by Matthew Cobb
De Gaulle’s short broadcast went out on the BBC French service in the early evening.71 Nobody in London thought to record it. Speaking in his singsong voice, de Gaulle, like Churchill earlier in the day, gave a brief summary of his view of the fall of France, pointing the finger at the inability of the French high command to cope with German tactics. He then reminded his listeners that the outcome of the war would be decided on a planetary scale, that the French Empire had yet to be defeated and that joint naval action with the British could repulse the Germans. Finally, he closed with an appeal which has since gone down in French history:
I, General de Gaulle, now in London, call upon the French officers and soldiers who are or who may find themselves on British soil, with or without their weapons, I call upon the engineers and the skilled workers in the armaments industry who are or who may find themselves on British soil, to join me.
Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.
Tomorrow, as today, I shall speak on the radio from London.72
Although few people heard de Gaulle’s speech, it was widely reproduced in the French press in the days that followed. Agnès Humbert, who had fled from Paris to Limoges, ran through the garden ‘like a lunatic’ to tell a military friend the news. The officer was unimpressed: ‘It’s all a lot of nonsense . . . he’s a crackpot, that de Gaulle, you mark my words,’ he said. But Humbert wrote in her diary: ‘It is thanks to that “crackpot” that this evening I decided not to put an end to everything . . . He has given me hope, and nothing in the world can extinguish that hope now.’73
But Humbert’s response was unusual. In the main, de Gaulle’s declaration fell on deaf ears. The French population was bitter, depressed, cynical. Calls to arms from a nobody had little purchase on people who no longer trusted their military leaders. One of the few accounts of popular reactions to de Gaulle’s speech comes from Georges Sadoul, who heard the broadcast with a group of his fellow soldiers. Their responses were forthright: ‘Go fight yourself, you bastard. You’ve got your arse in an armchair and you want other people to go on getting themselves killed.’74
Within a few months that attitude began to evaporate. People realized that they could resist, that they should resist. But de Gaulle’s role in awakening the fightback would be minimal. The Resistance was born in France, not London.
2
A Glimmer of Light
France was stunned. Pétain enjoyed the numb support of much of the population, simply because he had ended the horror of the war. It took some time for most people to realize the moral, political and economic price that would be paid for such a peace. While France had apparently stepped out of the conflict, the country was split into two. The Vichy regime was unique in the whole of Occupied Europe: it was the only government to agree willingly to the occupation and division of its country. The proud possessor of an Empire had been reduced to the status of a defeated, occupied state. On an international scale the Nazis appeared to be unstoppable: in the middle of July Hitler launched his long-awaited air attack against the British Isles – the Battle of Britain had begun. Thousands of German aircraft leaped into the skies above the Channel, the first step in Hitler’s plan to subdue his last enemy in Europe. It seemed as though the Nazi wave would roll over the whole continent.
Something like normal life resumed in the Non-Occupied Zone, where Vichy pretended to reign supreme. All over the country, the millions who had taken to the roads during ‘the Exodus’ gradually returned home. But the reality of fuel rationing soon changed the face of France – the Occupation gave the Nazis access to a stock of petrol that was larger than Germany’s annual production, and they diverted a huge proportion of that fuel to their war effort, leaving the French with virtually nothing.75 Private cars vanished, bicycle rickshaws replaced taxis and lorries were commandeered by the army. Paris streets looked like pictures from a weird parallel universe – all deliveries were horse-drawn, road-signs were written in German gothic script, while the twelve bus routes that remained were operated by strange hybrid vehicles: single-decker buses with a huge container on the roof to carry the gas that now powered them.76
All over the country, modern road transport disappeared. Charles d’Aragon remembered life in Vichy France: ‘The big cities, which yesterday were so close, became distant once more. Villages that were neighbours ceased to be so. The kilometre regained the value it had in the previous century. Distances were measured in paces – of man or horse.’77 Things were not quite so bucolic in the northern Occupied Zone. Paris was covered in German road signs, the buildings were festooned with swastikas and Nazi soldiers crowded on to public transport and into bars, restaurants and cinemas. The capital became a Nazi town. Elsewhere, the Germans poured troops into the western coastal regions, setting up garrisons and taking over French naval and air force infrastructure. It was here, in the towns and villages along the Atlantic coast, that the first signs of friction between the French population and the occupying army appeared.
