Through these biographical entries, the dictionary retraces the lives of women and men with very different forms of commitment and trajectories. Some were active Resistance members; others were arrested because of their origins, their political or trade union activities, their convictions, or their opposition to the Occupation. Their stories thus help to better understand the diversity of the people confronted with repression during the Second World War.

Each biography seeks, as far as the available sources allow, to retrace the person’s life: their history before the war, their commitments, the circumstances of their arrest, their sentencing or execution, and the traces left in the archives and in family or collective memory. The dictionary thus restores an individual dimension to a history long approached mainly through figures, lists or events.

These men and women were victims of the repressive apparatus set up in France during the Occupation by the German authorities, the French Vichy authorities and, in the territories concerned, the Italian Fascist authorities. Although their stories are profoundly different, each testifies, in its own way, to the many forms of opposition and resistance to the Occupation and the repression.

This work is thus a major tool for the knowledge and passing on of this history. The project has since continued and been expanded online, with new entries devoted in particular to those summarily executed, massacred, or killed in action. It now makes it possible to continue research into the victims of the repression and to raise greater awareness of their stories.