In this context, it is not so surprising to find the first issue of Liberté containing quotations from Pétain as well as Foch. The paper was initially ready to credit Vichy with good faith, distinguishing between Pétain and his advisers.54 Frenay was even more prepared to give Vichy the benefit of the doubt. In 1941, he vigorously attacked the Armistice, but took no stand on Vichy and avoided attacks on Pétain. Having worked at Vichy at the end of 1940, he knew about the anti-German sentiments of people like Paillolle or Groussard. Even after Frenay resigned from the army, the 2ème Bureau continued to provide him with information which he exploited for his Resistance activities.55 When at the end of 1941 some members of Combat were arrested, the informer who had betrayed them to the Gestapo was apprehended thanks to Paillole.56 In such circumstances it was understandable that Frenay could be open-minded about Vichy. His most controversial involvement with the regime occurred at the start of 1942, after further arrests of Combat members. Frenay was informed that they might be released if he would agree to meet Pucheu, the Interior Minister. He had two meetings (on 28 January and 6 February 1942) with Pucheu who tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to moderate his activities.57
Frenay’s indulgence towards Vichy was reinforced by sympathy with the regime’s political objectives. The manifesto he drafted in the autumn of 1940 was favourable to the spirit of the National Revolution.58 In August 1941, his paper Vérités continued to approve Vichy’s internal policies: ‘we are on [Pétain’s] side when he attacks the power of money, Freemasonry and bureaucracy’.59 This stance was not unusual. It was shared by General Cochet who declared Vichy’s reforms to be ‘absolutely in accordance with what I have wanted from the bottom of my heart’. He called for loyalty to Pétain even after Montoire: ‘let us keep the most complete confidence in the Marshal whom no other Frenchman could replace in his task of internal recovery’.60 When Cochet republished his tracts after the war, he omitted such passages and erased the ambiguities of the early Resistance.
We have already noted that the Resistance was slow to condemn anti-Semitism. In fact, some resisters even sympathized with Vichy policy towards the Jews. In January 1942, Viannay in Défense de la France condemned the ‘invasion of Israel or any other invasion’ and proclaimed that there ‘is a French way of dealing with these problems which is not the German way’. Vichy would not have dissented from this. In June 1942, the OCM produced a cahier on post-war reform which expressed doubts if Jews could ever assimilate into France. Of course, there were other voices as well. Pantagruel condemned anti-Semitism in October 1941; so did all thirteen issues of La France continue between June and December 1941; Franc-Tireur published an article condemning racism in December 1941.61
In the early days resisters did not spend much time discussing political reforms since they all agreed that no meaningful reform was possible until Germany’s defeat, but the point is that they did not necessarily contest the kind of reforms Vichy wished to carry out. The Liberté group was in close contact with Emmanuel Mounier, and when Esprit was banned Mounier did not have to seek out resistance circles: he was already part of them.62 All that had separated him from them previously was not the values in which they believed, but whether those values stood any chance of being realized while France was occupied. Not many resisters unequivocally condemned Vichy from the beginning. The exceptions included Libération-Sud whose first issue in July 1941 directly criticized Pétain. The second issue in August attacked Vichy’s anti-Republican measures, criticized the Jewish Statute, and proclaimed it stood for ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. Franc-Tireur’s first issue in December 1941 was also hostile to Pétain whom it called a ‘conscious traitor’.63 This was not surprising given the republican sympathies of the movement’s leaders, but it was also explained by the late date. At the end of 1941, even those well disposed to Vichy were losing their illusions.
