by Geert Mak
Chapter FORTY-THREE
Saint-Blimont
‘WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE EXASPERATING SITUATION IN WHICH THE fate of France no longer depends on the French themselves,’ Marc Bloch wrote in summer 1940.
It was a feeling he shared with many of his countrymen. ‘For my father, Vichy was synonymous with treason,’ Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Veterans of the Resistance in Picardy, told me. She was the daughter of André Gaillard, better known in the Resistance by his pseudonym ‘Léon’, watchman at the sugar beet processing plant in Saint-Blimont. He was a true French patriot, he abhorred all forms of collaboration. As soon as the surrender was signed he began, on his own at first, with small acts of defiance against the occupier: slogans on walls, the sabotage of machinery and transports. Later he and his comrades began attacking German outposts, mostly to obtain weapons. ‘They called my father and his friends terrorists and communists. But it was really a political mish-mash, they didn't belong to any political party,’ Lucienne Gaillard said.
And so began the Resistance: as an ad hoc grass-roots movement of French men and women of every background, a guerrilla group comprised of enthusiastic amateurs. Soon they were receiving weapons from England and training from British undercover agents, yet they remained autonomous and self-willed. The communists hesitated at first, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union they, too, joined the Resistance in numbers. Along with them came hundreds of thousands of refugees who often set up separate cells of their own, and quite frequently played a heroic role. In the south-western corner of the country the Spanish communists had their own 14th Corps, which had thirty-four guerrilla fighters by June 1944. The Poles ran their own intelligence service, the R2, an important factor in the struggle. Spaniards were the first to set up a Maquis group in the Ardèche, German communists reinforced the groups in the Gard and Lozère. A British agent sent to help the Resistance at Villefranche-du-Périgord reported that his French was of no service to him there: the members of the group spoke only Spanish or Catalan.
The growing hostility – in which the clergy played an important role – towards anti-Semitic measures provided a major stimulus for the Resistance. In many other ways the Catholic Church remained loyal to the Vichy regime, but in summer 1942 a bitter conflict arose concerning the treatment of the Jews. On 23 August, the elderly Bishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard Saliège, had a pastoral missive read aloud from the pulpits of his diocese, in which he roundly condemned the hounding of Jews: ‘Jews are men. Jews are women. They are a part of humanity. They are our brothers, like anyone else. A Christian may not forget that.’
The letter caused a chain reaction: dozens of other bishops and church leaders followed his lead. An ecclesiastical resistance group began smuggling Jewish children out of Vénissieux, one of the worst transit camps, close to Lyons. A totally new source of resistance arose in this way: Catholics who sympathised in principle with Pétain but could no longer reconcile their consciences to the burgeoning manhunt by Vichy and the Germans. They arranged countless hiding places for Jews and others on the run, they provided food and protection, and gradually many of them came to join the armed resistance. The Protestants, who enjoyed a long tradition of resistance, had gone into action much earlier. Many Jewish families were given shelter in Protestant villages in the Cevennes, often with the tacit approval of the entire community.
During that same summer of 1942, André Gaillard and eight others set up their own combat group. They destroyed German lines of communication, took in Allied pilots who had been shot down and kept watch on all German activities in ‘their’ zone. ‘Almost everything happened in this house,’ Lucienne Gaillard told me. ‘Pilots, weapons, the wounded, everything.’ Wasn't she ever afraid? ‘Not at all. It was an ecstatic time, we all found it equally exciting.’ She gave me an overview of what their group did; I cite here only those actions which took place between August and December 1943.
On 3 August, her father and his men blew up a rocket launcher.
On 23 August, they derailed a German transport train; the Germans in their zone were always busy reinforcing the coastline in connection with a possible invasion.
On the night of 23 October they blew up a troop transport headed to Russia, causing great losses of men and equipment.
On 28 October they sabotaged the Paris-Calais line, causing a train full of troops and war materials to fly off the rails at top speed.
On 11 November – using pinpoint information from French railway personnel – they derailed another military train on the same line. They were pleased with the effects of these attacks, because they blocked German reinforcements for days and produced quite a few casualties and a permanent loss of German materials.
On 16 November, a huge load of flax that had been confiscated by the Germans was burned.
On the night of 10 December, with the help of the local police sergeant, they freed two Resistance fighters from the gendarmerie in Gamaches, just before they were to be transferred to the Gestapo prison at Abbeville.
On 16 December, they blew up a munitions train; when a German backup train arrived the next day, they pulled the engineer out of the engine, set full throttle and let the unmanned train crash at full speed into the wreck of the artillery transport they had derailed the day before.
On 28 December they blockaded the rails again, causing the crash of an engine and four carriages.
By 1944, André Gaillard's little group of amateurs had developed into an experienced guerrilla company of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI), with 7 officers, 22 non-commissioned officers and 160 soldiers. They now formed part of one large army: the Free French Forces, who fought alongside the Allies in Africa and Italy and the various Resistance groups, of the left and of the right, within France itself.
