The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  Shortly before Pineau returned to France, his life took another dramatic turn. Passy asked him to work with Free French Intelligence and to set up two intelligence circuits, one in each zone. Swept away by his contacts with Passy and British Intelligence, Pineau had little hesitation in accepting the offer. This new task not only added a further layer of danger to his life; it also meant he would have to accept the new London line of keeping action and intelligence entirely separate, and abandon his work with Libération-Nord. As a result, he returned to France a changed man. He had left as the delegate of the Resistance in the Occupied Zone; he returned as a Free French secret agent. His uncertainties about de Gaulle remained.

  Minutes before his Lysander left, Pineau received a new version of a speech de Gaulle was planning to make on the BBC. There were enough minor changes – a stronger critique of Vichy, some vague talk of the need for economic planning by the state – to make Pineau confident that his trade union comrades in France would be pleased.

  But back in Paris Pineau felt the same kind of political vertigo he had sensed with de Gaulle. Just as the General did not understand the Resistance, Pineau’s comrades did not understand the Free French. They were not impressed by what he told them about de Gaulle – when he read out the final, amended declaration, it was greeted with a stony silence. They felt the concessions were minor, that de Gaulle could not be trusted, and scolded Pineau for making too many compromises. Glumly, Pineau realized they were right. Even when it came to the one thing Pineau was certain they would appreciate – the money he brought with him – the gulf between them yawned once more, with the dyed-in-the-wool trade union committee men on one side, and the underground journalist turned spy on the other: when he handed the money over to Laurent, who acted as the treasurer for Libération-Nord, his comrade immediately offered to give Pineau whatever money he needed, in return for a receipt. Pineau was aghast at this absurd piece of routinism in such a dangerous context: ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to ask people for receipts?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ came the indignant reply. ‘I can hardly be Treasurer and not have my accounts up to date!’318 The incomprehension was mutual, and total. The Resistance had a lot to learn.

  5

  Life and Death

  On a freezing cold evening at the end of January 1942 Henri Frenay sat alone in a small café in Lyons. He was completely dejected, unable to eat a single mouthful of his meal. The excitement of meeting Jean Moulin earlier in the month had been swept away: in the space of a few catastrophic days, forty-five members of Combat in the Non-Occupied Zone had been arrested by the Vichy police, including two of Frenay’s closest associates – his lover, Berty Albrecht, and Maurice Chevance. Earlier that day, Frenay had lunch with Chevance;319 now his comrade was in prison, and Frenay was touching rock bottom:

  I felt overcome with fatigue. Crushed, oh, I was utterly crushed! For the first time in my life I understood the full meaning of this word . . . One by one the faces of all those dear comrades rose up to haunt me. They seemed to be smiling. What could I do for them, my God, what could I do! I felt ashamed to be free, spared in the battle into which I had led them and in which they had fallen. Should not I too have been among them? It would have been so simple for me to surrender to the police, and I would have found such peace.320

  Combat member André Koehl had been arrested near Clermont-Ferrand, his suitcase full of copies of the newspaper. In breach of the most elementary security rules, Koehl was carrying an uncoded list of names and addresses of Combat members. That was all the Vichy police needed. Frenay had sat in his room, stunned, as every hour brought reports of new arrests.

  Worse was to come in the days that followed. The Combat group in the Occupied Zone was smashed by the Gestapo, who arrested forty-seven people in and around Paris.321 Henri Devillers, a Combat agent who had been recruited in the autumn by Frenay and Berty Albrecht to carry information across the demarcation line, turned out to be an agent of the Abwehr, the Nazi counter-intelligence service. For three months the Gestapo had access to every piece of information that Frenay’s group transmitted between the two zones. The arrested résistants – including René Parodi, who also worked with Libération-Nord – suffered a dreadful fate. After a period in French jails, they were deported to Germany under the sinister designation Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog). This referred to prisoners who were to disappear without trace into the hell of Nazi Germany. Not even their relatives would know what happened to them. Eventually, in October 1943, the Combat prisoners were tried, and seventeen of them – including six women – were sentenced to a particularly brutal end: with one exception, they were beheaded with an axe in Cologne in January 1944. For the six women among the arrested, the death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment, but at the end of the war only two made it back from the concentration camps.322