Liberté offered its first personal criticism of Pétain in October, quoting Clemenceau’s remark that he had preferred the madness of Foch to the sanity of Pétain in 1918.64Combat was the last Southern movement to break with Pétain, which it did after Laval’s return to power in April 1942. In the next month Combat declared; ‘All is clear now. The Pétain myth is over … All France is now against you.’ By October 1942, Pétain had become the ‘sinister old man of Vichy’. Combat’s condemnation of Vichy now extended beyond collaboration to the regime’s internal policies: ‘the suppression of our liberties … the odious antiSemitic legislation… the omnipotence of the monopoly trusts’. At the end of the year Combat was invoking ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.65
This ideological radicalization of the Resistance did not occur in the Occupied Zone. Northern resisters were condescending about the South where they saw too little danger and too much politics. After a visit to the South, Pineau claimed that the Southern resisters ‘might as well have had visiting cards printed with their clandestine names’; he concluded that they needed some Germans in the street.66 This was why Lecompte-Boinet decided, after Combat’s collapse in the Occupied Zone, that he would create a new movement, CDLR, rather than rejoin Frenay in the South. When an envoy from London tried to discover CDLR’s views on a post-liberation regime, he was told that the only purpose of the Resistance was to ‘make war’.67 Some Northern resisters did express political views, but of the most diverse kinds. In October 1940, Maurice Ripoche proclaimed that the task of freeing France of Germans must be followed by that of freeing her of ‘garrulous and incompetent politicians… [and]…Jews without patrie’ in order to create an authoritarian ‘New order’; Pantagruel recalled the Popular Front of ‘lugubrious memory’. On the other hand, L’Homme libre, from its first issue in October 1940, wanted a ‘democratic Republic where the words Liberty-Equality-Fraternity will not be empty ones’; Libération-Nord, hostile to Vichy from the start, was among the first papers to attack Pétain directly; and La France continue’s first issue (June 1941) announced that Vichy was the ‘anti-France’.68
It is wrong therefore to see all the Northern movements as more conservative than those in the South. The real difference was that, being directly confronted with Vichy, the Southern movements evolved in response to it, while the Northern ones did not. In the North, those starting hostile to Vichy remained so; others were slow to rethink their position. Défense de la France remained indulgent towards Vichy until November 1942, long after the regime had been discredited among every Southern movement. Viannay later admitted that he had continued to believe in a ‘hidden face of Vichy’.69 In the North, then, no common resistance ideology emerged. There was a world of difference between the technocratic elitism of OCM’s Cahiers, the Socialist Republicanism of Libération-Nord, and the democratic Catholicism of La France continue. The difference between the Northern movements and the Southern ones was that the former were still reacting to the republican past while the latter were reacting to the Vichy present.
In the South, however, ideology became central to the self-definition of the Resistance. As Kedward writes: ‘the realisation that the underground war against Germany involved a form of civil war against Vichy is the central development in Resistance history in 1941’.70 The Resistance started to develop a common rhetoric, drawing on the traditions of French Republicanism. In 1942, some members of Franc-Tireur in Lyons resurrected the revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchêne which had been founded in 1793 and revived in 1848 and 1871. Although only four issues appeared, the main purpose was to establish a lineage for the Resistance. This was also the ambition of a paper founded at Saint-Étienne in May 1942, calling itself the ‘Newspaper of the Inheritors of the French Revolution’. It took the title 93 in reference to the Second Republic of 1793. Even Combat now talked of the ‘Fourth Republic’, and frequently mentioned revolution.71
Other Voices I: Catholics and Socialists
The politicization of the Southern Resistance did not occur in a void. In 1940, most political organizations had been stunned into silence, their leaders too discredited to rai
se their heads. But towards the end of 1941, their voices—Catholic, Socialist, Communist—started to be heard again.
Catholics, especially those with Christian Democratic backgrounds, were prominent in resistance from the start: in the Voix du Nord, in Valmy, in Résistance, in Liberté, and in Défense de la France. There were also Catholics like Mounier who inhabited a twilight zone between support for Vichy and criticism of it. A similar position was held by Stanislas Fumet, who had been an important Christian Democrat presence before 1940 through his periodical Temps présent. Its network of subscribers, the ‘Amis du temps présent’, was part of the infrastructure of French Christian Democracy. In December 1940, Fumet revived his periodical with the new title Temps nouveau. It pushed criticism of Vichy and Nazism as far as legally possible until being banned by the government in August 1941, along with Esprit. Mounier and Fumet had helped to create a space through which it was possible to glide almost imperceptibly from Pétainism to Resistance—and not only metaphorically: many future resisters met in their Lyons apartment.