In the end, eighteen men and women from this group in Picardy – a group likes hundreds of others in France – were killed. Two of them died before the firing squad, six others were killed in skirmishes and fifteen were sent to concentration camps. Only ten of them came back.
Meanwhile, in faraway London, General de Gaulle was trying to save the French national honour. In June 1940 he had left for England, as he said himself, empty-handed. ‘My father,’ Lucienne Gaillard said, ‘started his resistance work after an appeal by de Gaulle. The general was very important to us, he was a symbol, but at the same time he didn't really exist. He was not closer to us than Napoleon.’
Churchill, who had a weakness for France and initially for de Gaulle as well, could help him in only two ways: he gave recognition to his French National Committee as the only legitimate French authority, and he gave him the opportunity to speak to the French regularly through the BBC.
De Gaulle made the most of both opportunities. In June 1940 almost no one in France listened to his broadcasts. By 1941, according to estimates from his Vichy opponents, there were 300,000 listeners; by 1942 there were 3 million. He always spoke of the Resistance as though it were a regular standing army, rather than a guerrilla force of beginners that consisted at first of fewer than 7,000 men and women. He saw himself as its natural commander-in-chief. That the members of the Resistance themselves, particularly the communists and socialists, had different ideas about that did not seem to concern him. From the start he worked on a new national myth, a hopeful historical tale that was to resurrect the French morale. ‘In 1940, France lost a battle, but not the war,’ he kept repeating.
If the notion of a ‘conceptual nation’ applied to anywhere, it was to de Gaulle's idea of France. A nation, after all, consists of more than shared territory and a common language, of governmental and cultural unity and everything that may flow from that, but also of a communal mentality, of the sense that that unity exists in the minds of all citizens, and that it is valuable, an honour and a joy in which to participate. In France, more than in any other European country, this sense of grandeur had traditionally been cultivated to great heights. That explains why the collapse of 1940 was so precipito
us: the French had lost their conceptual nation. It was above all to this mental crisis that both Pétain and de Gaulle tried to find a solution, each in his own way.
In doing that, de Gaulle had to operate as a Baron Munchausen: only by his own hair could he pull himself and his horse out of the quagmire. He had, in reality, almost no power, even his costs were at first largely defrayed by the British government. At the same time, his conceptual nation demanded that he behave like a great and powerful statesman, self-willed and independent of the other allies. ‘General de Gaulle needs constantly reminding that our primary enemy is Germany,’ someone in his coterie once noted. ‘For if he were to follow his natural instinct, it would be Britain.’ De Gaulle's conceptual France was still a world power, and seen from that vantage both Great Britain and the United States remained his major rivals.
On 20 January, 1941, Harold Nicolson, in those years parliamentary secretary at the ministry of information, lunched with de Gaulle at London's Savoy hotel.‘I do not like him,’ he wrote in his diary.‘He accuses my ministry of being Pétainiste.“Mais non!” I say, “Monsieur le Général!” “Well, then at least Pétainisant.” “We are working,” I tell him, “for all of France.” “All of France!” he shouts. “That is the Free France. That is ME!’” In late 1941 they dined again. ‘His arrogance and fascism annoy me. But there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes.’
Churchill too saw in de Gaulle an impassioned and emotional spirit. Churchill knew the French, he recognised the importance of symbolic figures for an occupied France and understood the complexity of the political situation within which de Gaulle had to manoeuvre. Despite all their conflicts, there were also moments of reconciliation and friendship between the two statesmen.
Roosevelt, who barely had personal ties with de Gaulle, wrote the general off quite quickly. He considered him to be an ‘almost intolerable’ idiot, and seriously doubted his authority over the French. For the American president, it was unimaginable that a modern Western democracy like France could accept the authority of a strictly self-declared leader. Following a conference in Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt publicly joked about de Gaulle: ‘One day he says he's Joan of Arc, the next day he says he's Clémenceau. I told him: you've got to decide which one you want to be!’
After two years of war, therefore, de Gaulle found himself increasingly isolated, a powerless nuisance in the eyes of the Allies, a caricature of himself in the eyes of many of his supporters. Regularly, after yet another quarrel, he would be denied access to the BBC microphone. On one occasion, in April 1942, Churchill even issued orders that he not be allowed to leave England: at that point, de Gaulle was effectively his prisoner. Jean Monnet, acting as liaison between the three statesmen, noticed in his talks with the general ‘a mixture of practical intelligence that can only command one's respect, and a disturbing tendency to go beyond the boundaries of common sense.’
De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance in France was also a troubled one. He mistrusted the communists in particular. Many Resistance leaders suspected, on the other hand, that de Gaulle was using the guerrilla force primarily to advance his own ambitions, for after the war. Despite all his pretensions of leadership, the lines of communication between him and the Resistance only developed systematically after autumn 1941.
