From September 1940 the PCF’s stance towards the Germans mirrored the fluctuations in the relationship between Hitler and Stalin. A Gestapo report in January 1941 noted that since September 1940 the Party had embarked upon anti-German propaganda.78 The extent of this should not be exaggerated: it was no more than a change of tone. L’Humanité started referring to the ‘occupying authorities’ rather than, more neutrally, the ‘authorities’. In Moscow, Thorez, who had not approved of Duclos’s flirtations with the Germans, was pushing to accentuate this more anti-German orientation.79 A document prepared by the PCF leaders in Moscow in April, and approved by the Kremlin, stressed that the ‘main task is not the overthrow of capitalism … but the defence of national interests… national liberation from the yoke of the foreigner’.80 The Party did not prevent the activities of a group of its intellectuals in Paris who founded the clandestine periodical L’Université libre in November 1940, and then its successor La Pensée libre in February 1941. La Pensée libre was easily the most substantial clandestine publication which had so far appeared in France, and could not have appeared without help from the Party’s underground publishing networks. Its first issue denounced ‘German imperialism and its vassal Marshal Pétain’. The choice of the word ‘imperialism’ in preference to ‘Nazism’ shows, however, that a class analysis still prevailed over a patriotic or anti-fascist one.81
In May 1941 the patriotic orientation became more pronounced with the call for a ‘National Front of Struggle for the Independence and Freedom of France’ and a condemnation of the ‘barbaric methods of Nazism’. This later enabled the PCF to claim that it had not suddenly become anti-German after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 21 June 1941, but it cannot disguise the fact that before this date the central axis of Communist policy was neutralist. The war was denounced as an imperialist conflict; the Party’s slogan was ‘Neither a British Dominion nor a German protectorate’. Only after 21 June did the conflict become a ‘War for National Liberation’. Before this date, if it cannot be said that the Communists collaborated, it cannot be said that they resisted either. Although Communist students were involved in the 11 November demonstration in Paris, the Communist press ignored the event.
Any frustration felt by Communist activists about the Party’s policy was channelled into uncompromising denunciation of Vichy. Sometimes this permitted an oblique attack on the Germans through phrases such as ‘collaboration signifies the domestication of France’ even if the identity of the domesticator was not spelled out. In general, however, the attack on Vichy ‘traitors’ concentrated on domestic issues: Vichy as a regime of capitalist oppression and political reaction. Class not patriotism was the Party’s frame of reference at this stage. The Communists tried to organize people’s committees (comités populaires) to exploit discontent over food shortages; they agitated for higher wages in the factories. This propaganda had little impact, but the violence of the Communists’ opposition to Vichy set them apart from any other group in France. Only the Communists could have said about Pétain at this time: ‘France hates you for its misfortunes.’82
The PCF’s attacks on Vichy were a logical response to the repression which the regime had unleashed against it. In the autumn of 1940, French police launched anti-Communist operations throughout the country. The Party was vulnerable because its activists had come out of hiding in the first weeks of the Occupation. Generally the Germans approved Vichy’s anti-communism, but some prefects of the Occupied Zone complained of a lack of German cooperation. After June 1941 they had no complaints. This date appears in retrospect as a turning point in the history of the Communists under the Occupation, but this is not how it appeared at the time to Communist activists in the South who were still reeling from the effects of the repression. In the Var, the Party had almost been wiped out, and it showed no signs of life between March and September 1941.83 Repression was the main experience of the Communists in Vichy France both before and after June 1941.
In July 1941, Comintern instructed the PCF to launch armed struggle. The orders were to disrupt industrial production in factories working for the Germans, carry out acts of sabotage, and organize armed groups.84 The first objective merely involved giving a patriotic slant to the previous factory agitation for improved pay: disrupting production was now presented as undermining the German war effort.85 The first act of sabotage was the derailing of a train at Épinay-sur-Seine on 18 July. The first case of armed action was the assassination of a German soldier by the Communist Pierre Georges (Colonel Fabien), in full daylight, at Barbès-Rochechouart metro station on 21 August. Two days later, two German officers were killed in Lille. Most Communist resistance activity occurred initially in the Paris region and the Nord/Pas-de-Calais. The Germans recorded sixty-eight actions in the Paris region between August 1941 and January 1942.86 From the autumn, Communist resistance spread to other parts of the Occupied Zone. Three incidents occurred on three successive days of October 1942: on 19 October, the derailing of a train between Paris and Rouen; on 20 October, the assassination of a senior German officer in Nantes; on 21 October, another assassination in Bordeaux.
