by Paige Bowers
Despite Philippe’s intransigence, Geneviève showed him that her uncle offered France the best way forward. She gave him all of her uncle’s essential writings and went to work converting other network members while he read them. Robert Salmon began to see things her way, and he knew it would be difficult for DF to get assistance from London unless they began supporting Charles de Gaulle.
“Rather quickly,” Viannay recalled, “I perceived that she considered herself on a mission from the resistance and from the youth of her generation, in part because of the last name she had.”
Viannay—and DF—fell in step.
“Even in the resistance, people didn’t know who de Gaulle was and what he wanted,” Geneviève later said. “He was France and Free France was France. But my comrades never really understood that. They said ‘But it’s the English who are conducting the fight.’ Personally, I thought at the time—and it was not out of sympathy for my good uncle—that . . . a resistance united behind him was absolutely necessary.”
Geneviève also knew that there were plenty of lies to refute. Some whispered that her uncle was still friends with his mentor, Pétain. Others gossiped that the general named his son Philippe after the marshal, who was also the boy’s godfather. There were other yarns too, some of them too absurd to be taken seriously. Geneviève would set the record straight by writing a biographical article about him that was published on Défense de la France’s front page on June 20, 1943. The newspaper was the largest underground periodical in France at the time, with a circulation of 450,000, so a compelling piece would surely make waves.
At the top of the story was a mysterious disclaimer that said the story was written by someone who was close enough to the general to truly know him. The author shared family history and argued that Charles de Gaulle was a self-made man who had prepared himself for this moment. Geneviève listed his accomplishments: graduation from Saint-Cyr, valiant battle in World War I, a military career that had been marked by his “independence of spirit,” and provocative writings. He was a man who would not, could not capitulate, and so he followed the path of honor to London, where he now sat, trying to keep the flames of French resistance burning.
“He knows that France demands more of him than merely dying for the country,” she wrote in conclusion. “It is the hardest sort of combat that he must undertake . . . while carrying on his shoulders the faith of an entire people. . . . Charles de Gaulle left France, but it was so he could lead it into combat and victory.”
Geneviève signed the piece with the pen name Gallia, the Latin word for France and an allusion to her family name. Almost two weeks later Gallia’s Défense de la France debut was followed by another story, titled “De Gaulle and French Independence.” Geneviève wanted readers to understand the nature of her uncle’s allegiance to the British. Claims that he would make France part of England were nonsense, she wrote. All Charles de Gaulle wanted was France’s total independence. Following that story, the paper reproduced excerpts of de Gaulle’s speeches before devoting entire issues to his biggest texts. Geneviève became the first—and only—woman to write for the paper. As support for her uncle grew, she continued to distribute photos of him to curious supporters. One DF member didn’t recall how she got her hands on one of the pictures but remembered how surprised she was when she saw the general’s likeness for the first time: “That photo, I don’t know, it was like seeing Jesus for the first time. I can’t tell you what it was like to see [him]. I was almost amazed to see his face, to see who he was at long last.”
* * *
On June 21, 1943, General de Gaulle’s delegate Jean Moulin showed up forty-five minutes late for an afternoon meeting in a doctor’s office near Lyon with nine other resistance leaders. A few weeks earlier he had created the National Council of Resistance (NCR), a sixteen-member group that consisted of representatives from eight resistance groups, five political parties, and two trade unions. Its first act was to recognize Charles de Gaulle as chairman of a provisional government that would replace the Vichy government and prevent France from coming under Allied military administration after its liberation. The temporary administration, under de Gaulle, would organize elections for a new constituent assembly that would have seven months to draft a constitution for an official government. Moulin had also gotten the NCR to recognize General Charles Delestraint as leader of the country’s Secret Army. When Delestraint was arrested by the Gestapo on June 9, 1943, in Paris, Moulin had to find a replacement, which was what brought him to this meeting at a doctor’s office in Lyon. As Moulin took his seat among his resistance colleagues, the Gestapo charged in and arrested almost everyone in attendance.