Some of the first people to defy the Nazis were women. Six weeks after the armistice was signed, a laundrywoman from Rennes was sentenced to three months in prison ‘for publicly insulting the German army’, while two seamstresses were each sentenced to one week in prison for the same offence. Some of these protests were organized. In Toulouse, twenty-one-year-old Hélène Cazalbou slapped a German officer in the street, while her accomplices threw leaflets, which read ‘You are here and in Paris, but soon we will be in Berlin’.78 Cazalbou was lucky – she got away with a one-year suspended prison sentence. For others, confrontation with Nazi troops meant death. In Bordeaux a Polish Jew named Israel Karp threw himself at a group of German soldiers who were hoisting the Nazi flag in one of the city’s main squares; convicted of ‘acts of violence against members of the German army’, Karp was executed.79
Nazi ‘justice’ was not only harsh; it was indiscriminate. All over the Atlantic coastal region the Germans laid down dedicated phone lines, creating a Nazi communications web. In July cables in Brittany, near Rennes, Fougères and Angers, were repeatedly cut. In August and September two cables near Nantes were cut twice. Each time, the Germans responded by fining the town they deemed to be ‘responsible’ – for example, following the sabotage of one of the cables near Nantes, the city was fined 2 million francs. For the saboteurs, the punishment was savage: on 19 June – before the armistice – an agricultural worker named Étienne Achavanne cut the telephone lines linking the German command in Rouen with a Luftwaffe airbase. Achavanne was captured and on 7 July was shot by a German firing squad. The official end of the Franco-German war did not make Nazi ‘justice’ any less vicious: later in the summer, Marcel Brossier, a thirty-one-year-old mechanic, was found guilty of cutting telephone cables and was executed at Rennes. A few days earlier, Pierre Roche, a teenager from La Rochelle, was executed for cutting the cable to Royan.
Roche’s sabotage prompted the Nazi commandant of the region to requisition French civilians to protect the cable by patrolling it through the night. Christian Pineau was one of those assigned this tedious task. Pineau, who had been burning official papers from his Ministry shortly before the Nazis arrived in Paris, had fled with millions of other refugees during ‘the Exodus’ and had finally ended up in the Charente-Maritime, near La Rochelle. Like dozens of local men, he had no choice but to follow the Nazis’ orders and make the best of a bad job:
Each farmer had to devote on average six hours to the stupid task of wandering up and down next to a wire. In fact, the job was not too unpleasant because the nights were warm; we took provisions to pass the time, emptied bottles of wine, sang our hearts out or played cards . . . By the time the guard was changed, some of us were completely drunk.80
This kind of mute rejection of the Occupation was typical of the early weeks following the military debacle. In August a fifty-one-year-old socialist civil servant and journalist, Jean Texcier, gave voice to this sentiment, in the form of ‘33 Conseils à l’occupé�
� (‘33 Hints to the Occupied’), a brief text composed of thirty-three short paragraphs, which he published anonymously – and illegally – in Paris.81 This gently ironic pamphlet outlined how the population should passively resist the Nazis because, as Texcier put it, ‘THEY ARE NOT TOURISTS. They are conquerors.’ Texcier’s proposals were hardly radical – polite aloofness if a German soldier tried to strike up a conversation, pretending not to understand German, refusing to attend public concerts given by German troops, and so on – but he struck a chord when he suggested that the time would come for a settling of accounts: ‘On the outside, pretend you do not care; on the inside, stoke up your anger. It will serve you well.’
Texcier’s low-key document had an immediate impact. As well as the original printed version, the text was re-copied by hand or by typewriter, and was slipped into letter boxes and left lying on Métro seats. Agnès Humbert was one of the many who came across Texcier’s pamphlet. She had returned to Paris at the beginning of August, after fleeing to Limoges. On 18 August she wrote with undisguised joy in her diary:
Will the people who produced the 33 Conseils à l’occupé (‘33 Hints to the Occupied’) ever know what they have done for us, and probably for thousands of others? A glimmer of light in the darkness . . . Now we know for certain that we are not alone. There are other people who think like us, who are suffering, and organizing the struggle.82
For most people, the ‘struggle’ consisted simply of listening to the BBC. Every evening, thirty minutes of news and sketches were broadcast in French, including a five-minute slot for de Gaulle’s ‘Free French’. This daily dose of propaganda helped make de Gaulle’s name synonymous with opposition to Vichy. A new word entered the language to describe hostility to the Occupation and the division of the country: ‘Gaullism’. There was no other public figure who adopted such a clear stance, and the French began to look to the exiled General as the figurehead of opposition to the Nazis.
The wit and quality of the entertainment on the BBC, plus its slightly puckish humour, endeared it to a huge part of the French population. A joke that went the rounds in autumn 1940 shows the popularity of the BBC, and the subversive way in which it was viewed:
– Do you know what happened recently? At 9.20 p.m. a Jew killed a German soldier, cut him open and ate his heart.
– Impossible. For three reasons. A German has no heart. A Jew eats no pork. And at 9.20 p.m. everyone is listening to the BBC.83
Along with comical songs and long-running sketches, there were pastiches of commercial jingles, each of which had a clear message. Probably the most famous was directed against the BBC’s main rival, the Nazi-controlled Radio Paris.84 To the catchy tune of ‘La Cucuracha’, a voice would softly sing ‘Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est allemand’ (‘Radio Paris tells lies, Radio Paris tells lies, Radio Paris is German’).
The BBC programmes made no secret of their highly partisan attitude. The overall title – Les Français parlent aux Français (‘The French speak to the French’) – neatly implied that neither Radio Paris nor Radio Vichy truly represented the voice of the French people. And every evening the programme would open with a reminder of how long the Occupation and division of France had lasted. On 22 September – the day the Battle of Britain was won – the opening declaration was: ‘This is the ninetieth day of resistance by the French people against oppression.’ This sombre statement was updated every day until the end of the war.
