When their resources were so exiguous, early resisters had to bluff to win new recruits. The first issue of Libération-Sud was grandiloquently subtitled ‘Organ of the Directory of the Forces of French Liberation’.30 Vildé’s paper Résistance claimed to be the ‘Official Bulletin of the National Committee of Public Safety’. Pineau wrote the first issues of Libération-Nord on his own, attributing to himself a number of pseudonyms to convey the illusion of an editorial team: on military matters he was Captain Brécourt, on economics he was François Berteval.31 Frenay impressed potential recruits with complicated diagrams of the structure of his organization, but this structure existed largely in his head.32
Consolidation I: Movements and Networks
Structures did gradually emerge, and gave rise to two distinct types of resistance organizations: networks (réseaux) and movements. The networks were set up with specific military objectives—the collection of information, sabotage, organizing escape routes—and were linked to the intelligence networks of the Allies (SOE, MI6, OSS) or the Free French (BCRAM). Some networks developed from spontaneous local initiatives, such as efforts to help British soldiers stranded in France after the Armistice. Others were set up from scratch by intelligence agents sent out from London. In either case, the link with the outside world was their raison d’être—there was no point in collecting information without somewhere to send it—and the condition of their effectiveness: they needed codes, radio transmission facilities, and money. For security reasons, networks had to be rigidly compartmentalized and hierarchically organized. They did not have newspapers because the overriding priority was secrecy. By contrast, newspapers were central to the existence of most movements. Although these also collected information and sought links outside France, their priority was to target the French population: to shake it out of its lethargy and eventually organize it for action.33
The differentiation between movements and networks crystallized gradually. The first resisters did whatever seemed possible. The Musée de l’homme group started by smuggling escaped prisoners to the Free Zone; then it moved on to collecting information; then, finally, it founded a newspaper. In theory it had gone from being a network to a movement, but such distinctions did not yet exist. Once the networks became more professionalized and started receiving aid from London, the rule was that their members could not also be in a movement. But this was difficult to enforce. When Christian Pineau agreed to create an intelligence network for the Free French in 1942, he recruited from his Libération-Nord movement. Pineau himself ceased working for the movement, but at the base some agents remained involved in both movement and network.34
Nonetheless the distinction between movements and networks was fundamental. The networks were specialized, secretive, and usually small: effectiveness and security might be jeopardized by size. The movements, on the other hand, sought to increase their numbers. The networks had mysterious coded names—Ali-France, Jade-Fitzroy, Caviar, Brutus, Comète—while the names of the movements spoke for themselves: Libération, Défense de la France, Résistance. After the war, official recognition was conferred on 266 networks, representing a total of 150,000 agents. There were huge variations: the Ossau network was restricted to the Basque region and had seventeen full-time agents and ninety-four part-time ones; Zéro-France had 1,000 agents, of whom 150 were full-time. The networks’ social composition also varied. Some specialized in infiltrating a particular institution, like the Ajax network which recruited among the police. Others, like Jade-Fitzroy, recruited eclectically: its members included railway workers, postal workers, garage owners, a prefect of police, hairdressers, restaurateurs, gendarmes, doctors, teachers, lawyers, priests, students, engineers.35
The networks incarnated the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the Resistance so familiar in the popular imagination.36 Their military contribution to the war may have been more significant than that of the movements, but they belong more to the history of military intelligence, and the Allied war effort than to the social and political history of France. The movements, however, were intimately linked to that history. Among the movements, 1941 was a year of consolidation. Some groups went under; others expanded. New recruits tapped their own circles of contacts. One local organizer of Défense de la France approached friends who had played in the same football team; another contacted pharmacists he had known while working as a medical visitor before the war; most of the movement’s members in Brest had been at school together.37 Once existing contacts were exhausted, it was necessary to prospect further afield. Some small groups were absorbed by, or attached themselves to, larger ones. In Britanny, the first group in the Ille-et-Vilaine Department was founded by the guardian of the Château de Fougères, with his wife and daughter. It grew in size, and then attached itself in August 1941 to a larger movement called Ceux de la Libération.38 Défense de la France also absorbed a number of groups in Britanny: by the end of the Occupation, of its 800 members in the region, 40 per cent had started in a separate group.39
Frenay was much assisted by the merger with the Liberté group in November 1941. D’Astier’s route to success was to build links to the Socialists and trade unions. In the spring of 1941, he secured backing from Daniel Mayer, who was reconstructing a clandestine Socialist Party, and in the autumn from the venerable trade-union leader Léon Jouhaux. The fact that d’Astier, the highly strung French aristocrat, should have won over Jouhaux, the taciturn and cautious trade unionist, was testimony to d’Astier’s considerable eloquence. Jouhaux published an anonymous ‘Appeal to Workers’ in Libération’s fourth issue in December. Socialist and trade-union representatives joined Libération’s Executive Committee. The movement was powerfully reinforced by having a network of Socialist and trade-union activists at its disposal.40 In the case of Libération-Nord, which had been founded by trade unionists and Socialists, such links already existed.
