B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Many resisters also felt that de Gaulle did not sufficiently appreciate the risks they ran or the significance of what they were doing. One scene which recurs in similar terms in the memoirs of many Resistance leaders is the first meeting with de Gaulle in London, when the visitor first encounters the general’s lofty coldness. Christian Pineau, an early arrival, described finding himself in the presence of an ‘authoritarian prelate’ who sat him down and commanded without any introduction: ‘Now tell me about France.’ Having listened impassively, de Gaulle then launched into a monologue on the perfidy of the British. He asked no personal questions, showed no curiosity about life in the Resistance.5 Given how de Gaulle describes the Resistance in his memoirs, one can understand why its members felt aggrieved about his view of them:

  Having given the Resistance the inspiration and leadership which saved it from anarchy, I found it, at the right moment, a useful instrument in the struggle against the enemy and with regard to the Allies a useful support for my policy of independence and unity.6

  The misunderstanding between London and France was reciprocal. Resisters in France criticized what they sometimes referred to as the émigrés of London, but those in London felt that they had no lessons to receive in heroism from those who had chosen to stay in France. Arriving in London in July 1940, a future member of the Free French, Jacques Bingen, wrote:

  Here I am, escaped from Nazi soil and ready … to fight Hitler until the end … I have lost all I had, my money … my work, my family which has stayed in France, and perhaps I will never again see my country and my beloved Paris … But I remain a free man in a free country and that counts more than anything.7

  The suddenness of Bingen’s total rupture with the past was not experienced by most resisters in France whose move into clandestinity was usually more gradual. In that sense, his decision to go to London was as radical and courageous an act as any performed by most resisters in France in 1940. The point of the comparison is not to award marks for heroism, but to stress the psychological divide between those who left France and those who stayed. Neither was able fully to appreciate the virtues of the other.

  In addition to the distinction between France and London, a distinction needs to be drawn between the minority of actively committed resisters in France and those who participated in more informal types of resistance. There are two possible pitfalls to avoid when broaching this subject. The first is the temptation to adopt an excessively narrow and military interpretation of resistance. This was the approach of British intelligence and military planners who were sceptical about the value of much of what passed for resistance in France. From the Allies’ point of view, this might have been justifiable, but the historian of France is not required to confine resistance to those aspects of it which can be shown genuinely to have hastened the Liberation. In the history of France, resistance is more important as a social and political phenomenon than a military one.

  It is also necessary to avoid the other extreme of adopting an excessively broad interpretation of resistance, extending the term to include any manifestation of opposition to the German presence. This was the attitude satirized by Anouilh in his play L’Orchestre where one character who had performed in an orchestra during the Occupation defends herself by saying that it was an orchestra of resisters: ‘When there were German officers in the audience, we played wrong notes. It took a certain courage! We risked being denounced at any moment; they were all very musical.’8 Several observers during the war were even to claim that the elegance of Parisian women was a form of resistance against the German attempt to break France’s spirit.9

  The Resistance was increasingly sustained by the hostility of the mass of the population towards the Occupation, but not all acts of individual hostility can be characterized as resistance, although they are the necessary precondition of it. A distinction needs to be drawn between dissidence and resistance. Workers who evaded STO, or Jews who escaped the round-ups, or peasants who withheld their produce from the Germans, were transgressing the law, and their actions were subversive of authority. But they were not resisters in the same way as those who organized the escape of réfractaires and Jews. Contesting or disobeying a law on an individual basis is not the same as challenging the authority that makes those laws.10

  Resistance, then, requires some congruence between intentions and actions. Just as it is not enough to think anti-German thoughts to be a resister if nothing results from these thoughts, so acts which might have had unintended consequences beneficial to the Resistance cannot be qualified as resistance. On the other hand, once the organized Resistance grew in strength, and became a presence in society, there were increasing opportunities for individuals to contribute to it in informal ways. What might have once been individual acts of disobedience became part of the Resistance. In short, the Resistance must always be considered dynamically in relationship to the population at large.

  Resistance, finally, must also be studied in relation to Vichy. The Resistance comprised not only those who had always opposed Vichy, but also those who had originally supported it or at least been willing to work within the legal framework of the regime. Individuals like Mounier or Segonzac, reviews like Confluences or Poésie, organizations like Jeune France or Uriage had tried to explore the leeway that Vichy offered them to express nonconformist views. As the situation revealed itself to be less open than they had believed, they found themselves pulled into dissidence and sometimes resistance. The Resistance did not suddenly emerge fully formed to challenge the Vichy regime: its contours were moulded by Vichy.

  These are the issues which will be examined in Part IV of this book. Chapter 16 examines the origins and emergence of de Gaulle’s Free French in London; Chapter 17 the origins and emergence of resistance in France. Chapters 18 and 19 examine how these two originally parallel and separate enterprises converged and interlinked. Chapter 20 examines the relationship between the Resistance and the mass of the French population. Finally, Chapter 21 looks at the development of Resistance ideology, viewing that ideology not only as an opposition to the values of Vichy but also as a dialogue with them.