Moulin had proven in the early days of the occupation that he was willing to die rather than submit to Nazi pressure. He cut his throat with a piece of broken glass rather than yield to a Nazi demand to wrongly accuse Senegalese French army troops of civilian massacres. He survived his wound and went on to become one of the most respected men in France, parachuting in to unite the disparate movements under General de Gaulle and getting them the resources they needed. Now more than ever it was important for Moulin not to break under questioning, not to surrender any names, meeting places, plans. The stakes were too high.
Moulin was beaten for at least two weeks after his arrest. During that time, SS officer Klaus Barbie dragged Moulin’s unconscious body into his office, trying to make other resisters spill secrets. They didn’t, and neither did Moulin, even though the SS put hot needles under his fingernails, closed doors on his hands until his knuckles broke, and whipped and hit him until he passed out.
“Jeered at, savagely beaten, his head bleeding, his internal organs ruptured, he attained the limits of human suffering without betraying a single secret, he who knew everything,” his sister, Laure, later wrote.
The Paris-based Gestapo ordered that those who had been arrested in Lyon must be brought to the capital for further questioning. Barbie brought Moulin to the capital, and the Gestapo continued to beat him, but he did not break. On July 7 he was placed on a stretcher and loaded onto a train for Germany. He died en route and was brought back to Paris two days later and cremated. Although the loss was a catastrophe to the movement, its members knew they needed to carry on.
One of those resisters was young, beautiful Jacqueline d’Alincourt. She had met Geneviève de Gaulle through mutual friends in 1941 and stayed in touch with her, especially after she learned of her husband’s death in a concentration camp in Nuremburg. She was so devastated by the loss that she could not even shed a tear, Geneviève recalled. Jacqueline vowed to avenge her husband’s death through resistance, and Geneviève promised to introduce her to a network.
Already Jacqueline had formed a mininetwork with her sisters shortly after the occupation. Each day they went out armed with umbrellas, paste, and several homemade anti-Nazi posters that they pasted up in high-traffic places such as food lines. When the young women were done hanging up their handiwork, they opened their umbrellas to conceal their faces so no one could figure out who had pulled the stunt. By 1942 Jacqueline had networked her way to Jean Moulin’s team in Paris. She translated intelligence into code and received messages from militants that she could pass along by radio to London. She also provided London-based Free French agents with housing in France. Once they parachuted into the country, Jacqueline provided them with safe lodging, false identification papers, food stamps, and a professional cover. To protect these operatives she often had to rent in her own name. If they were arrested in one of her apartments, there was the risk that she would be too. The peril was worth it, as far as she was concerned. She had already lost so much.
The risks were also increasing for Geneviève, who had been asked to take on more responsibilities within Défense de la France and on its newspaper. She became part of the committee of directors and assumed more editing and distribution duties with the journal, everything from selecting articles for publication to finding influential readers who would talk ab
out their work. The newspapers were sent to priests, vicars, and lawyers, among others, as Geneviève looked for more names to add to the mailing list.
“We had the physicians’ directory, so every doctor got a copy,” she recalled. “We delivered it to anyone who dealt with the public because we had to change people’s minds and convince them that they could and should resist.”
Groups of students were dispatched across the city to buy small amounts of stamps and envelopes. Other teams addressed and stuffed the envelopes with newspapers before fanning out through the capital to mail them from various spots. Others rode through the city on their bicycles to hand out the papers or pushed their way through the Métro to hand out copies in crowds. There was always the threat of being stopped and searched, but DF members pressed on, ever mindful of the danger. With each passing issue Geneviève began to believe that Défense de la France was the best newspaper in occupied France. Everything felt like it was coming together. Perhaps the Germans weren’t so invincible after all.
