by Paige Bowers
It was fine with her, Geneviève said, and she put her bag down by the counter before sitting down. The owner offered her some hot soup and a bit of whiskey to warm her up. She was grateful for the gesture, especially before heading into another uncertain day.
In Paris Germaine Tillion was learning how hard it was to predict the future. After several Musée de l’Homme members had been arrested, tried, and shot, she was now head of the group. The killings had scarred her deeply, and she became obsessed with protecting the condemned that remained in French prisons. She began scheming ways to break these comrades out of prison, and she held meetings in her home to plan those getaways. By then Germaine had met a priest named Robert Alesch who had gained her trust. She did not know it at the time, but Alesch was an agent of the Abwehr, a Nazi intelligence organization that paid him 12,000 francs a month to infiltrate and inform on resistance networks in Paris. On August 13 Germaine was to meet Alesch at the Gare de Lyon so she could pass him a matchbox full of important documents. She walked toward the ticket counter with him and watched his ticket get punched. Just as he resumed his walk through the crowd toward the train, someone tapped Germaine’s shoulder and said, “German police. Come with me.”
She wheeled around and snapped, “Perhaps you think I am a Jew.” The officer snapped back, “No Madame, I don’t. But I’ll see your identity papers.” As she was taken to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, she wondered why Alesch wasn’t arrested. She was charged with espionage, housing a British pilot, helping enemies of Germany, aiding a prison escape, and terrorism. She denied it all.
On the other side of town, the Gestapo arrested her mother.
* * *
After Allied forces invaded North Africa, the Germans swarmed into France’s southern zone to occupy it on November 11, 1942. Charles de Gaulle was looking like a more palatable alternative to Philippe Pétain, and police became increasingly concerned about violent resistance acts. General de Gaulle’s intelligence forces within France had gotten wind of the same tensions. Through his delegate Jean Moulin, he had been working to unite all the disparate resistance networks and link them to the movement in London so that France could become an instrument of its own liberation.
When asked by the British propaganda department how he wished to be seen, he replied, “I am a free Frenchman. I believe in God and the future of my country. I am no man’s subordinate. I have one mission and one mission only, that of carrying on the struggle for my country’s liberation. I solemnly declare that I am not attached to any political party, nor bound to any politician whatsoever, either of the right, the center or the left. I have only one aim: To set France free.”
By 1943 his niece Geneviève ventured into the eastern region of France called Haute-Savoie, which bordered Switzerland and Italy, to help build a group of young fighters that was assembling in Voirons by getting them recruits, false papers, and weapons. In the mountains there were fewer occupation forces and less stringent police surveillance. As a result the Allies believed these areas would be best for parachuting in agents and containers of supplies.
For the fighters these areas were good places to wait after clashes, and they huddled together in dugouts, huts, caves, or ramshackle farms as they awaited their next move. There was cold, there was rain, there was anxiety. These fighters, called maquisards for the shrubs—or maquis—in which they hid, were sneak-attack artists, and their small numbers required them to plan well and work quickly. After the maquisards ambushed German convoys, derailed trains full of personnel and matériel, attacked poorly guarded patrols, and destroyed parked cars, the Nazis scoured the area in search of these breathless guerrillas. If they escaped they would head into the larger villages under an assumed identity, recruiting more men from the factories, dockyard, and offices that provided them with cover. When they got what they needed, they’d disappear.
Geneviève was a rare female face in this environment, and she was aware of that as she headed up into the mountains to work with this fighting group. There she met Hubert Viannay, younger brother of a cofounder of the Défense de la France resistance group at the Sorbonne. As they gathered together in the mountains, they heard from one of their local informants that they were being watched by an Italian detachment that had heard there were small armed groups of young people in the vicinity. While they verified whether this was true, one of their officers fell into a ravine and broke his leg. When it became clear that nothing would come of the surveillance, Geneviève decided that she could safely return to Paris.
