The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  A member of one of those groups remembered how it all began:

  It was on a beautiful evening in July ’40, on the Boulevard Montparnasse, that three friends discovered their mutual disgust at Pétainist cowardice and decided they had to prepare the fightback.114

  Those three friends were left-wing intellectuals – Jean Cassou, Claude Aveline and Marcel Abraham. Barely a week after that discussion on the Boulevard Montparnasse, Cassou received a visit from his friend Agnès Humbert, who had just returned from Limoges. Humbert – ‘an outgoing woman, impetuous and courageous,’ said Cassou115 – catalysed his vague sentiments into a concrete plan. As Humbert wrote in her diary that evening:

  Suddenly, I blurt out why I have come to see him, telling him that I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something, if I don’t react somehow . . . The only remedy is for us to act together, to form a group of ten like-minded comrades, no more. To meet on agreed days to exchange news, to write and distribute pamphlets and tracts, and to share summaries of French radio broadcasts from London. I don’t harbour many illusions about the practical effects of our actions, but simply keeping our sanity will be success of a kind.116

  At one level the Resistance really was that simple – ordinary people, who were angry, humiliated or ashamed, or all three at the same time, decided to change things, despite the fact that they had neither the experience nor the means to make things happen. They had the will, and that was enough. Jean Cassou later wrote: ‘A moral revolt, a moral fact, was the key starting point for all résistants, the essence of the Resistance.’ In the years that followed, the same scene – the same moral revolt, the same decision to act – took place over and over again, all over France.

  Like all Resistance organizations, the small group set up by Cassou and Humbert grew through a series of friendships and chance meetings.117 Cassou’s friend, Paul Rivet, the director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, allowed the group to use the Musée’s duplicator, and on 25 September 1940 they produced their first leaflet. The group soon expanded to include an anthropologist at the Musée, Germaine Tillion. She was already involved in resistance work through retired Colonel Paul Hauet, who ran a charity that helped French prisoners of war. When Tillion volunteered to help him, Hauet explained that they would also be organizing an escape network for French POWs. Over the next year their group in the east of France helped around 5,000 men return home.118

  Tillion in turn recruited the Musée’s librarian, Yvonne Oddon, and her fiancé, the Russian exile Anatole Lewitsky, who studied shamanism.119 They then drew in one of the most dazzling, mercurial and tragic figures of the Resistance, the Russian anthropologist Boris Vildé. Tall, blond and well built, Vildé was born in St Petersburg in 1908, moving first to Estonia, then to Berlin, where he was jailed for anti-fascist activities. He arrived in Paris in 1932, where he married the daughter of a professor of history, and eventually worked at the Musée de l’Homme, studying Arctic peoples. Vildé made a striking impression on everyone he met – Agnès Humbert described his ‘cool and luminous intelligence and his remarkable character’,120 while Simone Martin-Chauffier seems to have been in awe of him: ‘He was there, so present and, at the same time, as absent as a god, a thinker, a lost child.’121 It was Vildé’s idea to produce a newspaper that would carry material from the international press, analyses of the political and military situation, and above all calls to action. That active orientation was reflected in the title they adopted: Résistance. Paul Rivet put his finger on the source of some of Vildé’s ideas: ‘Vildé is a son of the Revolution,’ he said; ‘he carries the Revolution within him, he understands how revolutions work.’122 Whatever the case, Vildé soon became the leader of the group, and his ideas shaped its brief life.