Hitler began 1943 without his usual bombast. In his previous New Year’s address, he had crowed to the German people about the Reich’s glorious victories. Now he came to them claiming he was a peace-loving man who had been forced into war. He promised eventual victory, but his words rang hollow. Russian armies were handing his troops heavy defeats in the East, while Allied troops in Africa were on the increase.
“Winter may be difficult,” the führer said. “Its blows, however, cannot hit us harder than last year. It will be followed by an hour in which we shall again come forward, exerting all our strength in order to help the cause of freedom and thus also the life and future of our nation. . . . The day will come when one of the contending parties in this struggle will collapse. That will not be Germany, we know.”
By the end of January, Russian troops continued their drive eastward as British pilots dropped bombs on Berlin, and American pilots strafed two important naval bases in broad daylight. In February German troops surrendered after the Battle of Stalingrad, and other Nazi forces had been mowed over in other skirmishes with tremendous losses. By May Allied soldiers in North Africa had forced the surrender of the German Afrika Korps, leading to the imprisonment of 275,000 Italian and German fighters. Headlines outside France trumpeted Nazi failures, and the BBC and resistance papers worked to get this news into the country to bolster morale. Germany was running out of manpower, other reporters noted. Although it was dipping into its reservists and foreign workers for help in the battlefields and factories, these replacements were proving less efficient. The turning tide drained Nazi morale and emboldened resisters. Within the first three months of 1943, small groups of French fighters killed at least 532 German officers and troops across the country in various types of attacks.
DF embraced the defiant spirit. On July 14, 1943, the members decided to distribute the paper in plain view of the occupiers. Philippe Viannay believed that being a little more daring would inspire more of the French to push back against the Germans. Germany was trying to dominate the country through terror, so the group implored its readers to liberate themselves from their fears. Once that happened they “would be indomitable.”
They stood in the metro, handing out copies of the newspaper as they rubbed shoulders with passing Nazis. Geneviève remembered that one German soldier saw the front page of their issue and turned red with anger as he read some of the headlines. Across the top of the front page a printed quote from her uncle screamed, “France, unite with us!” A story about Bastille Day reminded Frenchmen about their historic duty to fight back against an oppressor in the name of liberty. July 14, that story said, “was a day of confidence” and unity. Geneviève watched the soldier put his hand on his revolver in response, but what could he do in a crowded subway car? He couldn’t kill her in front of other passengers, not in these tense times. Plus, as Geneviève recalled, “everyone was squeezed in, everyone was rushed and had somewhere to be.” At the next stop Geneviève stepped off the train and disappeared into the crowd.
The next day, DF members handed out papers in church doorways, innocently, as if they were passing out a parish bulletin. Geneviève distributed copies in front of one church as one of her male associates watched from the other side of the street, looking for any signs that the Gestapo was coming and they needed to run. He carried a canister of tear gas, just in case. A church parishioner walked up to Geneviève, took one of the papers, and gave it a quick glance before crumbling it up and throwing it in the gutter. The man rushed to the opposite sidewalk, but that didn’t stop others from coming out of the church and browsing the rest of her copies. They were surprised when they realized they had not been handed a church circular but a tract that was calling them to action. Many folded it up and stuck it in their pocket as they entered or left the church. Some read it openly, not caring whether they were caught.
On such a triumphant day, one fact remained unknown to DF: one of their distributors, a young medical student named Serge Marongin, was a Gestapo informant. He had learned a lot about the network’s distribution process but did not know much about its other activities, which the higher-ups did their best to keep secret. Marongin compiled a list of resisters in the network and handed a final copy over to the Germans, who paid him 100,000 francs for his work. Three days later the head of the French Gestapo, infuriated that the young people of Défense de la France could so brazenly distribute their underground papers in broad daylight, ordered the arrest of its members.