On the way back to the capital, Geneviève decided to use her real identity papers. She was carrying some compromising items—notably some stamps that she had found at the prefecture of Annecy, false identity cards, and messages that had been entrusted to her by the maquisards—so she realized that this was a gamble. She stepped onto the crowded train and settled into her seat before the train began its lumbering journey toward the capital on bombarded railways. Once the locomotive passed the demarcation line, the Nazis stopped it and boarded it for a check. Geneviève knew her identity papers wouldn’t cause any problems, but the packet of documents in her bag would, so she calmly slipped the envelope into the newspaper she was reading and hid it behind her back.
A group of German soldiers had boarded the train and began checking the identity papers of each rider. When the officers reached Geneviève, she handed them her identity card and noticed that at first they did not seemed bothered that her last name was de Gaulle. Then one of them asked, “De Gaulle? Are you related to General de Gaulle?” She responded yes.
The soldier said, “Come with me.”
She protested, “Come with you? Why? I am in good standing. I am returning to Paris in the occupied zone.”
“Come with me,” he repeated. “And bring your bags.”
Geneviève grabbed her satchel but left her newspaper on the seat. A female passenger began to tell her that she had left something behind, but her husband kicked her in the shin to get her to keep quiet. The German who took Geneviève away didn’t notice the exchange and took her off the train for questioning. In his office she confirmed that she was the niece of General de Gaulle and then answered several questions about her family, her residence, and her activities. When she was done the German officers said they were going to search her. She wasn’t worried because she knew she had no resistance-related materials on her.
The officer began to search her bag.
“What is this?” he asked, holding up a picture of her uncle.
“As you can see it is a picture of my uncle, General de Gaulle, in the period when he was just a colonel,” she responded.
“This is forbidden,” he shot back.
“How is this forbidden?” she asked. “Why? It’s my uncle, it’s a family member. If you consider this seditious right now, it’s not. Look: he has five stripes. In France, five stripes means that one is a colonel.”
“You don’t have the right to have this picture,” the officer said.
“I absolutely do,” she said. “And you can’t forbid me from keeping it.”
The search produced nothing else for the Germans but it lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, during which the train remained at a standstill. One officer called Paris to find out what they should do under the circumstances. When he hung up with his superior, he told Geneviève that she could return to her train. He handed her handbag to her along with the picture of her uncle.
She stared at them calmly, then exclaimed: “You think I can just get back on the train like that? You made me get off the train and I showed you that it was stupid. There’s no way I can get back onto the train again with all of the people on it. Plus, I have a seat. I had a lot of trouble getting it, so give me a soldier to accompany me back to reclaim it.”
The Nazis assigned her a soldier who accompanied her to the train and led her through the crowded corridor, stepping on passengers’ feet as he passed. As she walked behind him, passengers asked her why she was arrested and
whether she was in trouble. Thrilled, she shouted, “No, no, it was because I am the niece of General de Gaulle.” The German kept pushing through the crowd as Geneviève joyfully explained herself to anyone who would listen. When she reached her seat and sat down, her fellow passengers watched her in silent admiration. No one had touched her newspaper, and she looked inside it to find all the mail and papers she had concealed.
4
Défense de la France
Geneviève’s brief acquaintance with Hubert Viannay and his maquisards soon brought her resistance work from another direction. Hubert introduced Geneviève to his brother Philippe, the cofounder of Défense de la France, a large, Paris-based resistance group that was mainly composed of students.