Consolidation II: North and South
Another pattern which developed within the Resistance was a differentiation between the two main zones. Initially there were contacts between resisters in both zones. Frenay sent Robert Guédon, a contemporary from the Saint-Cyr military school, to organize groups in the North during 1941; Philippe Viannay asked a relative in Lyons to contact southern groups. As for the two Libération movements, d’Astier’s in the South and Pineau’s in the North, they originally had no connection with each other. But a link was established when the philosopher Jean Cavaillès, one of d’Astier’s first recruits, was transferred to the Sorbonne. In January 1942, the two Libération newspapers announced that the movements were uniting; in August, it was claimed that a single inter-zone coordinating committee had been set up.41 None of these efforts bore fruit. Défense de la France did eventually have a few members in the South, but it remained an essentially North-based movement. Nothing more was heard about the merger between the two Libération movements. Most Combat leaders in the North were arrested at the start of 1942. One of the survivors, Jacques Lecompte-Boinet, did succeed in rebuilding a resistance organization in 1943, but he called it Ceux de la Résistance and avoided links with the South.
Apart from the practical obstacles imposed by the demarcation line, the different conditions in the two zones complicated efforts to create any common organization. The North was more dangerous: the German presence rendered the survival of any group precarious. The Musée de l’homme group was decimated by arrests at the end of 1940; by March 1941 it had been destroyed, and its newspaper with it. Almost none of the first papers set up in the North survived: Arc disappeared after twenty issues in January 1941; Pantagruel after sixteen issues when its founder, Raymond Deiss, was arrested in October 1941; L’Homme libre in June 1941, after the arrest of Lebas; and Valmy in April 1942, after the arrest of Raymond Burgard. Sometimes the fleeting existence of a newspaper is only known to us after a group was disbanded. No copy survives of the six numbers (up to 5,000 per copy) of La Bretagne enchaînée which apparently appeared between November 1941 and February 1942.42
In the South, which was free of Germans, conditions were more relaxed. One visitor to Edmond Michelet, a member of Liberté, had the impression Michelet’s activities were so well known that it would have been possible to ask in the streets of Brive for the ‘head of the Resistance’. So notorious were the sympathies of the journalists Yves Farge and Georges Altman, who worked on the newspaper Progrès de Lyon as well as on the clandestine Franc-Tireur, that visitors to the Progrès de Lyon had been known to ask the receptionist for the offices of the Resistance.43 The safety of the South should not be exaggerated—Michelet was arrested in February 1943, and resisters like Frenay and d’Astier had started to live entirely clandestine lives—but some indication of the difference between the two zones is provided by the fact that the ‘historic’ founders of the three main Southern movements—d’Astier, Lévy, Frenay—as well as the second generation of leaders who replaced them after they went to London or Algiers—respectively Copeau, Claudius Petit, and Bourdet—all survived the war in their posts (apart from Bourdet who was finally arrested in March 1944), whereas the three successive leaders of the northern movement Ceux de la libération were all arrested: Maurice Ripoche in October 1942, Roger Coquoin (Lenormand) in December 1943, and Gilbert Védy (Médéric) in March 1944. Of the movement’s first leaders, only one—André Mutter—survived the war.44
By 1942, then, separate movements existed in either main zone. In the South, three organizations predominated: Libération-Sud, Franc-Tireur, and Combat. Although Frenay put most emphasis on building up a military organization, while d’Astier placed great store on his links with the unions, in practice all three movements developed a similar kind of organization. After the introduction of the relève, Combat created a special Workers’ Action section (AO). At about the same time it also created a section to infiltrate the administration (NAP). Libération-Sud followed with a similar section specializing in infiltrating the highest reaches of the administration. Each movement had a section to manufacture false papers (Libération-Sud had twelve people fully employed on this by the end of 1942); a social service section to help the families of resisters who had been arrested; a section responsible for gathering intelligence; and embryonic paramilitary units.45 This specialization of operations showed that the movements were becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated. But propaganda—essentially the newspapers—remained by far the most important activity. In 1942, Libération-Sud spent about 300,000 francs per month—three-quarters of its budget—on producing and distributing its newspaper.46
In the North, the consolidation of the Resistance was less advanced than in the South. This does not mean that the Northern resistance was less important than the Southern. On the contrary, Frenay, visiting the North in April 1941, came to the conclusion it was ahead of the South. The greater fragmentation of the Northern Resistance was a result of the greater danger—in secrecy lay security—and also of the geographical divisions between the various zones (Alsace-Lorraine, the Reserved Zone, the Nord/Pas-de-Calais). There were Resistance papers with a specifically regional appeal like La Voix du Nord, founded in Lille in April 1941 and calling itself the ‘Resistance organ of French Flanders’, or Lorraine, founded at Nancy in August 1942.