Despite these spectacular operations the Communists did not possess a smooth military machine, ready to leap into action at the first opportunity. Except for those, like Fabien, who had fought in Spain, few Communists had experience of armed action or the stomach for it. Communist ‘military resistance’ consisted of a handful of determined and desperate individuals armed with a few revolvers. The first actions were carried out by three minuscule groups restricted mainly to the Paris region: the Organisations speciales (OS), teams which had been created in the autumn of 1940 to protect Communists during the distribution of tracts; Young Communists organized into so-called Bataillons de la jeunesse; and the immigrants of the MOI. In total, these represented probably not more than a hundred people, a tiny minority of a party which had itself been decimated by the repression it had suffered. In the autumn of 1941, Charles Tillon was instructed to co-ordinate these groups by setting up a national military committee (CMN). Previously Tillon had been a Communist organizer in the south-west. He was one of the few Party leaders who had openly called for resistance to the Germans as early as the summer of 1940. Normally Communists did not tolerate deviations from the Party line, even—especially—if these anticipated positions subsequently adopted by the Party. But in 1941 the Communists needed all the leaders they could find, especially ones as energetic and able as Tillon who was to become the organizer of the Communists’ entire military effort. At first, however, Tillon’s CMN had only the most shadowy existence. It is not even clear whether the three operations of mid-October had been co-ordinated.87 This was a darkly mysterious time in the Communist Party’s history.
In February 1942, Moscow ordered the Communists to intensify armed action. After the German failure to take Moscow in 1941, the Soviet leadership believed that the Red Army would soon be ready to undertake a decisive offensive. Stalin wanted the Allies to organize a second front to take the pressure off his forces. The Communists were encouraged to expect victory in 1942. This optimism seemed less well founded after the successful German offensives into the Caucasus, and the Allies’ rejection of a second front in Europe during 1942. But such setbacks only increased the demands made of the Communists: they were supposed to take pressure off the Red Army by pinning down German troops in the West. In July, the PCF came close to calling for a national insurrection. Its armed groups were now designated Sharpshooters and Partisans (FTP) which were organized into small groups of three or four men who were supposed to retain their normal jobs, meet when there was an action to carry out, and then disperse. There was also one full-time armed unit operating from the forest of Moret-sur-Long not far from Paris. This group, an anticipation of the rural-based Maquis of 1943, carried out its actions in the city—it shot Doriot’s secretary in August 1942—and then retreated back to the countryside.88
As the number of Communist actions increased, so did the in
tensity of repression. The German and French police were now co-operating fully. In Paris the Bataillons de la jeunesse had been completely wiped out by the spring of 1942. In August, a new unit, calling itself the Valmy group (no relation to the defunct Valmy newspaper) carried out two spectacular attacks in Paris at the Rex Cinema and the Jean-Bouin Stadium. Several Germans were killed, but the entire Valmy group was arrested. Only the MOI remained operational in Paris. The Communist leader Charles Debarge, who had masterminded daring attacks on the Germans in the Nord, was arrested in September after several close shaves, and a huge police operation almost eliminated the entire Party organization in the département.89 The Moret-sur-Long group was destroyed. In the spring of 1942, the Party came close to disaster when the fourth most important figure in the hierarchy, Raymond Dallidet, was arrested. Had he talked under torture, the entire leadership of the Party would have been at risk.90
The summer of 1942 was the nadir of Communist fortunes. It was also the period when, in the Occupied Zone, the Party constructed the skeleton of an underground organization which allowed it to survive and eventually develop a highly effective resistance operation. In the long run the Party profited from adversity. At the time, however, the Communists were close to extinction, and they were almost completely isolated. After June 1941, the Party called for national unity. It tried using the ‘National Front’ idea, launched in the previous month, to rally the entire resistance under its banner. But the other Resistance movements were wary. Frenay’s paper Vérités attacked the Front national in September 1941; Franc-Tireur pointed out in February 1942 that one could not simply forget the behaviour of the Communists before June 1941.91 Quite apart from this problem, most other resistance movements disapproved of terrorism. Faced with this lack of response, the Communists abandoned the prospect of alliance with other groups and downplayed the Front national theme. L’Humanité did not mention it in the first five months of 1942.92 The Communists seemed entirely alone.