  The first issue of Résistance appeared on 15 December. It was only four pages long, and most of the articles dealt with the Nazi exploitation of France, the growth of anti-Semitism or the politics of the USA. What set Résistance apart from the rest of the early underground press was the rousing tone of the front-page editorial:

  Your immediate task is to get organized so that, when you receive the order, you can resume the struggle. Carefully recruit determined men, and give them the best leaders. Support and convince those who doubt or who have lost all hope. Seek out and keep watch on those who have disavowed the Nation and those that betray it . . . In accepting to be your leaders, we have sworn to sacrifice everything to this task, to be hard and pitiless. Yesterday we did not know each other; none of us were involved in the old party squabbles that took place in government or in the Assembly; we are independent, simply French, chosen for the action which we promise to carry out. We have only one ambition, one passion, one desire: to recreate France, pure and free.123

  Résistance claimed to be the ‘Bulletin officiel du Comité national de salut public’ (‘Official Bulletin of the National Committee of Public Safety’). This was a reference to the revolutionary committee created in 1793, but there was no highly organized group behind Résistance. The reality was far more prosaic. As Agnès Humbert imprudently wrote in her diary:

  We met in Louis Martin-Chauffier’s office, where a minuscule fire was burning. How wonderful it felt not to be frozen: all four of us were thrilled by this touch of luxury. Simone Martin-Chauffier brought us a tray of tea – proper tea – with bread and butter. The atmosphere was snug and cosy. The men wrote and talked, while I typed up their articles.124

  The tone adopted by Vildé in the editorial was a calculated gamble. A small minority of French people wanted to resist, to be given a plan of action – to be led. Résistance hoped to attract them, simply by claiming to be that leadership. Vildé adopted the same attitude with his own comrades, when he told them that they already had more than 12,000 armed men in Paris.125 This was simply not true. Despite this boastful exaggeration, he had made an astonishing number of contacts in a very short time – even now, the full extent of his work is not known.126

  In a matter of weeks Vildé made links with an escape network around Béthune in the north of France, which was run by a garage owner called Sylvette Leleu, together with a nun, Sister Marie-Laurence, and Madeleine de Gaulle, niece of the General. Leleu also introduced Vildé to her young trainee accountant, René Sénéchal. Sénéchal, also known as ‘Le Môme’ (‘The Kid’), soon became Vildé’s right-hand man, transporting documents and people across the demarcation line, making contacts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Perpignan. At around the same time, Vildé also recruited Albert Gaveau, an unemployed mechanic from Béthune who would soon be involved in much of the group’s activity.

  Through his father-in-law, Vildé met Robert Fawtier, Professor of Medieval History at the Sorbonne, who had established an intelligence circuit that included railway workers who provided information about troop movements. He also recruited society fashion photographer Pierre Walter, a good-looking man in his thirties, who shared an apartment with a pilot, Georges Ithier, in a flea-ridden Parisian hotel that doubled up as a knocking shop for prostitutes servicing the Nazi army. While the troops were getting their kicks on the second floor, Ithier and Walter organized the duplication of Résistance and helped Vildé set up a series of safe houses and an escape route across the Pyrenees.

  This bewildering array of contacts reinforced Vildé’s charismatic reputation and made even his closest comrades wonder about how extensive the group was. Simone Martin-Chauffier wrote:

  Sometimes I wondered how many of us there might be – Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? And how many groups like ours were there? Did anyone know? Did we all depend on some leader, who was pulling the strings from afar?127

  Agnès Humbert was certain there was something going on, but she was unsure exactly what it was:

  Vildé is in contact with an organization of major influence. The Intelligence Service? The Deuxième Bureau [Vichy Intelligence], or perhaps another French group born out of present circumstances? We have no idea, and we all know that we mustn’t ask ques
tions. We have put our trust in Vildé and we must be guided by him.128

  Germaine Tillion was slightly less enthusiastic:

  I personally felt I had to consider the English as allies, and act accordingly – which did not stop me from feeling a certain disgust at the idea of seeing our resistance activities coordinated from London by the Intelligence Service.129

  The exact details of Vildé’s connections with British Intelligence – if any – are not known (all MI6 archives are permanently closed).130 But by whatever route, information collected by the Musée de l’Homme network found its way back to London. Some of this intelligence turned out to be extremely important. A sociologist at the Musée de l’Homme, René Creston, had friends in Brittany who gave him drawings of the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire, and of the immense dry dock – the biggest on the Atlantic coast. These drawings were sent to London and used as part of the planning for Operation CHARIOT, which took place in March 1942 when a British destroyer loaded with explosives was rammed into the dock gates. The charges were on timers to enable the crew to escape; the ship eventually exploded as she was being inspected by German officers who thought that the attack had failed.131 In the hours before the explosion, intense fighting left 169 British troops dead, along with 16 French civilians. Two young boys, Henry Thibaud and Michel Savary, recalled what happened:

  Around four in the morning we heard artillery fire. From the window we could see cars in the street – we quickly got dressed. My father opened the front door, but two Huns said ‘Get back in!’ Everyone in the build ing came down into the hall. An Algerian who lived on the first floor said, ‘The British have landed with a small boat and a big boat full of explosives. It has broken down the dock gates.’ My father went out on his bike. But he was arrested. The Huns came and searched our house. They asked everyone for their papers, then they left. The next morning when we went outside, there was blood all over the streets. The Germans were armed with rifles, grenades and machine guns. Suddenly a lorry went past in the Rue de Méan, and I saw it was full of British prisoners. They made a ‘V’ sign with their fingers, which meant victory.132

  The captured soldiers were right: the dry dock had been put out of action for the rest of the war. As a result, the largest German battleship – the Bismarck – could not be used in the Atlantic sea war, and U-boat activity in the North Atlantic was severely affected.

  Producing an underground newspaper merely endangered those brave or foolhardy enough to be involved. But intelligence work could lead to the loss of innocent lives. Agnès Humbert struggled with this moral dilemma as she trudged her way through the slush-filled Parisian streets at the end of 1940. She had the possibility of getting information about a German airstrip to the north of Paris, but realized the potential implications. As she wrote in her diary:

  Because of my meddling, there will be widows, inconsolable mothers, fatherless children . . . As a direct result of my meddling, people – French people, living peaceful lives – will be killed and wounded, children maimed. Where are all my lofty humanitarian ideals now?133

  But then, as she walked past the Gare de l’Est, Humbert saw two German officers striding towards the station, and the full reality of the Occupation struck home:

  Trudging in front of them are three porters weighed down with packages: bolts of cloth with I don’t know how many shoeboxes tied on to them with string. Suddenly I am reminded of one of those old colonial newsreels – Afrique vous parle (‘Voice of Africa’) or some such – with those long processions of ‘native bearers’ carrying the baggage of two or three white explorers, or exploiters. A pitiful sight, it always made my heart contract with pain. And now, as I stand in the slush outside the station watching this same spectacle unfold, the same but even more sordid, I am rooted to the spot. We simply have to stop them, we can’t allow them to colonize us, to carry off all our goods on the backs of our men while they stroll along, arms swinging, faces wreathed in smiles, boots and belts polished and gleaming. We can’t let it happen. And to stop it happening we have to kill. Kill like wild beasts, kill to survive. Kill by stealth, kill by treachery, kill with premeditation, kill the innocent. It has to be done, and I will do it.134

  *

  The activity of the people around Vildé began to attract the attention of the Nazis. The first sign came when Weil-Curiel had to return to England. Vildé knew Weil-Curiel through Nordmann, who distributed Résistance; at the end of December Vildé persuaded a Breton fisherman to take the Free French agent back across the Channel, and sent Gaveau along to see that all went well. But the Germans raided the boat, arresting the fisherman. Luckily, the two résistants managed to escape – Weil-Curiel to the Mediterranean, Gaveau to Paris.135 Then in February the police raided the site where the second issue of Résistance was being duplicated, discovering a list with the names of the people to whom it was to be delivered. At the top of the list was Nordmann. A couple of days later he was arrested as he travelled with Gaveau, who again managed to escape. As the Resistance became more experienced and more professional, Gaveau’s repeated ‘luck’ would be seen as suspect, but Vildé’s group was extremely naive.