In March 1942, the first Resistance leader arrived in London for personal consultations. Christian Pineau, leader of the large Libération Nord organisation, described his meeting with de Gaulle as an audience with an ‘authoritarian prelate’ who mostly delivered monologues and had no interest at all in the daily problems encountered by the Resistance. British documents released more than fifty years later show that in May 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt were on the point of expelling de Gaulle from the Allied command. Between themselves they spoke of him as the ‘prima donna’ and ‘the bride’, and hoped to replace him with his rival General Henri Giraud.‘He hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere,’ Churchill wrote in a coded telegram to his cabinet during a visit to Washington.
Yet the Allies did not dare publicly to dethrone de Gaulle. He was too important for the French, and had indeed succeeded in working his way up to the status of a kind of Joan of Arc, a living monument, a modern myth.
De Gaulle moved his headquarters from London to Algiers, where he was free to implement his own brand of politics. In June 1944, when the invasion of France was about to take place after years of preparation, he was informed about the landing with a day and a half's notice. Although the rest of the Allied command was involved with other hectic issues at that moment, de Gaulle immediately demanded their full attention. And what was his problem? The soldiers had French money with them that had been issued without his approval, and Eisenhower, in the text of his planned speech, had not said a word about de Gaulle or the Free French Forces. Futilities and formalities in the eyes of the British and the Americans – ‘Allez, faites la guerre, avec votre fausse monnaie!’ Churchill shouted – but de Gaulle did not see it that way. As the paratroopers of the British 6th Airborne Division were about to seize the first strategic bridges in France, de Gaulle decided at the last moment to recall the 200 French liaison officers who were to accompany the invasion. He himself threatened to go straight back to Algiers. American General George C. Marshall shouted angrily that ‘no sons of Iowa would fight to put up statues of de Gaulle’.
De Gaulle was the great nuisance again, but once more he finally took part loyally in all the actions. But was he really wrong? In the final analysis: no. The problem, after all, was due to the American's refusal to take him seriously, even though – after Giraud stepped down in 1943 – all representatives of free France had emphatically recognised him as their leader. Nor was it de Gaulle's fault that the issue of temporary authority over France – for that, in fact, was what this was all about – was raised only at the eleventh hour: it was the British and the Americans who had confronted him with a fait accompli by waiting until 4 June to tell him about the invasion.
In his heart of hearts, Churchill understood that, but his interests lay elsewhere. During lunch that day, when an enraged de Gaulle shouted that he had not been consulted at all, not even in regard to the provisional authority over France, Churchill sneered back at him: ‘And what about you? How do you expect us, the British, to adopt a position separated from that of the United States? We are going to liberate Europe, but it is because the Americans are with us to do so. For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’
De Gaulle would never forget those words. In 1963 he used his veto as president of France to block British admission to the European Economic Community: by admitting them, Europe would also be admitting the Trojan Horse of America. In 1966 he withdrew France from the military organisation of NATO: the American troops were to leave Europe, and certainly to leave France. About 26,000 GIs were sent home. The American secretary of state, Dean Rusk, cynically asked de Gaulle whether ‘the dead Americans in the military cemeteries’ also fell under the evacuation orders. A cartoonist drew a GI on his way out, shouting to the president: ‘If you need us again, our number is 14–18 — 39–45!’ That year, de Gaulle travelled to Moscow to establish new ties with Eastern Europe.
And time after time, in intimate circles, he would recount Churchill's words from June 1944.
Finally there is the story of all those millions of French citizens in occupied France. After the confusion, the fleeing and the humiliation, they felt the impact of foreign occupation chiefly in their stomachs. On an unheard-of scale, the Germans quickly picked their part of the country to the bone, and that soon became felt. In October 1941, the Parisian authorities were warning against the use of cat meat in daube provençale.
In addition, as from 1942, millions of men from the occupied territories were transported to Germany
to perform forced labour there at the factories and farms, and this new manhunt drove people all over Europe into the arms of the Resistance. Former Vichy supporters also now became convinced that, in practical terms, Hitler's European Grossraumwirtschaft amounted to nothing less than a European economy dedicated solely to the service of Germany.
In the Lozère, the Cevennes, the Creuze, Auvergne, the Massif Central, in all those huge, sparsely populated mountainous regions, the ‘unregistered’, the refugees and those dodging the Arbeitseinsatz, quickly formed resistance groups of their own, operating more or less independently of the official Resistance. As early as summer 1942, the word maquis – Corsican for rough, wooded terrain – had become a normal part of the French vocabulary. ‘Prendre le maquis’ was the expression used both for going into hiding in the French interior and joining the Resistance. In autumn 1943, the southern French Resistance estimated the number of Maquisards at 15,000.
Unlike the official Resistance, the Maquis was and remained a spontaneous movement taken part in primarily by young people. They formed something like Robin Hood clans, each with its own subculture, its own jargon and its own leader, always on the move, always busy surviving. Each group carried out its own war against Vichy and the Germans. Most of them were hardly involved in any coordinated resistance activities, such as espionage for London, systematic sabotage or support for the Allies.