the repercussions of the movement for political and religious life in the city are also discussed. The emergence of Protestantism in Nantes had a profound and immediate impact on attitudes to the authority of city institutions and on practical governance in the town, even though the movement was relatively small compared with those in other cities. In these circumstances, the city authorities had great practical difficulties in maintaining order and effectively exercising their authority. Further, undermining practical governance was the corrosive impact of Protestantism on the ideological props to authority in the city. Contemporary authors emphasised the religious and cultural threat posed by heresy to the influence and institutions of the Roman church.

Liberation Committees were most frequently local institutions of grassroots counterpower vis-à-vis traditional power brokers wishing to facilitate the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum or ante Mussolini. In factories, large offices, and rural areas characterized by the survival of semi-feudal production relations, the latter still a prominent feature in parts of rural Italy, Liberation Committees constituted prima facie challenges to the reestablishment of the dictatorial powers of proprietors and top-level managers. Nowhere did the competing social visions and political projects clash more thoroughly than in factories, offices, or the circumstances confronting landless labourers vis-à-vis traditional landed elites. Next to no serious attention has been devoted to this contentious feature of the moment of liberation until now. My description and analysis of Liberation Committees at the point of production reinforces the assessment of the moment of liberation as a transnational moment of crisis and opportunity when everything appeared possible.

The challenges to traditional ante-bellum or ante-Mussolini ways of ruling and running societies were perhaps most visible in the area of fundamental changes affecting the most popular mass media at that time: newspapers. Virtually all across Europe, the vast majority of hitherto operating daily newspapers were shut down at the moment of liberation, and a new antifascist press often took over production facilities vacated by their compromised former owners. After some cursory glances at the politics of the post-liberation press in Germany and Italy, I then go into considerable detail in the case of France. For it was in France where the challenges to published opinion in the wake of Nazi occupation went further and deeper than anywhere else. In France, however, too, within very few years the power of money regained the upper hand, turning back the clock to the status quo ante bellum.

Much attention has been rightfully devoted to the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and—less so—the Allied landing on the Mediterranean coastline. This chapter focuses on the contribution by antifascist resistance activists to the liberation of France. It is often overlooked that much of Southern France south of the Loire and Lake Geneva was liberated to a significant extent by resistance units. Obviously, without the engagements responsible for the liberation of the Northern half of France by Allied troops, the resistance would not have been able to carry this out. Still, the liberation of roughly half of France by resistance groups had major consequences for the plans of French antifascists for post-liberation society. The most significant acts of defiance of the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum occurred precisely in those areas where the resistance had been largely responsible for the expulsion of German troops.

No Western European country experienced liberation at such a slow pace as Italy. The Allied landing on Sicily occurred twenty months before the final liberation of Northern Italy in late April 1945. As a result, the evolution of antifascist resistance activism underwent a contradictory development unique in Western Europe. The official Roman government administering liberated Italy and Rome-based coordinating bodies of the resistance operating in the North performed the role of a break on the radical dynamic of antifascist activism in Italy’s North. In parts of Central and Northern Italy, the social power and political clout of Liberation Committees became all-important counterpowers to traditional political authorities, far exceeding the radical dynamics which had propelled French Liberation Committees into the limelight of their day. Virtually all of Northern Italy was liberated by antifascist activists in advance of the arrival of Allied troops moving north.