The contribution of these individual Catholic voices to the Resistance as a whole was reinforced by the appearance of a specifically Christian presence in the Resistance in the form of the newspaper Cahiers du témoignage chrétien. Its founder was the Jesuit Pierre Chaillet whose role in rescuing Jews through the organization Amitié chrétienne we have already seen. Chaillet had met Frenay in Lyons, and he began contributing to his paper, Les Petites Ailes. The first issue of Témoignage chrétien appeared in November 1941 with an article by the Jesuit Gaston Fessard entitled: ‘France, be careful not to lose your soul.’ This was a closely argued critique of the values of Nazism which concluded unequivocally: ‘Collaboration in the government of the Marshal = Collaboration in the New Order = Collaboration in the triumph of Nazi principles.’ The first issue of Témoignage chrétien was printed on the presses of Combat, and distributed through Combat’s network of contacts. Five thousand copies were produced. Soon the journal established its own presses and distribution networks thanks to the efforts of Louis Cruvillier, who had worked for Temps nouveau until its prohibition in 1941. Cruvillier was eventually forced to escape the police by taking refuge in Switzerland in May 1942, but by this time Témoignage chrétien had established itself within the French Resistance. No other Resistance publication did more to condemn racism and anti-Semitism.72
As well as Catholics, there were many Socialists among the first resisters, but the Socialist Party itself was discredited by its pre-war divisions. Blum had been imprisoned by the Vichy regime while Faure was a discreet supporter of it. In the South the rebuilding of the Party began with a meeting at Nîmes in March 1941. The nine Socialists present christened themselves the Committee of Socialist Action (CAS). To break with the past, they decided to exclude Socialists who had voted for Pétain. The moving force behind the CAS was Daniel Mayer, who had been a journalist on the Party newspaper Le Populaire, and was devoted to Blum. In the North, a separate CAS was set up, under Henri Ribière, but progress was slower both because of the need for secrecy and because Libération-Nord assumed the character of an unofficial Socialist resistance movement. Mayer’s ambition in the South was not to found a resistance movement, but to ensure that the Socialists would be ready to play a political role at the liberation. In the meantime, he allowed Socialists to join whatever movement they wished.
The turning point in the reputation of the Socialists was the Riom trial which opened on 20 February 1942. Blum, the most prominent defendant, deployed all his dialectical skill and moral passion, and succeeded in turning the tables on his prosecutors. The trial developed into a public relations disaster for Vichy, and was terminated on 11 April. What Vichy had planned as an indictment of the Popular Front was transformed by Blum into a resounding defence of socialism and the Republic. From this point the Socialists felt less obliged to apologize for their past. One sign of this confidence was the (clandestine) reappearance in May 1942 of Le Populaire. The newspaper announced that it did not represent ‘the party of yesterday’ and had repudiated those ‘Socialists who have betrayed’. But it called itself the ‘Central Organ of the Socialist Party (SFIO)’ and was numbered ‘New series, No. 1, 26th Year, No. 6329’. This was an assertion of continuity, and Socialists now had a voice that could not be ignored. By the end of 1942 the combined forces of the CAS in the two zones were probably about 28,000 (about a quarter of the pre-war membership). In the South, the Party was strong in Marseilles where it had able organizers in the persons of Félix Gouin and Gaston Defferre.73
Other Voices II: The Communists
The Communists also had to live down a compromised past, but there is still much controversy about just how compromised that past was. Non-Communist historians argue that the Party came close to collaboration in the summer of 1940 by negotiating with the Germans to legalize L’Humanité.74 Until the 1960s Communist historians denied the existence of the negotiations, and when this position was no longer sustainable they blamed them on junior officials. The official line was that the Party had been the pioneer of resistance. The Party’s Appeal of 10 July was presented as the first call for resistance in France, parallel to de Gaulle’s call from London. Non-Communist historians contested the alleged date of the Appeal and cast doubt on its resistance credentials. It certainly is a curious document, attacking Pétain’s government and calling for ‘a free and independent’ France, but without mentioning the Germans.