  Devillers had no time to bask in his betrayal: in one of the strangest moments of the Occupation, he was immediately arrested by Vichy counter-espionage in the shape of the Travaux Ruraux (TR), led by Paul Paillole, one of Frenay’s army colleagues and friends. The role of the clandestine TR – in breach of the armistice agreement with the Nazis – was to observe and harass foreign agents within Vichy France, including German spies. Devillers was promptly tried by a secret French military tribunal for communicating information to an ‘enemy espionage organization’ and was executed two months after his arrest.323 With one hand Vichy was smashing a Resistance organization, with the other it was executing a man who provided the Nazis with information to do the same thing. This apparent paradox can be explained by the fact that Vichy was formally an independent regime, and by the existence of a small minority within the state apparatus who were hostile to collaboration.

  After Frenay’s moment of depression in Lyons, the Combat leader left for Annecy to discuss the crisis with François de Menthon, taking with him another of his lovers, Chilina Ciosi. To his amazement Berty Albrecht walked into the hotel where he and Ciosi were staying. Berty had been freed by the Vichy police to give Frenay a message: Henri Rollin, the head of Vichy police counter-espionage, wanted to meet him. Combat was still reeling from the wave of arrests, and Rollin’s invitation could easily be a trap designed to finish the group off. Frenay’s comrades finally agreed he should take the risk and meet Rollin, with the hope that something might be done for the dozens of Combat members who had just been imprisoned.

  The next day, 28 January, Frenay entered Rollin’s office in Lyons. Rollin, who was married to a Russian Jew, had written a fiercely anti-Nazi book and eventually joined the Free French in London. But at this point Rollin was apparently a Vichy loyalist who wanted Frenay to stop his activities. Neither Frenay nor Rollin budged an inch, but the interview ended with an invitation for Frenay to meet the Minister of the Interior, Pierre Pucheu, and a promise that Frenay would not be subject to Vichy surveillance for the time being.324 The next day Frenay met Pucheu in his Vichy offices for ninety minutes. This was not a good idea. As well as being responsible for all anti-Resistance repression in France, the forty-two-year-old Pucheu was a far-right activist and one-time steel magnate who had bankrolled the fascist Parti Populaire Français.325 Indeed, Combat never mentioned Pucheu’s name without calling him a traitor. And now Frenay was in discussion with him.

  Like Rollin, Pucheu argued that Combat should stop attacking the government, before reminding Frenay that ‘These are not negotiations. I am simply giving you a warning before proceeding to repress your organizations with extreme severity.’326 In response, Frenay asked for ten days free of police harassment, so that he could set out Pucheu’s case to his comrades in Combat. That evening, in a final unreal twist, Frenay dined with Rollin and his wife in one of the smartest hotels in Vichy.327 Frenay had one more meeting with Pucheu, on 6 February. For Combat, the point was to gain time – Frenay was convinced that the Vichy police knew enough details to round up the entire leadership if they wanted.328 He read Pucheu a statement that criticized Vichy’s anti-Sem
itic policies but suggested that if the government secretly provided the Resistance with information and changed its political line, then Combat would be more measured. Pucheu asked for time to think about this unlikely proposition, and Frenay left. There was no further meeting between the two men. Frenay met Rollin one more time, on 25 February, to discuss the situation of the arrested members of Combat, virtually all of whom had been released as a result of the Frenay–Pucheu discussions, and had then immediately gone into hiding.329

  Frenay’s group appeared to have made a brilliant manoeuvre. They had gained valuable time that had been used to tighten up security and protect their members, and above all the arrested comrades had been freed. But this came at a terrible price, a price they were too naive to foresee.

