the war (the financial agreement was finalized in March 1941). A separate letter guaranteed the territorial integrity of the French colonial empire. French Resistance The French Resistance was a decentralized network of small cells of fighters with the tacit or overt support of many French civilians. The various resistance groups by 1944 had an estimated 100,000 members in France. Some were former Republican fighters from the Spanish Civil War; others were workers who went into hiding rather than report for the mandatory Service du travail obligatoire (STO) to work for German arms factories. In the south of France especially, Resistance fighters took to the mountainous brush () that gave them their name, and conducted guerilla warfare on the German occupation forces, cutting telephone lines and destroying bridges. The Armée Secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone: Combat, Libération-sud and the Franc-Tireurs. Some organizations grew up around one of the many clandestine presses of the time, such as Combat, founded by Albert Camus, to which Jean-Paul Sartre also contributed. Stalin supported the effort once the Nazis invaded Russia. French prisoners of war were held hostage against the French government meeting their quota of workers. When the mass impressment of able-bodied civilians began, French railway workers (cheminots) went on strike rather than allow the Germans to use the trains to transport them. The cheminots eventually formed their own organization, Résistance-Fer. The French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as came to call Resistance forces inside France, were an uneasy alliance of several maquis and other organizations, including the Communist-organized Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) and the Armée secrète in southern France. In addition, escape networks helped Allied airmen who had been shot down get to safety. The Unione Corse and the , the criminal underground of Marseilles, gleefully provided logistical escape assistance for a price, although some such as Paul Carbone instead worked with the Carlingue, French auxiliaries to the Gestapo SD and German military police. French colonial empire France's colonial empire at the start of World War II stretched from territories and possessions in Africa, the Middle East (Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon), to ports in India, Indochina, the Pacific islands, and territories in North and South America. France retained control of its colonial empire, and the terms of the