The story of Défense de la France began in the summer of 1937, when there was a chance meeting between a young Catholic patriot and a wealthy industrialist thirty years his senior. The patriot, Philippe Viannay, was a twenty-year-old seminarian who worked as a summer camp supervisor in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris. The industrialist, Marcel Lebon, was the fifty-year-old owner of a large gas and electric company and founder of the camp. Impressed by his young charge, Marcel befriended and mentored him, drawing him out on a wide range of subjects. For Philippe it was a life-altering friendship; the next summer he enrolled at the Sorbonne as a philosophy student. When war enveloped France in spring 1940, Viannay fought in a battalion of sharpshooters and won a Croix de Guerre for his valor. After the armistice was signed in late June, Viannay turned to Lebon for advice on what to do about the Nazi occupation. It was an outrage, he believed. Lebon advised him to start an underground journal. He pledged financial support to the young man’s endeavor and had one of his assistants research the technical aspects of getting a press up and running on the sly.
The logistics were complicated. First, paper was hard to come by. If you found some you had to hide it because the Nazis wanted to control who had it. Then mimeograph machines and printing presses had to be moved from location to location to prevent unwanted Nazi searches. The noise from a printing machine could be enough to tip off a curious German, so it was important to consider where and when you made copies.
Cohorts were also crucial. After Philippe returned to campus determined to boost morale and embolden the French with this work, the twenty-three-year-old made two important new friends: Robert Salmon and Hélène Mordkovitch. Robert, twenty-two, was a Jewish student whose courage in battle had also earned him a Croix de Guerre in 1940. He was taken prisoner but escaped and returned to Paris, where his classmate Philippe began talking to him about his idea for a secret newspaper. Robert liked the plan and pledged his support. Hélène, twenty-three, was a harder sell on the journal, in part because of her initial disdain for Philippe. A geography student and lab assistant, she was irritated to learn that Philippe enrolled in a geography class because he thought it might be easy. They argued a lot, and when he waxed patriotic about doing something about the occupiers, she threw up her hands in disgust and snapped: “What are you doing that’s concrete? What do you propose? Why haven’t you left for England?” His reply: “What about an underground journal?” From that point on she began to look at him a little bit differently. Shortly after that Robert decided that their journal—and movement—should be called Défense de la France (DF).
With Marcel Lebon’s help, in spring 1941 DF purchased a Rotaprint rotary press for its printing operation, christened it Simone, and set up the machine in an abandoned building near the Sorbonne. By July they needed to move the printer to avoid getting caught by the Gestapo. So they relocated it to one member’s family home, where it remained until his mother got worried about hiding it there. Philippe spirited the printer out to his father’s house on the western side of Paris until Hélène got her hands on the keys to the Sorbonne’s cellars. The machine stayed there until DF got a tip that the cellars would be searched, so a group of adherents moved it into a professor’s house. The tip turned out to be false, and the group moved the machine back into the cellars by the summer of 1942. But frequent searches and constant suspicion made it necessary for them to constantly move the printer and to purchase their paper on the black market. Under cover of darkness DF members filled their backpacks with paper and brought it to the cellars where they would print the two-to-four-page journal. When printing was finished they’d bring the newspapers out in their backpacks without arousing suspicion. Distribution came next, with the admonishment to share the papers with neighbors and friends and discuss what they had read.
The first issue appeared in August 1941. In the beginning the paper did not champion General de Gaulle. Philippe Viannay did not trust the solitary general and believed that politics and the military should never be mixed. If they were going to salute and support anyone, it needed to be someone who was standing on French soil. DF cautiously supported Pétain. Philippe believed that “the Marshal will do what he has always done: resist, safeguard France’s interests.” But he rejected collaboration with the enemy, somehow managing to separate Pétain from the actions of the men around him. Not everyone in DF shared his views. Some felt Pétain was a traitor and the very antithesis of hope. Robert Salmon, for his part, was fervently against the old war hero, as were most of the women in the group. But the paper remained pro-Pétain until November 1942, after Vichy announced that all able-bodied men and women of a certain age would have to work in German factories, and Nazi troops began occupying the southern zone. Then DF believed that “the [Vichy] government had morally ceased to exist.”