  Although the Resistance in the Non-Occupied Zone had not yet made any physical attacks on the Pétain regime, their continuous criticisms and their clandestine preparation for armed action represented a real threat. Frenay’s discussions with Pucheu handed Vichy a golden opportunity to split the Resistance, which they seized in the first half of February by leaking news of the meetings to Frenay’s Resistance rivals. In Paris Pierre Brossolette heard about the affair within a matter of days, and duly forwarded the news to Free French Intelligence, openly criticizing ‘Fresnet’ but without giving any indication of the context – there was no mention of the wave of arrests or of Combat’s intention to bargain for the release of their comrades.330 On 1 March Emmanuel d’Astier’s Libération denounced ‘petty schemes and petty betrayals’ and poured scorn on ‘those café diplomats who hoped to respond to the siren calls of Vichy’. Three weeks later Libération made a more open allusion to the affair, including a sotto voce appeal to doubting members of Combat:

  Among those Frenchmen and women who are fighting the Germans there are sincere and courageous people who thought they could negotiate with the government, having a strong hand to play. They will be fooled by Vichy, and their troops will abandon them.331

  Although Moulin was eventually able to defuse the row and get both groups to publish a statement declaring their ‘complete agreement’ and their loyalty to de Gaulle, the damage was done, and the Resistance was permanently weakened.332 Combat and Libération never truly fused, and rumours about Frenay’s Vichy connections continued to circulate. In the middle of 1942 Christian Pineau and Free French Intelligence both suspected Frenay of being a Pétainist agent, and at one point Moulin was forbidden to have any contact with Combat, because London feared the group was manipulated by Vichy.333 Moulin, however, staunchly defended Frenay, recognizing his fundamental loyalty and the vital role he played in the Resistance.334

  *

  As the terrible winter of 1942 gradually ended, the Resistance in the Non-Occupied Zone began to realize the opportunity before it. Although Pucheu was determined to repress the Resistance ‘with extreme severity’, the movements in Vichy France still enjoyed a far greater freedom of activity than their counterparts in the Occupied Zone. At the same time as Frenay had been chatting in Pucheu’s office, Frenay’s comrades in the north were being thrown into prison, hostages were being executed with savage regularity, while the trials of Vildé’s Musée de l’Homme group and of the members of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse were coming to their dreadful conclusions. If the Resistance movements in the Occupied Zone could act despite potentially lethal consequences, there was no reason for those in the south not to emulate them.

  The first actions taken by Combat members were small beer compared with the assassinations and explosions carried out in the Occupied Zone. In 1941 Frenay had recruited Jacques Renouvin, a lawyer in his late thirties. Renouvin was a myopic bear of a man who had been a far-right street brawler in the early 1930s; now he wanted to use his physical talents and his taste for violent confrontation to serve the Resistance. With Frenay’s enthusiastic support, Renouvin set up a series of ‘Groupes Francs’ – hit squads – whose role was to attack the most visible symbols of collaboration in the Non-Occupied Zone, beginning in his home town, Montpellier. In February 1942 the Groupes Francs blew up several recruiting offices for the Ligue Anti-Bolchevique (Anti-Bolshevik League), one of the main fascist groups that flourished in Vichy France. They then began intimidating kiosks that sold pro-Nazi publications. First they would send a letter signed ‘Combat’, inviting the owner to stop selling such material. If this brought no change, a second letter would be sent, warning of the consequences; if the owner continued to ignore such friendly advice, the kiosk would be blown up. In case anyone did not get the message, in Montpellier the comrades painted a huge reminder on the seventeenth-century aqueduct that dominates the city: COMBAT PUNISHES TRAITORS.335

  These actions were the work of a very small and highly committed minority, but increasingly, ordinary people also wanted to protest. Recognizing this change, the key Resistance leaders in the Non-Occupied Zone decided to hold a series of demonstrations on May Day, to show the scale of opposition to Vichy and the Occupation.336 Moulin contacted London and tried to persuade de Gaulle to support the campaign:

  ALL RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS SUPPORT DEMONSTRATION STOP REQUEST GENERAL SPEAK ON RADIO TWENTY-SIXTH APRIL DATE LAUNCH OF MASSIVE CAMPAIGN OF LEAFLETS PAPERS ETC STOP AGREE IN PRINCIPLE BEFORE SEVENTEENTH APRIL STOP337

  Although London agreed that de Gaulle would speak, there was no broadcast, either because de Gaulle was too busy finalizing his ‘social’ statement with Christian Pineau or because he was near comatose with a bout of malaria.338 Whatever the case, Moulin was irritated: ‘it was regrettable,’ he said in a message to London, ‘that the General had not launched the promised appeal on the occasion of the first common demonstration of workers and resistance movements. The movements had distributed 120,000 newspapers and 250,000 tracts for May 1st.’339

  The effort paid off. In Marseilles tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the Vieux Port; in Lyons, similarly large crowds marched through the centre of the city, to cries of ‘Long live de Gaulle! Hang Laval!’ Smaller demonstrations took place in Toulouse, Nice and Montpellier.340 In Lyons and Marseilles there were violent confrontations with the police, revealing the intensity of popular opposition to the government. The demonstrations were even more successful than the Resistance had expected, partly because they coincided with a decisive shift in the politics of Vichy. After sixteen months waiting in the wings, Pierre Laval had returned as Prime Minister. This change, which followed pressure from Germany, showed that the Vichy regime was truly nothing more than a tool in Hitler’s hands. Two enthusiastic collaborators – Admiral Darlan and Pierre Laval, head of the military and head of the government respectively – now vied for power in Vichy. Pétain’s pretence that he represented some kind of ‘third way’ between the Allies and the Axis, a tactic that had fooled many people, had been shown to be a delusion. As Jean Guéhenno wrote in his diary:

  By Hitler’s will, Laval is the head of the government of France. The old man [Pétain] has handed over power and has turned into a ghost, even before he’s dead . . . There are, in fact, two governments – a military power, in the hands of Darlan, and a civil power, in the hands of Laval. Perhaps the old man hopes to play one off against the other, and to preserve some degree of independence. What is certain is that France, and its 40 million citizens, does not want either of them. The Pétain government was backed by cowards. There is no one behind the Darlan–Laval government. Even the cowards are ashamed.341

  *

  The May Day demonstrations proved that a traditional workers’ protest could mobilize substantial numbers of ordinary people against the Occupation and against Vichy. At the same time, under pressure from Moscow to do all in its power to hasten an Allied attack on Nazi-occupied Europe, the Communist Party began to change its attitude towards de Gaulle, the Free French and the rest of the Resistance. On May Day the Communist underground newspaper, L’Humanité, called on its readers to build the ‘Front National’, a Communist-led front organization, ‘which, from the Gaullists to the Communist
s, groups together all those French people who want France to remain French’. The declaration went on to recognize the Free French forces fighting with the Allies as ‘representatives of France at war on the battlefield’, and even called on French sailors ‘to take their boats into the camp of General de Gaulle to continue the patriotic struggle which will restore France to its sovereignty and its grandeur’.342

  Just as the Communists adopted Gaullist language, de Gaulle started to change his tone. In response to Laval’s return to power, de Gaulle broadcast a call to arms that could have been lifted from a Communist leaflet:

  It is the duty of every Frenchman and Frenchwoman to fight actively, by all means in their power, against the enemy itself and against the agents of Vichy who are the accomplices of the enemy. These people are like the enemy: the French people should hound them, sabotage their plans and hate their leaders. National liberation cannot be separated from national insurrection.343

  It was not only words that began to be shared. Shortly before leaving for London with Pineau in March, Paco had discussed with a Communist Party contact the possibility that the PCF would receive weapons and other materiel from London. Within weeks, the links were activated, beginning with discussions between the Free French agent Rémy and ‘Joseph’ (George Beaufils), a leading PCF member. These two men were very different – one was a royalist Catholic, the other a Communist atheist – but they struck up a strong friendship that lasted for decades.344