Our study analyses the issue of resisting against Nazism through a self-narrative corpus, in a historical context expanding beyond the limitations of the Second World War. It spreads across a period that begins with the creation of the “Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes » (Committee of Antifascist Intellectual Vigilance) in 1934, until the end of the fifties with the release of the movie Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) directed by Alain Resnais, in 1956. The fundamental idea of self-narrative is to be understood trough Michel Foucault lecture, at the College de France, in 1982, about “L’Herméneutique du Sujet” (The Hermeneutics of the subject). From this point of view, we can establish a parallel between the resisting self-narrative and the self-care practices that he studied from texts written in the Greek and Latin Antiquity. With a selection of twelve texts chosen among a corpus of french or french-speaking self-narratives, we propose to have a new spin on the personal writing of resistance and to define a poetics of these resistant self-narratives. This group of texts gathers different types: diaries, testimonies, poetry, letters and essays. We think that the idea of personal resistance is to be set out with the attitude of “refusance” from Philippe Breton. Thus, we will try to conjure up a notion of how the subject gets on to resistance through writing, and why this personal resisting can be considered as a deed: from a potential resistance drawn by the self-narrative, as Foucault showed it, the self-narrative turns out, in our historical context, to be a resisting act against Nazi experience.