  Worried that the noose was tightening around the group, Yvonne Oddon and Anatole Lewitsky persuaded Vildé to leave Paris for the Non-Occupied Zone. They should have heeded their own advice: a couple of weeks later they were arrested by the Gestapo in a night raid on their apartment. Earlier that evening the Nazis had ransacked the Musée de l’Homme, having been tipped off about the Saint-Nazaire plans. They were closing in. From the other side of the demarcation line, Vildé got a message through to Claude Aveline, ordering him to leave Paris; Cassou was also on the point of leaving. The editorial board of Résistance was falling apart, but there was no question of stopping work. Agnès Humbert asked Pierre Brossolette, a talented young left-wing journalist who had stopped writing at the beginning of the Occupation, to break his self-imposed silence and join the group. Brossolette eventually agreed, making a decision that would change his life.

  One evening in March Agnès Humbert was producing the next issue of Résistance, written entirely by Brossolette. They no longer had access to a duplicator, so Humbert had to type as many copies as she could. There was a knock at the door, and there was Vildé, grinning broadly. ‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘I had to come back,’ he replied. Things had gone badly in the south – The Kid and Ithier had been arrested – and Vildé felt he had to return to reorganize the group. This was another mistake. On 26 March Vildé had lunch with Walter and Gaveau, and then left to see Simone Martin-Chauffier, who was going to get him some false papers. He never arrived: the Gestapo arrested him on the way. Three weeks later Humbert was arrested at her house as she typed a leaflet. Shortly afterwards, Walter and his girlfriend were eating with Albert Gaveau; Gaveau complained of feeling ill and left. A few minutes later the Gestapo arrested Walter and his girlfriend. Résistance was dead.

  For nine months the Nazis prepared the trial of what later became known as the Musée de l’Homme group.136 They had been betrayed by Gaveau, who had been working for the Nazis from the moment he had been recruited by Vildé.137 But the Nazis were not able to penetrate any further into the nebulous network of groups in which Vildé and his comrades were involved. They got Résistance and the Béthune escape network, but not Abraham, Aveline, Brossolette, Cassou, Fawtier, Hauet, Simone Martin-Chauffier or Germaine Tillion. As the Nazi judge, Ernst Roskothen, complained: ‘We knew everything that Gaveau knew and absolutely nothing else.’138

  The trial, which began in Fresnes prison in January 1942, was a strange affair. Although the prosecutor was a caricature of a sneering, anti-Semitic Nazi second-rater, happy to lie and to bully, the rest of the Germans maintained a quiet dignity. Roskothen, by all accounts an honest man doing a dishonest job, was determined to follow the book, and a mutual respect between the judge and the nineteen accused soon set in. The members of the network were overjoyed to see each other again, and a kind of festive atmospher
e developed at certain points. Many of the prisoners felt an odd pleasure at the number of people who had been charged – it showed that they had been involved in something substantial. As Agnès Humbert put it: ‘There are so many of us! Many people I don’t know at all.’139

  At the end of the trial, five of the accused were acquitted, three received prison sentences and Agnès Humbert was sentenced to deportation. The remainder, including three women, were sentenced to death. The last to be sentenced was Vildé. After the sentence was passed, he pleaded that Sénéchal, The Kid, should be spared.140 Then, remarkably, Vildé asked to shake hands with the judge. Roskothen was so moved by this request for reconciliation from a man he had just condemned to death that he had to hurry from the room to vomit. The prisoners, meanwhile, seemed to enter another world. They hugged each other, joked about the future and were philosophical about their fate. ‘We can’t complain, we gambled, we knew the risks, and we lost. Tough on us – but there will be others who will continue our work,’ said Nordmann.141 The clerk of the court – a German soldier – went up to Vildé and said he hoped he would be spared. Vildé laughed, took the German’s hands and swung their arms back and forth, making both men giggle. But despite the bonhomie of the courtroom, the Nazi death machine was relentless. Although the three women had their sentences commuted to deportation, on a cold afternoon on 22 February 1942 the seven men were taken up to Mont Valerien, an army hill fort to the west of Paris, where they were executed. At his own request, Vildé was the last to be shot.

  During his long months in prison, Vildé had written in a notebook, trying to make sense of what was happening to him. His thoughts give an insight into his motivations, and those of many other résistants: