In the autumn of 1941, de Gaulle tried to instil a greater urgency in those responsible for political action: so far not a single envoy had been sent to France. When the National Committee was set up, responsibility for political action in France was given to a Commissariat of the Interior, under André Diethelm, a civil servant who had joined de Gaulle in 1941. On 7 November, Morandat was finally parachuted into France on his much-delayed political mission. Passy believed that the distinction between political action and military/intelligence operations was artificial, and once the Commissariat of the Interior did start sending envoys to France, there were rivalries and crossed wires between its agents and Passy’s. This plagued the entire history of the Free French.
Diethelm drew up a plan to organize a propaganda network in France and recruit political personalities to it. He contacted his acquaintance Philippe Roques, a former adviser to Mandel, who visited Mandel regularly in prison. Roques was given the task of sounding out former parliamentarians about their attitude to de Gaulle.35 The problem with this idea, as with the previous schemes of Palewski or Dejean, was that it failed to build upon the activities of Resistance organizations which were beginning to emerge in France—for the simple reason that almost nothing was known about these organizations. In August 1941, one of Passy’s agents, Pierre Forman, had stumbled upon a resistance movement called Liberté. He was sent back in October to develop the contact. But Forman’s relations with Liberté deteriorated when he was accused by the group of being responsible for indiscretions which had led to arrests of its members. Forman became less enthusiastic about Liberté, and his final report in December 1941 accused them of being merely ‘idealistic intellectuals’.36
De Gaulle expressed his own attitude to what little was known about the Resistance in a press conference on 2 October 1941. He announced: ‘A vast resistance is gradually forming … To organize and direct this resistance, not only in the already liberated territories, but everywhere in France and the empire, that is the task which the French National Committee has undertaken.’ Given that he knew nothing about this ‘vast resistance’, de Gaulle’s claim to direct it was extraordinarily presumptuous. He was even more explicit in a speech on 23 October, reacting to the shooting of hostages which had occurred after the first Communist terrorist attacks. De Gaulle criticized such attacks as premature and likely to lead to demoralizing reprisals: ‘The war of the French people must be conducted by those whose responsibility it is, that is to say by me and by the National Committee … For the present time the order I give for the occupied territory is not to kill the Germans.’37
De Gaulle had no means of applying this ‘order’. His real problem at the end of 1941 was not so much that he knew nothing about the Resistance—in fact the Forman reports, the terrorist attacks, the arrival of some Resistance newspapers, were allowing a vague picture to emerge—but that the Resistance was not integrated into any strategy that London might have towards France. It was at this opportune moment that Jean Moulin arrived in London with his authoritative report about the Resistance—what it had so far achieved, and what uses might be made of it.
17
The Resistance 1940–1942
Where does the history of the Resistance begin? From the first weeks of the Occupation there were sporadic anti-German incidents: stray shots fired on German patrols, German posters slashed, cables cut. Clearly these brave but futile acts were gestures of ‘resistance’, but rather than anticipating what came to be ‘the Resistance’, they represented desperate final skirmishes in the battle of France.1 They were an end, not a beginning, and their perpetrators were usually young men or boys, acting alone, and often paying with their lives. The future Resistance also started with the acts of isolated individuals, but individuals seeking to make contacts and develop new responses rather than continue a lost battle.
Personalities
In July 1940, the Socialist Jean Texcier, witnessing the first contacts between the Paris population and smiling German soldiers photographing each other in front of Parisian monuments, penned his Conseils à l’occupé (Advice to an Occupied Population) which comprised thirty-three ‘rules of conduct for the population of an occupied country’. Texcier’s Conseils originally circulated like a chain letter; two months later he heard them quoted on the BBC.2 In September 1940, in the Free Zone, General Cochet started producing a series of tracts called Tour d’horizon, calling on the French to ‘watch, resist and unite’. His readers formed groups to disseminate the tracts more widely.3
While Cochet was attempting to appeal to opinion, other army officers were trying to act more discreetly against the Germans. Many of these were to be found within the army intelligence services, the 2ème Bureau. There was, for example, Colonel Alfred Heurtaux, also a vice-president of the Legion of Veterans and Captain Paul Paillole, head of the counter-espionage department. Also operating within the orbit of the Vichy regime was Colonel Georges Groussard who founded the Groupes de protection, a supplemental police intended both to act as a sort of praetorian guard for Pétain and become the nucleus of a future anti-German military force. That many future resisters started out working for the Vichy regime is only surprising in the light of the later history of the Resistance, which developed its identity in opposition to Vichy. But this could not have been predicted at the beginning. In 1940–1, when there was not yet a Resistance, but there were tiny numbers of people ready to work to remove the Germans from France, many of them could be found at Vichy.4
These patriotic and conservative soldiers could hardly have been more different from the group of intellectuals which formed in the summer of 1940 at the Musée de l’homme. Most of them were from the left, some of them were not of French origin. Both these facts applied to the most active member of the group, Boris Vildé, a linguist of anarchist inclinations and Estonian background, who started to build a network of contacts both in Paris and outside. The group’s activities included collecting information about German installations, helping British aviators or escaped prisoners of war to escape to Britain, producing and distributing tracts. At the peak there were probably up to 300 people involved. In December, they started a newspaper called Résistance.5
Although they did not know it, they were not the first to do this. The earliest newspapers to have left a trace were Pantagruel and Libre France (later called Arc) which both appeared in Paris in October 1940.6 Another precocious centre of activity was Roubaix where the city’s Socialist mayor, Jean Lebas, was involved in the production of a paper called L’Homme libre from October 1940. In the Unoccupied Zone, the earliest clandestine newspaper was Liberté, whose first issue appeared on 25 November 1940 with a quotation from Marshal Foch: ‘a people is only conquered when it accepts defeat’.
Who were these resistance pioneers? Claude Bourdet, a leader of the Combat movement, suggested that they were people who had already ‘broken with their social and professional milieu’.7 Another resister, Jean Cassou, said that he had always been someone ‘without possessions, without inheritance or title, with no fixed home, no social status, no real profession’. Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, founder of the southern resistance movement Libération-Sud, asserted that ‘one could only be a resister if one was maladjusted’.8 This may have been true of the flamboyant d’Astier, the black sheep of an aristocratic family, who before 1940 had been a journalist of no fixed opinions. He was a heavy user of opium and felt obliged to undergo detoxification before embarking on resistance. Those who knew d’Astier before the war as an aimless dilettante were amazed at the determination and single-mindedness he would display during the Occupation, and he never entirely shook off his reputation as a condottiere and adventurer.
The cases of Bourdet, Cassou, and d’Astier should not be generalized. Most early resisters were far from being outsiders. The founder of Liberté was François de Menthon, a law professor who secured a post at the University of Lyons after the Armistice. In the autumn of 1940, de Menthon began to sound out the views of other
academic colleagues: Pierre-Henri Teitgen and René Courtin at the University of Montpellier, Alfred Coste-Floret at Clermont-Ferrand. Like de Menthon, they had all been committed Christian Democrats before the war. Their deliberations resulted in the decision to produce the newspaper Liberté, whose first issue de Menthon drafted at his family chateau near Annecy.9
No less respectable than François de Menthon was Captain Henri Frenay, a career officer from a traditional Lyons family. All that set Frenay apart from his conservative Catholic background was his relationship with Bertie Albrecht, who was married to an Englishman. Working in the field of factory welfare provision, Albrecht had introduced Frenay into left-wing circles before the war, and he later claimed that she was responsible for his political education. After the Armistice, Frenay was posted to the Marseilles garrison where he began approaching colleagues about forming a secret military organization that he decided to call the Mouvement de libération nationale. Frenay continued his soundings after being transferred to Vichy in December 1940 to work for the 2ème Bureau.10
Worlds apart from Frenay, but no less rooted in a professional milieu, was the trade-union official Christian Pineau. After the Armistice Pineau got himself a job at the Ministry of Supply, and this allowed him to move between the zones without causing suspicion. With another trade unionist, Robert Lacoste, he drafted the CEES manifesto of trade unionists opposed to Vichy. In addition to this public activity, he started a clandestine newspaper called Libération, whose first issue appeared in Paris in December 1940.11
Philippe Viannay was a 23-year-old Sorbonne student from a middle-class family. Like many of his generation, he despised politics as exemplified by the Third Republic. But immediately after the defeat, Viannay felt the need to ‘do’ something. An industrialist friend, Marcel Lebon, suggested that he start a paper, and offered to provide funds. The first issue of the paper, Défense de la France, eventually appeared in August 1941.12
Jean-Pierre Lévy worked for a small Strasbourg-based business which moved to Lyons after the defeat. There he encountered a group called France-Liberté which had grown out of meetings of friends and acquaintances. Many of them were businessmen and professionals, with varying political beliefs, but all opposed to Vichy’s authoritarianism. Lévy, who had contacts among the Alsatian refugee community in Lyons, provided many early recruits to the group, and soon became its dominant figure.13
Raymond Burgard was a teacher at the Lycée Buffon in Paris. He was an active member of the Christian democratic movement Jeune République. With four other Jeune République activists from the fifth arrondissement of Paris, he formed a group in September 1940. They began by putting anti-German stickers in the metro and on walls. Their motto was: ‘Only one enemy, the invader.’ In January 1941, they started a newspaper called Valmy, and this became the name of their group.14
Menthon, Frenay, and Lévy in the Unoccupied Zone; Viannay, Pineau, and Burgard in the Occupied Zone: an academic, an officer, a businessman, a student, a trade unionist, a teacher. These were not maladjusted mavericks although clearly they were individuals of exceptional strong-mindedness, ready to break with family and friends. When Frenay’s mother, an ardent Pétainist, heard about his activities in 1941, she threatened to denounce him to the authorities: he did not see her again until the war was over.15 If the first resisters were sometimes led to rebel against their backgrounds, it was as often within their own milieu, even their families, that they sought their first contacts: Frenay among army officers, Viannay among students, Menthon among Christian Democratic academics. D’Astier’s earliest recruits included his own nephew and niece.
Glimmers in the Night
In Resistance memoirs, the theme of night emerges frequently. Texcier collected his Resistance writings under the title Écrits dans la nuit; Frenay entitled his memoirs La Nuit finira. The publishing house which produced clandestine resistance texts called itself the Éditions de Minuit (the Midnight Press).16 The night is a conventional image of oppression, but in this case it also conveys the idea of isolation—literally ‘living in the dark’. As Marc Bloch wrote to Lucien Febvre, the Occupation meant ‘the impossibility of knowing what our closest neighbour thinks. We live surrounded by monads.’17 The first priority was to find other glimmers in the night, to make contacts. These were usually with old friends or former colleagues,18 not only for reasons of safety but also to build bridges to the world before defeat: there was reassurance in continuity.19 One Christian Democratic resister said of his participation in the Resistance that it was not a ‘passing phase in my life; it was a continuity: I carried it in me through all my past’.20
As contacts widened, new encounters occurred: Catholics found themselves alongside anticlericals, Socialists alongside conservatives. Chance often determined the group one joined. It was on a train that Frenay met Claude Bourdet, who became one of his closest collaborators. Had this not occurred, Bourdet says that he might have ended up in London. Two founders of Libération-Sud, Lucie Samuel (Aubrac) and Jean Cavaillès, teamed up with d’Astier after he overheard their conversation in a Clermont café. Jacques Copeau, who joined Libération-Sud later, and became d’Astier’s deputy, remarked: ‘I could just as easily have stumbled upon [Frenay’s movement] Combat.’21
What did ‘resistance’ mean to these people? One must cast aside romantic images of groups feverishly deciphering coded messages from London, unpacking parachute drops, or sabotaging trains. In 1940–1, there were no contacts with London and no parachute drops; most early resisters had no idea how to sabotage a train or the means to do it. Equally, the hackneyed phrase ‘he or she joined the Resistance’, is entirely inappropriate to 1940–1. Before it could be joined, resistance had to be invented. So indeed did the very concept of resistance. It was true that the founding of Défense de la France had been prompted by the memory of La Libre belgique, a Belgian underground newspaper in the First World War, or that in Lille people laid flowers by the statue of the First World War heroine Louise de Bettignies,22 but most resisters, in Frenay’s words, ‘had no precedents to guide our thoughts and acts’.23
Resistance was a territory without maps, and sometimes developed differently from what the first pioneers had expected. D’Astier, who christened his group ‘La Dernière Colonne’, wanted to organize attacks on collaborators. This proved to be beyond the capacity of his handful of recruits, and instead they tried propaganda. On the night of 27 February 1941, in several cities of the Southern Zone, they posted up stickers denouncing the newspaper Gringoire. This ended in disaster. Five of them, including d’Astier’s niece, Bertrande, were arrested. The group was close to extinction. After other false starts, d’Astier decided to produce a newspaper, called Libération. The first issue appeared in July 1941, and it rapidly created its own momentum. A newspaper required money, printing facilities, paper, and ink; it had to be collected and distributed. As circulation expanded, these became full-time tasks, and false identity papers had to be forged for those who performed them. In this way, the newspaper Libération changed the priorities of the group which had created it. The newspaper in a sense created the movement: La Dernière Colonne became Libération.24
Frenay’s National Liberation Movement developed differently, but a newspaper also became central in a way that he had not expected. Frenay originally intended to create paramilitary units, organized into groups of six or thirty, which would form the embryo of a liberation army. With Bertie Albrecht, he also began producing an information bulletin which could be slipped inside magazines. This bulletin became a newspaper called successively Les Petites Ailes and Vérités. In November 1941, Frenay’s group merged with the Liberté group, and they formed a single newspaper called Combat. Frenay did not abandon his military plans, but the newspaper’s importance was revealed by the fact that the new movement, although taking the name Mouvement de libération française, became generally known as Combat.25
In 1941, resistance meant above all propaganda, especially in the South, and newspap
ers were its main vehicle. When Jean-Pierre Lévy, on a visit to Marseilles, saw a ‘proper’ clandestine paper, he realized his movement, which had only distributed tracts, must produce one as well. This resulted, in December 1941, in the first issue of Franc-Tireur, henceforth the name by which the movement was known.26 However modest its appearance, a newspaper projected a future: numbering a sheet ‘one’ suggested that others would follow. Some resisters were worried about tempting fate in this way. Lévy’s group decided not to number the first issue of Franc-Tireur in case they were unable to produce a second one. Only with the appearance of the eighth issue in June 1942 did they feel confident enough to begin numbering the paper.27 Newspapers were also a tangible proof of existence, a way of becoming known and a means of recruitment. Distributing a paper allowed ordinary people to do something. Creating solidarity between those who produced a paper was initially as important as conveying any message to those who might stumble upon it.
The term ‘newspaper’ is too grandiose for the first artisanal efforts. The first ‘issue’ of Liberté was three pages long; there were only seven copies of the first number of Libération-Nord, produced on a typewriter; Valmy’s first issue was produced on a child’s press. These ‘newspapers’ were left on trains and in post offices, or slipped into letter boxes, a primitive form of distribution which relied on shopkeepers or concierges turning a blind eye. In these early days, much time was spent scrounging money and travelling the country to extend contacts. Frenay later wrote: ‘we did not have a penny … We ate in 15-franc restaurants, travelled third class, economized on envelopes. This was the heroic epoch during which solid bonds of friendship and confidence were built up.’28 The rules of clandestinity had to be learnt by experience. On one train journey, Frenay suddenly noticed that the initials in his hat band did not correspond to his alias, and he rushed to the lavatory to remove them.29 The memory of these early adventures explains why Resistance leaders were later so resentful of attempts by outsiders to infringe their independence.
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