If in the South the three main movements all had newspapers and developed similar structures, in the North there was more diversity. There were papers without movements; movements with papers; and movements without papers. In the first category were several papers which appeared after the disappearance in 1941 of the titles which had emerged at the start of the Occupation. These new newspapers included La IVe République, created in December 1941 by some Socialists to replace the defunct L’Homme libre; the short-lived La France continue, of which thirteen issues appeared in Paris between June 1941 and January 1942; and Résistance, created in October 1942, in Paris, by Marcel Renet (Destrée), to replace Valmy. When Renet chose the title Résistance he did not know there had already been a paper of the same name—a salutary reminder of how isolated these early efforts were.47
In the end, Résistance did develop a movement around its newspaper, and this brought it closer to the second category of organizations in the North: movements with papers. The most important of these were Défense de la France and Libération-Nord. Défense de la France eventually became the most widely distributed of all Resistance newspapers. Although the movement did develop other branches—especially the forging of identity cards—producing the newspaper remained its most important activity. Libération-Nord’s newspaper never took off to the same degree, and as the movement grew, the newspaper became less important to it. The distinctiveness of Libération-Nord lay in its close links to the Socialist and trade-union movement, and this may have been one of the reasons why, unlike most other movements, which were dominated by one or two charismatic leaders, it was run on more collegial lines.
The third category comprised movements without papers. The biggest of these was the Civil and Military Organization (OCM) which emerged in December 1940 out of the merger of two groups: one headed by the industrialist Jacques Arthuys and two professional officers, Colonel Alfred Heurtaux and Colonel Alfred Touny, and the other headed by Maxime Blocq-Mascart, an economic consultant and lobbyist. After the arrest of Arthuys and Heurtaux at the end of 1941, OCM was run by Blocq-Mascart and Touny. Recruiting its cadres among industrialists, top civil servants, and professionals, it gave priority to military action—the collection of intelligence, building up fighting units—but it also organized groups to reflect on post-war economic and political problems. The fruits of these discussions were published in a series of Cahiers which gave the movement the reputation of being technocratic and elitist. Up to a point this was true, but OCM also contained intellectuals of left-wing origin, including former members of the cabinet of Jean Zay under the Popular Front.48
The two other important northern movements without newspapers were Ceux de la Résistance (CDLR) and Ceux de la Libération (CDLL), both of which confined themselves to military objectives: collecting intelligence, helping Allied aviators to escape, sabotage, and so on. They were indeed more like networks than they were like the Southern movements. CDLL developed out of the efforts of the engineer Maurice Ripoche to organize resistance in the intelligence service of Vichy’s air forces. Initially, he recruited in the air force and among former members of La Rocque’s PSF. CDLR was founded in 1943 by Lecompte-Boinet, son-in-law of the famous First World War general Mangin, out of the remnants of Frenay’s organization in the Occupied Zone after the arrests of 1942.49
Towards Ideology
If some important Northern movements did not have newspapers, this was because propaganda seemed less urgent than in the South. As one Northern resister put it, ‘the Germans looked after that’.50 In the South, where there were no Germans before November 1942, the priority was to shatter complacency, reminding people that half the country was occupied. Unlike the Northern movements, those in the South had to situate themselves in relation to Vichy: what was Vichy’s real attitude to the Germans? Did resistance to Germany mean resistance to Vichy? Ultimately this led to another difference between the two zones: in the South, resistance became increasingly ideological.
The Resistance only discovered politics gradually. The situation after the defeat was unprecedented, rendering previous political alignments redundant. Socialists and Cagoulards, monarchists and Freemasons, Catholics and anti-clericals were to be found on all sides. Many resisters acted out of instinct more than ideology. Yves Farge, the Lyons journalist, described his feelings in June 1940 as follows:
The trolley bus from Tassin stopped to let a German motorised column pass, and some character on the bus dared to say in a loud voice ‘the French are at last going to learn what order really is’. I nearly hit him. Then in front of the Grand Hotel there were women waiting to see the German officers emerge. To one of them I said ‘Too old for prostitution’. It all began in ways like that.51
A similar knee-jerk revulsion had
prompted Texcier to write his Conseils à l’occupé. But even if the trigger was emotional, subsequent responses were bound to be shaped by political conviction. The group which formed around Menthon was influenced by shared Christian Democratic values: its members opposed Nazism not Germany, and Liberté was not chosen as the title of their paper by chance.52 Many of the students involved in Défense de France were members of the student section of Catholic Action (JEC), which had been anti-Munich and anti-Nazi before 1940.
Such general principles did not, however, offer clear guidance how to respond to Vichy, especially while Pétain’s attitude to collaboration was open to interpretation. Vichy initially turned a blind eye to many of the anti-German activities developing in its shadow. General Cochet, whose resistance tracts were signed in his own name, was left in peace by the regime until the spring of 1941. How could resisters not be encouraged by Vichy’s attitude to the passeurs who smuggled people across the demarcation line? For the Germans this was an illegal activity punishable by death; for Vichy, which claimed that the Armistice did not justify turning the line into an internal frontier, it was entirely legitimate. When Paul Kepfler, a passeur from Poligny in the Jura, who was captured by the Germans and sentenced to death, escaped to Lyons, he was sent a cheque by Ménétrel accompanied by a note expressing Pétain’s admiration for his ‘admirable conduct’.53 Such gestures heartened those wishing to believe that Vichy was playing a double game.
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