Towards Unity
In May/June 1942, there was another shift in Communist policy. The Front national idea was resurrected and L’Humanité now called for the unity of all ‘patriots’ whether Socialist, Radical, conservative, Catholic, Jewish, or atheist. The Communists started to employ the Republican rhetoric—the language of 1793—which had served them so well during the Popular Front. They launched a major propaganda campaign for the celebration of the battle of Valmy in September 1942. This kind of language offered a possible bridge to the other movements which, especially in the South, were developing similar themes. Despite the other movements’ wariness towards the Communists, an objective convergence was occurring between those resisters, like Frenay, whose original sympathy for Vichy’s political objectives had been eroded as they lost faith in the regime’s foreign policy, and the Communists, who had always contested the political objectives, but ignored the foreign policy until June 1941.93
Given the reputation of the Republic by the end of the 1930s, this reassertion of republican values was not self-evident. It was a situation which Vichy itself created by becoming so identifiably a right-wing regime, and linking its fate so irremediably to Germany’s. Those like Mounier, who had hoped to opt out of politics and defend spiritual values—in Peguy’s words, mystique not politique—found that politics could not be circumvented after all. The issue was decided for them when Vichy drew a line beyond which criticism could not be expressed: it was Vichy which ensured that the Resistance would be Republican. The Republic could possess a mystique again, and provide the Resistance, especially in the South, with an identity which transcended differences between the movements.
In fact these differences had never meant much to the ordinary members of resistance movements. The movements recruited wherever they could. In Marseilles, Combat had many Socialists in its ranks. When the southern movements eventually united in 1943, it was discovered that the same person was often distributing the papers of several movements.94 The same was true in the North. In the Pas-de-Calais, the OCM, reputedly a right-wing organisation, recruited many Socialists (including the future Socialist leader Guy Mollet). After the war, some members of Défense de la France turned out not even to know the name of the movement to which they had belonged; 11 per cent of them had worked for other organizations as well.95
For these reasons, there was a compelling case for the movements to unite their efforts. The main obstacle came from the susceptibilities of the leaders. There could hardly have been two men more temperamentally mismatched than d’Astier and Frenay who first met in the summer of 1941. Frenay realized that d’Astier’s political and trade-union contacts were superior to his own, but wondered how seriously to take him. D’Astier, who tried to dazzle Frenay with his eloquence, realized that Combat was better organized than Libération. This made him wary when Frenay started pushing for a merger: he did not want to be swallowed up by him. During the summer of 1941, there were discussions about a federation between three Southern movements: Libération, Liberté, and Libération nationale. But when Liberté and Libération nationale did merge in December 1941 (to form Combat), d’Astier remained aloof. Frenay’s contacts with Vichy worried many resisters including even members of his own movement, and the revelation of his contacts with Pucheu caused genuine shock. D’Astier used this as a pretext to break off talks and exploited Frenay’s discomfiture by giving the matter some publicity in Libération.96 At this moment, just when it seemed that the momentum towards unity had stalled, it was reinforced by the arrival of de Gaulle’s envoy, Jean Moulin. He had instructions to bring the movements together, and money to offer them, if they were ready to comply.