Listening to the BBC was neither simple nor safe. The Nazis beamed out powerful jamming signals, and listening became an offence punishable by six months in prison.85 Paris and Vichy adopted such extreme measures because they were alarmed at the success of the BBC’s programmes. Although there were around 5 million radio sets in France, plenty of households – especially in the south – did not have access to one. In many parts of the country listening to the BBC became a social activity – over a dozen people regularly gathered around a radio in an apartment in Montpellier, most of the inhabitants of a small village near Clermont-Ferrand would assemble to listen together, while a bar owner in Marseilles would listen in the back room – with the sound turned up so loud that all the customers could hear.86
The widespread enthusiasm for the BBC was all the more surprising, given the wave of Anglophobia that swept the country in the summer. On 3 July the Royal Navy bombarded the French fleet, at anchor in the North African port of Mers-el-Kebir, to keep it out of German hands. For ten hellish minutes, artillery shells rained down on the unsuspecting French vessels. Then it was over. The battleship Bretagne had capsized, and 1,297 French sailors had been killed – more than the number of German sailors the British had killed since the outbreak of the war. Sinking an immobile, unprepared target was hardly the Royal Navy’s finest hour, and it was exploited by Vichy, who argued that it revealed the true nature of ‘perfidious Albion’.
For the British, the attack was the dreadful result of Vichy’s refusal to put the fleet – the most powerful in the Mediterranean – out of the reach of the Nazis by sailing the ships to British ports or to the West Indies, or by scuttling them.87 In keeping with widespread French revulsion, de Gaulle called the attack a ‘deplorable and detestable’ occurrence, but he bravely justified it: ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt,’ he said on the BBC, ‘that, on principle and of necessity, the enemy would have used them against Britain or against our own Empire. I therefore have no hesitation in saying that they are better destroyed.’88 Tragic and deplorable Mers-el-Kebir may have been, but there was a war going on, and Vichy and its supporters had placed themselves firmly on the side of the Nazis.89
On 21 October, after the Nazis’ failure to win the Battle of Britain, and as the London Blitz began, Churchill broadcast in the BBC’s evening slot, speaking French with a thick English accent. In a slow, grandfatherly tone, he encouraged the French to keep faith with the British, held out the prospect of American intervention and made one of his typically bold statements:
Here in London, which Herr Hitler says he will reduce to ashes, and which his aeroplanes are now bombarding, our people are bearing up unflinchingly. Our air force has more than held its own. We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.90
Churchill’s broadcast made a huge impact. A teacher of English in a Versailles lycée instructed his pupils to take down as much as they could make out through the interference, and the following day the speech was reconstructed, in its entirety, in the classroom. In Marseilles a typist took down the speech in shorthand, then typed it up and circulated it around her office for those who had missed it. On a more personal level, the response of Simone Martin-Chauffier’s family, huddled around the radio in Paris, was typical. They laughed at Churchill’s joke about the fishes, and young Claudie said: ‘It was marvellous, wasn’t it, Mummy? And he spoke French! I love the English accent.’91
At around the same time as Churchill made his speech, Jean Texcier was overjoyed to hear the BBC broadcast extracts from his ‘Hints to the Occupied’, a copy of which had made its way across the Channel. One of the key bits of Texcier’s advice – that people should stoke up their anger, rather than express it immediately – had been echoed by Churchill. Much to Simone Martin-Chauffier’s irritation, Churchill had suggested that those in the Occupied Zone should wait for a lead from the Free Zone – where conditions were easier – before they took action. But within a month Churchill and Texcier would learn that young Parisians were not prepared either to wait for Vichy or to simply contain their anger.
*
Four months after fighting ceased on French soil, the reality of the Occupation began to sink in. The war was turning into a long-drawn-out conflict, and the Nazis were not going to be leaving soon. Worse, they were sucking the country dry. No sooner had the portraits of Hitler been hung on office walls than the Nazi bureaucracy set about meticulously cataloguing French economic and military resources – in both Zones – in order to pillage them. For example, they found 363,000 tons o
f non-ferrous metals; within seven months, over half was shipped to Germany. Ten thousand of France’s most advanced machine tools were dispatched to help the Nazi war effort – ‘No available machines that are necessary to Germany must remain in France’ went the order. Production in France was increasingly focused on German military needs. Any commercial order to a French company that related to supplies for the German armed forces had priority over all other orders. And the Nazis were good customers – in the first three months of the Occupation, they placed over 12 billion francs’ worth of orders, forging strong ties with French industry.92
As a result of this reorientation of the French economy, and the effects of the sea war, rationing was imposed at the end of September. From the outset, the nominal amounts available for each person per week were low – 100 grammes of butter, 50 grammes of cheese and 2.5 kilogrammes of bread.93 As the war continued, these amounts were gradually reduced – within three months the bread ration had been cut by fifteen per cent. Coffee soon disappeared completely, to be replaced by a vile brown concoction made from chicory and called ‘national coffee’; on the other hand, Coca-Cola was still available in Parisian bars.94