At some point in early 1943, DF’s cofounders were introduced to Geneviève de Gaulle through Hubert Viannay, Philippe’s brother. By then the group had grown to two thousand active members. But the group’s disenchantment with Vichy meant that it needed to unite around someone new. Geneviève knew just the person to inspire them. Her knowledge of history and knack for presenting a well-reasoned case only helped her cause.
* * *
By 1943 it was not safe to resist or to be a de Gaulle. Geneviève had hoped to slip into the southern zone to see her father, stepmother, and half siblings for the Easter holiday, but she learned that they had to flee for Switzerland after being warned that the Gestapo was about to arrest Xavier. In Switzerland Xavier began passing intelligence to the Allied forces in North Africa. His brother Jacques soon joined him after being smuggled into the country.
Geneviève’s brother, Roger, a resister who was enrolled in school in Toulouse, approached his sister for help fleeing the country when he realized he was being watched by local authorities. Geneviève put her nineteen-year-old brother in touch with an antiques store owner who knew people who could sneak Roger into Spain over the Pyrenees. He assumed a false identity—Jacques Astier, native of Montreal—just in case he got caught, but he was arrested before he reached the train he was supposed to take to Barcelona and detained for three weeks at a prisoner camp in Girona. When the British consul to Spain learned that Roger was there, they pressured the Spanish government to release him and send him to Madrid. In Madrid Roger was entrusted to Free French liaisons who brought him by ship to Liverpool, England. He reached London two weeks later, where he was outfitted in a British uniform and presented to his uncle Charles.
“Ah, there you are,” the general said when he arrived.
His aunt Yvonne gave him a colder welcome, after hearing rumors of the young man’s romantic escapades, chief among them a fling with a general’s wife. Like his older sister, Roger was at the age where he wasn’t about to be told what to do with his life. But he was in his uncle Charles’s house now and things were different. Charles sent Roger to cadet school and then to a posting in Algiers, where he would fight with the Free French.
Meanwhile Pierre de Gaulle had returned to Paris after working in Lyon, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and thrown in prison. From prison he sent word to Madeleine to leave the capital with the children and move into their family property near Rouen. When Madeleine arrived at the house, she receiv
ed a letter from Geneviève, which said that Xavier had left the country. Xavier’s younger sister, Marie-Agnès Cailliau de Gaulle, and her husband, Alfred, soon arrived at Madeleine and Pierre’s residence to celebrate Easter but were both summoned for questioning by German police. Madeleine heard through a contact that she was about to be arrested too and escaped France with the children by crossing the snow-covered Pyrenees on foot into Spain before heading to North Africa.
Mindful of the increasing danger, Geneviève wrote her uncle, seeking his advice on what to do next. “My dear Uncle Charles,” Geneviève wrote on May 6, 1943. “Maybe you have already heard about the different events affecting the family.” Uncle Pierre had been taken by the Gestapo. They assumed he was being held in the Paris area, but they didn’t know where and were very concerned. Then there was her father, Xavier, who had escaped on foot to Switzerland with his wife and children after believing he would be arrested. She continued with the family news in this vein before assuring her uncle that she would continue to fight for the country. She wanted to know where she could be most useful: France? England? A French territory? What did he think? She closed by telling him “we are all so proud of your actions,” before sending the letter to him in London via secret courier. She waited for a response. None came. She decided to stay put.
Because Défense de la France was slowly becoming anti-Vichy, Geneviève was determined to convert the group into fervent supporters of her uncle. She pressed her case with its cofounder Philippe Viannay, who admitted he knew nothing about Charles de Gaulle. Despite that, Viannay firmly believed that the country should not be seeking foreign help in the war effort. It should fight its way out of this predicament on its own, without enlisting allies, especially British ones, as General de Gaulle had done. Viannay and Geneviève had a lively, prolonged debate about her uncle, during which he refused to embrace her views. This was no shock to Hélène Mordkovitch, who knew that Philippe could be not only stubborn but also unwilling to hear a woman’s perspective. Her marrying him in 1942 didn’t soften him in the least.