The work sets out to give another view of the Battle of Normandy. Antoine Cardi is interested in the civilian victims, offering something other than military heroism alone. The territory we live on today in peace was, during the Second World War, the scene of a fighting whose procession of violence intensely affected civilian populations — a phenomenon that has become central in contemporary conflicts, from the two world wars to more recent ones in the Balkans or the Middle East.

Bringing images and historians' texts together in one volume aims at an operation of knowledge about a past that resonates strongly in the present, and at a reflection on the ways of writing history and on the capacity of the documentary approach, between indexical imprint and imaginary projection, to account for a reality now gone.