Some light has been shed on these mysteries by the recently opened Soviet archives.75 It emerges from these that the Comintern in Moscow was caught unawares by the German victory. It was initially unsure how to respond, and its directives were slow to reach Paris. The situation was further complicated by the dispersal of the French Communist leaders. Maurice Thorez, their chief, was in Moscow; his deputies, Jacques Duclos and Maurice Tréand, were in Brussels; the remaining leaders left in Paris headed south during the Exodus. Arriving back in Paris on 15 June, Duclos and Tréand saw the power vacuum in France as an opportunity to see if the German presence might allow the Communists to recover influence after the repression they had suffered during the Phoney War. Given the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact it was reasonable to assume that such a policy would be approved in Moscow. But everything would depend on the attitude of the Germans.
When some Communist mayors in the Paris region tried to re-enter the town halls from which they had been ousted during the Phoney War, the Germans would not support them.76 The Communists received more encouragement in the negotiations over the possible legalization of L’Humanité. On the French side, the negotiators included Tréand and Jean Catelas, who were, after Duclos, the two most senior Communists in Paris; on the German side, they included Abetz and representatives of the German military authorities. When two of the French negotiators were arrested by the French authorities, the Germans got them released on 25 June. During the negotiations, Tréand and Catelas promised that if L’Humanité were allowed to reappear, it would ‘pursue a policy of European pacification’ and ‘denounce the activities of the agents of British imperialism’. L’Humanité (which had been appearing underground since September 1939) printed three articles praising fraternization between French workers and the Germans, the last on 27 July.
On 3 July, Duclos received a telegram from Moscow instructing him to organize the ‘resistance of the masses against the aggressor’. This directive probably originated during the last stages of the battle of France and was Comintern’s reaction to the unexpectedly rapid German advance. But by the time the directive had passed the bureaucratic procedures and reached Duclos, the Armistice had been signed.77 Nonetheless Duclos felt obliged to take account of it, while not abandoning negotiations with the Germans. This resulted in the Appeal of 10 July (probably drafted towards the end of July) whose contradictions appear less baffling once this background is understood: Duclos was trying to respect the Comintern’s redundant instructions while also trying to formulate a policy appropriate to the prese
nt context. How little importance Duclos attached to the Appeal was clear from the report he sent to Moscow a few days later. He devoted only one sentence to it, and spent more time discussing the negotiations with the Germans, even commenting favourably on the humane treatment of French prisoners by German soldiers.
When Duclos’s reports on the negotiations arrived in Moscow in mid-July, they were a complete surprise. Comintern’s response was confused. While not totally condemning the attempt to get L’Humanité legalized, it cautioned against the meetings with Abetz. Duclos was told to refrain from attacking the British, but also to avoid provoking the Germans. Thorez, however, was alarmed by what he heard from Paris, and, partly under his influence, Comintern toughened its stance. Duclos was sent another message telling him to end the negotiations and warning against ‘any manifestation of solidarity’ with the Germans. In reply, Duclos defended himself from any suspicion that he might have become a ‘plaything of the occupier’. The Communists broke off the negotiations in the third week of August. Robert Foissin, one of the negotiators, was made a scapegoat and excluded from the Party. Almost simultaneously, Abetz decided against the legalization of any Communist newspaper. How close Abetz had come to allowing this is not clear, but the German military authorities had never been keen. The flirtation between the Communist Party and the Germans ended just as the Germans were about to end it anyway. Fortunately for the future reputation of the Party, the Germans had never allowed the relationship to go beyond a flirtation.
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