  16

  The Free French 1940–1942

  Beginnings

  When the 49-year-old General de Gaulle broadcast from London on 18 June 1940, he was an almost unknown figure. Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, knew only that de Gaulle had ‘a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s’; most French people, unable to see him, knew even less.1 Few people heard his speech; fewer still acted upon it; the BBC did not even bother to record it. In political and military circles, de Gaulle was notorious in the 1930s for his advocacy of the mechanization of the army and the offensive deployment of tanks. The stridency with which he argued this case had won de Gaulle many enemies. The only leading politician to back him was Paul Reynaud. As a result, de Gaulle’s military career had been respectable, but not spectacular. He was promoted to the rank of Brigadier-general on 1 June 1940, making him the most junior general in the army.

  On 5 June 1940, Reynaud took de Gaulle into his government as Under-Secretary of State for War, a post that he held for twelve days until Reynaud’s resignation. In Reynaud’s government, de Gaulle was one of the most vigorous opponents of an armistice. When he arrived in London on the morning of 17 June, the day after Reynaud’s resignation, de Gaulle had previously met Churchill on only four occasions. Churchill allowed de Gaulle to broadcast on the BBC despite the scepticism of other British ministers who wanted to avoid antagonizing the new Pétain government at such a delicate juncture. For this reason de Gaulle was not authorized to broadcast again until 22 June.2 Once the signature of the Armistice reduced the need to treat Pétain with kid gloves, Churchill was ready to accord de Gaulle formal recognition, despite the reservations of the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax.

  Originally Churchill hoped that de Gaulle might attract more important French personalities. This did not occur. Not only did few people come fr
om France to join de Gaulle, most leading French figures already in London decided to return to France. Even many of those who wanted to go on fighting had no confidence in a crusade headed by an obscure general: they preferred to go to North America. This was true of Jean Monnet, who had co-ordinated Anglo-French economic co-operation until the defeat; Alexis Léger, former head of the Quai d’Orsay; and Geneviève Tabouis and Henri de Kérillis who were celebrated anti-Munich journalists.

  De Gaulle had hoped to set up a French national committee in London, but there was no one of any importance to sit on it. Churchill therefore told him: ‘You are alone, I shall recognise you alone.’3 On 28 June, the British government recognized de Gaulle officially as ‘leader of all the Free French, wherever they are to be found, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause’. On 7 August, de Gaulle and Churchill signed a formal agreement stipulating that the British would supply the Free French, and in return de Gaulle would accept the general directives of the British High Command, although exercising ‘supreme command’ over his forces.

  Among those who did rally to de Gaulle in 1940, there were no prefects or ambassadors, no academicians or professors, no top civil servants or politicians. The names of his first followers would have been unknown to most French people. What is interesting about those names is the diversity of age, social origins, and political beliefs they represented. They included Georges Boris, a left-wing journalist and economist who had been an adviser to Blum; René Cassin, a 55-year-old jurist; Captain André Dewavrin, a 22-year-old lecturer at the Saint-Cyr military college; Maurice Schumann, a left Catholic journalist; René Pleven, a businessman who had worked with Monnet in London during the Phoney War; Émile Muselier, a retired admiral. These people were allocated tasks more or less suited to their expertise: Cassin became the Free French legal expert, Schumann became a broadcaster, Muselier became head of the Free French naval forces. Dewavrin, however, was assigned a task for which he had no qualifications or experience: to organize a Free French intelligence service.

  The leading personality to rally to de Gaulle was General Georges Catroux, Governor-General of Indochina until being sacked by Vichy. Catroux arrived in England in September while de Gaulle was away in Africa. Because he was a more high-profile figure than de Gaulle, Churchill hoped he might take over the leadership of the Free French. But Catroux proved ready to work under de Gaulle. His urbanity and charm proved a welcome complement to de Gaulle’s intransigence and asperity. As the British discovered more about de Gaulle’s personality, Catroux represented everything they would have liked de Gaulle to be.4

  De Gaulle’s prospects of recruiting from the army and naval personnel who had ended up in Britain after the evacuations from Norway and Dunkirk were not helped by the British attack at Mers el Kébir. But the greatest blow to de Gaulle’s initial hopes was that most of France’s Empire remained loyal to Vichy. The only significant exceptions to this were French Equatorial Africa (Chad, French Congo, Ubangi-Shari, Gabon) and the Cameroons, which rallied to de Gaulle in August 1940. Gabon, the last enclave in Equatorial Africa, was won back in October. This furnished de Gaulle with a foothold outside England, and a base from which, ultimately, Free French troops would participate in North African military operations. This success was quickly overshadowed by the catastrophic failure of the expedition to win over French West Africa. British and French intelligence had reported considerable local hostility to Vichy, but when an Anglo-French force, with de Gaulle on board, arrived off Dakar on 23 September, the defending Vichy forces, under the command of Governor-General Pierre Boisson, fired back. The operation was suspended after two days.