Six days later, on July 20, 1943, Geneviève left her office in hopes of attending 7:00 mass at Notre Dame. She was ten minutes ahead of schedule, so she planned to stop at a bookstore on the rue Bonaparte to pass false identity papers to a contact who would be waiting for her there. The bookstore was a popular drop point for resistance members, but on this particular day Geneviève did not see anyone there waiting, as she had expected. Something seemed strange to her, so she hid her briefcase of documents behind a pile of books and attempted to leave as discreetly as possible. On her way out a bespectacled man in a well-tailored suit approached her and asked her what she was looking for that day.
“I would like to buy a Bible,” she told him.
The man told Geneviève that the owner would be back soon and could help her with her purchase then. That’s when Geneviève realized she had been caught in a trap; she knew that the owner was on vacation. She edged toward the front door in an attempt to escape, but another man grabbed her by the collar and asked, “Why are you leaving?” Two more men came in the front door.
The elegant man in glasses walked toward her. His name was Pierre Bonny and he was once considered one of the most talented police officers in France until he was jailed on corruption charges. After he was released from prison, Bonny approached the Gestapo and offered them his services, which they did not refuse. Working in tandem with the notorious gangster Henri Lafont, Bonny doubled the size of the Gestapo by recruiting a force of thugs to help with raids, arrests, and interrogations. The duo enlisted Serge Marongin to root out members of Défense de la France. Marongin gave them a list with fifty names on it. Although Bonny didn’t know it at that moment—he knew only that he was arresting a resister at a drop point—the young lady he had snared was General de Gaulle’s niece.
Bonny, a master interrogator, brought her to the back of the shop for questioning while his men searched the store.
“Your papers, Mademoiselle,” he asked her.
Geneviève reached into her red-and-black purse for the document that falsely affirmed she was Geneviève Garnier. She handed it to Bonny and he began to look it over just as his men came into the back room with the briefcase she had concealed. One of the men opened the bag and showed Bonny the false identity papers and a Défense de la France article that she had begun to write. With evidence of her activities in front of her, Geneviève knew it was time to confess.
“Do you maintain that these papers are real?” Bonny asked.
“Actually, no,” she t
old him.
“What is your real identity?” he continued.
“Geneviève de Gaulle,” she told him.
Bonny looked concerned. He had become a very wealthy man by taking a percentage of the gold, fine art, furs, and jewels that Nazis had confiscated from Jews they had arrested, but it was not likely that he could enrich himself by capturing General de Gaulle’s niece. If the war turned in France’s favor, there was a good chance that Bonny would pay dearly for what he had done. He stared at Geneviève for an instant, then slapped her and ordered his men to take her out to his car. They took her for questioning at an empty mansion they had recently requisitioned on the Place des États-Unis. The car rolled slowly through the streets of Paris toward its destination, drifting past pedestrians on the sidewalks. Geneviève felt at peace as she watched scenes of daily life unfold, but at the same time realized she was no longer part of that world.
When she arrived at the Place des États-Unis, her captors escorted her out of the car and into the building, which stirred with drama because of the resisters they had begun rounding up that day. One of her jailers pointed a machine gun at her back and nudged her up the steps to a room under the mansard at the top of the building, where she would be held until she was interrogated. There was a small, round window in the chamber, and through it Geneviève could see the treetops and hear the happy squeals of children playing outside. Inside she could hear Bonny’s thugs shouting from the lower floors.
Hours later Bonny’s henchmen brought her into an office. There was not much to learn about Défense de la France at this point because Marongin had denounced most of its members. But the Gestapo was determined to find out who the rest of its associates were so they could capture them too. Geneviève refused to reveal any information and was slapped and punched in the jaw for her defiance. When it was clear she would not yield to their punishment, Geneviève was driven to Gestapo headquarters at the rue des Saussaies. There, after another interrogation, she declared her identity before she was sent to Fresnes Prison. Sitting in the back of the police wagon, Geneviève hummed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” She was entering a new phase, one without secrecy or false identities. But it was also one without freedom, and she did not yet know how to fight back.