August 25, 1944. After four years of occupation, Paris is liberated; German forces have surrendered. On the steps of the Hotel de Ville – his makeshift headquarters – General Charles de Gaulle delivers a grand victory speech: “Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!” he calls to the crowd. “Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!”

It’s a rousing feat of oratory, an address for the history books. And a fiction (as so many grand speeches are).

Michelle Wright’s debut novel, Small Acts of Defiance, places its heroine (Lucie) among the jostling spectators on the hotel steps. Lucie understands what de Gaulle is doing – invoking unity in order to build it – but his portrait of French solidarity feels painfully disingenuous. “She couldn’t help but think that, in order to heal the nation and focus on the future, the truth that he was turning away from, the shame of collaboration, was too big a truth to remain hidden in the shadows.”

Small Acts of Defiance is a novel born of this inescapable shame, this too-big truth. Anchored by months of in-country research, Wright explores the everyday rhythms of the Paris occupation, and the ratcheting persecution of the city’s Jewish inhabitants, one bureaucratic edict – one public dehumanisation – at a time. Paris was as complicit as it was resistant to Nazi occupation and its atrocities. Acknowledging that history, as Wright does so carefully, only makes the courage of the French resistance more astonishing, its victories more precarious. As living memory of the Holocaust fades, we cannot afford to forget these lessons.

Lucie’s story begins in Australia in 1940; she’s newly 16. Her father, Alfred, is a World War I veteran, a silent husk of a man whose nights are wracked by terror. As the possibility of a second great war looms, he takes his own life rather than face what’s to come.

Alfred’s death leaves Lucie and her French mother, war-bride Yvonne, with no option but to abandon their life in coastal Victoria. Somewhat improbably, the pair relocate to Paris to live with Yvonne’s brother, Gerard. Within weeks, the city has been invaded by German forces.

As the Australian teenager finds a place for herself in locked-down Paris – a job at an art store, with student-activist friends – her political consciousness blooms. And as the cruelties of the German occupation accrete and sharpen, Lucie is reminded of her father’s warning: “There’s no such thing as doing nothing. Doing nothing is still a choice. A choice to stand aside and let it happen.”

Small Acts of Defiance follows Lucie as she finds covert opportunities to oppose the Germans: illustrating and distributing leaflets, passing messages between resistance operatives, forging documents. “These small acts of defiance might not seem like much on their own,” Wright writes, “but they all add up.” Measured against the threat of firing squads and death camps, they don’t seem like small acts at all.