  This fiasco was a terrible blow to de Gaulle’s prestige. Dakar also had long-term repercussions on his relations with the Allies. It was widely believed that the operation had failed owing to indiscretions from Free French members in London. The British decided that the Free French could not be trusted with intelligence information. As a result, for the rest of the war, de Gaulle was kept in ignorance of every operation involving France. Dakar also reinforced the argument of those in the British government who wanted to build bridges to Vichy instead of backing a maverick general—‘that ass de Gaulle’ as Cadogan wrote—who seemed to have little support among the French. ‘We should treat Vichy tenderly’, wrote Halifax at the end of November 1940.5 Dakar also helps explain the unrelenting hostility that Roosevelt was later to display towards de Gaulle.

  De Gaulle recovered his confidence by spending six weeks visiting French Equatorial Africa. The tumultuous reception he received in Doula, capital of the Cameroons, helped erase the humiliation of Dakar. Possessing a French base, de Gaulle used it to seize back the initiative. On 27 October 1940, at Brazzaville in the Congo, he announced the creation of a committee of imperial defence to direct the French effort in the war. This was a substitute for the national committee he had failed to set up in June. De Gaulle proclaimed that he was exercising his power in the name of France and made a solemn commitment to submit his actions to the judgement of the French people as soon as they were free again.6

  The Committee of Imperial Defence was the first step on the road towards de Gaulle’s acquiring the status of the head of a provisional government. In the immediate term, it was a response to Pétain’s meeting with Hitler at Montoire on 24 October, and also a way of sabotaging any possible British rapprochement with Vichy. All this confirmed Foreign Office suspicions of de Gaulle. One official commented, ‘he has of late got rather out of hand’.7 The British believed de Gaulle should confine himself to building up a military force. Even some of de Gaulle’s followers took a similar view. Gaston Palewski, a former aide to Paul Reynaud, who had joined de Gaulle in the summer of 1940, told a Foreign Office official that de Gaulle should ‘above all be military… get away from the idea of a nigger kingdom and repair his damaged military prestige, for example by a successful action against the Italians’.8

  Conflict: De Gaulle and his Allies

  De Gaulle’s assertions of independence did not initially cloud his relationship with Churchill. The romantic in Churchill admired de Gaulle’s epic adventure; they shared a love of drama and a deep sense of history. In the end, however, a clash was inevitable because de Gaulle conceived his role differently from the British. Possessing no military resources, he was forced into a political role. When Cassin enquired about the juridical status of the Free French, de Gaulle had replied ‘We are France’. Refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Vichy government, de Gaulle saw himself as the sole repository of French sovereignty. He was prepared to defend that sovereignty from all sides—including the British. This emerged already in the negotiations over the Franco-British agreement of 7 August. Churchill had committed himself to support the ‘integral restoration of the independence and grandeur of France’. In a secret letter to de Gaulle, he explained that this phrase implied no commitment to preserving France’s frontiers as they had existed before the war. De Gaulle could only register his hope that ‘events will one day enable the British government to consider the question with less reserve’.

  The suspicion which lay behind this barbed exchange exploded into open hostility less than a year later in the Middle East, a region of long-standing Anglo-French tension. De Gaulle had long nursed the idea of an operation to reclaim Syria from Vichy. Initially the British claimed not to have sufficient forces available, until the outbreak of the anti-British revolt in Iraq raised the prospect of the Germans acquiring a toehold in the Levant. On 8 June 1941, an Anglo-French force, containing mostly Free French troops, attacked Syria. The Vichy forces fought back, and for the first time French soldiers found themselves fighting each other. At Dakar, the operation had been suspended before this could occur.

  After four weeks, the Vichy commander, General Dentz, surrendered, and signed an armistice with the British General Maitland Wilson. This document contained no reference to the Free French. It offered the defeated Vichy troops a choice between repatriation to France or joining the Alli
ed forces. Seeing this as a ‘pure and simple transference of Syria and the Lebanon to the British’, de Gaulle reacted furiously. He threatened to withdraw his Middle East troops from British command. What de Gaulle viewed as a plot was largely the result of the incompetence of the local British representatives, but he was understandably resentful that the Armistice had provided him no opportunity to recruit from Dentz’s forces.9

  De Gaulle succeeded in having the armistice amended, but the local British authorities remained obstructive. In one place, the British commander moved into the French residency, replacing the Tricolour by a Union Jack. De Gaulle sent a force to reclaim it, even at the risk of employing force against the British. His frustration at this situation spilled out in an extraordinary interview he gave from Brazzaville to the Chicago Daily News on 27 July. For the first time, he publicly expressed his differences with the British, even claiming that Britain was doing a ‘wartime deal with Hitler’. Churchill wondered if de Gaulle had ‘gone off his head’. Anthony Eden, one of de Gaulle’s staunchest defenders in the government, reminded Churchill of de Gaulle’s importance as a ‘rallying point against Vichy’, but even he speculated that de Gaulle might be crazy.10 Probably the same thought occurred to many Free French members in London. Churchill gave orders that on his return to London, de Gaulle was to be ostracized. After a stormy meeting between the two men on 12 September, a superficial harmony was re-established, but the relationship was never to be the same.11