18
De Gaulle and the Resistance 1942
Moulin’s Plan
Jean Moulin’s resistance began on 17 June 1940 when he tried to cut his throat rather than sign a document dishonouring French colonial troops. This was one of those actions which reveals an individual’s inner resources of courage, but the political convictions which inspired it had long been evident. Moulin came from a family where republicanism was lived like a religion. In 1939, as prefect of Chartres, it fell to him to attend the annual banquet in memory of a hero of the First Republic, General Marceau. Moulin’s speech made clear that as ‘the great grandson of a soldier of the Republic, grandson of a man who knew the prisons of the Second Empire for daring to declare his attachment to the Republic’, the occasion was no mere formality for him.1
Moulin’s father, a teacher at Perpignan, had Radical and Masonic connections which helped Moulin in the first stages of his career. By 1925, he was the youngest sub-prefect in France. Around this time, Moulin met the left-wing Radical Pierre Cot who was a passionate advocate of a Franco-Soviet alliance. Cot became a close friend and patron, and in 1936 when he became Air Minister in the Popular Front government, he made Moulin his chef de cabinet. Moulin’s experience of underground activity dated not from 1940, but from this experience of working for Cot when he helped to organize secret shipments of arms to the Spanish Republicans. One of Moulin’s associates later dubbed this his period of ‘archeo-Resistance’. These shipments occurred with Blum’s secret approval, and involved other members of Cot’s entourage—Pierre Meunier, Robert Chambeiron, and Henri Manhès—and also brought Moulin into contact with a number of Comintern agents: Maurice Panier, André Labarthe, and Louis Dolivet. Despite subsequent insinuations that Moulin was a crypto-Communist, even a Soviet agent, there was nothing sinister about these contacts in the context of the international movement of solidarity with Spain. Moulin was strongly pro-Soviet at this time—Cot later said that Moulin was ‘the most left-wing’ of those around him—but this did not make him a Soviet agent.2
After being dismissed by the Vichy government in November 1940, Moulin went to Paris and sought out his associates from the Cot team. Cot himself had left for America, where Dolivet, who broke with Comintern after the Russo-German Pact, joined him in December 1940. Meunier, who was working at the Ministry of Finance, had made some c
ontacts with early resisters including Raymond Deiss, who produced the newspaper Pantagruel, and Maurice Ripoche, who was later to found CDLL. Manhès was organizing his own network, called Frédéric, which included Meunier and Chambeiron among its members.3 Moulin’s aim at this stage seems to have been to collect information about anti-German activities. He also learnt a lot from his close friend Antoinette Sachs who had an extensive network of relationships. She informed him about the anti-German sentiments of the former Cagoulards around Colonel Groussard, whose mistress was her sister.4
Having prospected in the North, Moulin returned to the Unoccupied Zone in December 1940. It seems that he hoped to head for America from where Cot and Dolivet had plans to mastermind a resistance network in France. Owing to difficulties in obtaining a Portuguese visa, Moulin’s departure was postponed for nine months. This delay was important because, at some point during it, Moulin decided to go to London instead of America. It also allowed him to make the contacts in the South which were crucial in establishing his credibility with de Gaulle. His most important meeting was with Henri Frenay in the summer of 1941. Frenay provided information on the Resistance and told Moulin that he desperately lacked money and arms.5
Moulin finally left France on 9 September, and for six weeks he was stuck in Lisbon. From there he wrote to Cot, who still seems to have expected Moulin to join him, that he had decided he could be more useful ‘in following another path and being closer to our English friends’. The absence of any reference to de Gaulle in this letter may have been to reassure Cot, who shared the widely held view of the general as a fascist. It may also have reflected genuine doubt in Moulin’s mind about whether to offer his services to the British or Free French. The report which Moulin drafted in Lisbon was calibrated to appeal both to de Gaulle and the British.6 It said nothing about Moulin’s contacts with the former members of the Cot entourage, possibly because such company was unlikely to endear him to the Gaullists or the British. When the British asked why Dolivet was so keen that Moulin should come to America, Moulin lied directly, claiming that they had had no contact for two years.7 When he arrived in London, Moulin had not revealed his whole hand.
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