B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  D’Astier’s return from London at the end of July allowed unity negotiations to resume. Frenay remained most enthusiastic about a merger because he believed that Combat would be strong enough to absorb the other movements. Since Combat had the largest military forces, Frenay also assumed that if the movements combined their forces, he would effectively be in charge of them. For this reason, d’Astier and Lévy would only agree to a ‘single army’ if Frenay was not given command of it. The final stage of the negotiations occurred in London between Frenay and d’Astier (Moulin and Lévy having been unable to leave France) in the presence of de Gaulle. An agreement was signed on 2 October 1942. It provided for the movements to pool their paramilitary forces into a single organization known as the Secret Army (AS) which would act under the orders of London. The head of the AS was to be the 65-year-old retired general Charles Delestraint. Because Delestraint had no resistance experience, no Resistance leader could complain that a rival was being favoured. Frenay probably hoped that he would be purely a figurehead. Apart from the AS, the movements were to retain their autonomy, but they also agreed to set up a Co-ordinating Committee composed of their three leaders and chaired by Moulin.38

  This agreement was a compromise between Frenay (who had wanted a full merger) and d’Astier (who had not). But at the first meeting of the Coordinating Committee in France on 27 November Frenay, supported by Moulin, resumed the argument for unity. D’Astier dragged his feet, and at the end of the year he started merger negotiations with two Northern movements—Libération-Nord and La Voix du Nord—hoping to maximize his strength. These efforts came to nothing, and d’Astier bowed to the inevitable. On 27 January 1943, the three movements agreed to form a single organization—the United Movements of the Resistance (MUR)—although retaining their separate newspapers.39

  The Resistance: Geography and Sociology

  In the North, there was still little co-ordination between Resistance organizations, but it can be said that by the end of 1942 a resistance existed throughout France. How influential was it at this stage? This question is difficult to answer because Resistance movements were not like political parties. It is problematic even to define membership of a movement. There were full-time activists and occasional sympathizers, people working for one organization and others participating in several. In 1943 Libération-Nord declared: ‘all the readers of the newspaper who feel themselves to be in agreement with its spirit must even if they have not been “contacted” by one of our organizers… consider themselves incorporated into the Libération movement’.40 This conception of membership was too broad to be quantifiable.

  The relative importance attributed to the Southern movements was reflected in Moulin’s distribution of funds between them. In September 1942, Combat received 1.2 million francs, Libération-Sud 438,000, and Franc-Tireur 120,000.41 How many people did these movements represent? After the decision to set up the Secret Army, attempts were made to evaluate the potential numbers available for it. Passy estimated the total at 30,000, of which three-quarters belonged to Combat. But Frenay himself claimed 30,000 for Combat alone, and d’Astier, in November 1942, claimed 19,000 for Libération. The movements inflated their own figures, but this was all that London had to go on. By January 1943, Passy estimated the available forces at 65,000: 16,000 for Franc-Tireur, 23,000 for Libération, 26,000 for Combat. But this overall figure seems high, and if it is correct, the proportion attributed to Combat seems low.42 Since these ‘paramilitary forces’ had almost no arms, the figures cannot be taken too seriously. They represented the movements’ most optimistic assessment of the numbers at their disposal when arms became available. And the distinction between military and non-military forces, crucial in the eyes of London, was somewhat artificial. Most resisters performed several tasks indiscriminately. A BCRA representative, sent to help Libération-Sud organize its military forces, found that the names he was given frequently cropped up performing non-military activities: newspaper distribution, recruitment, and propaganda.43

  Who were these rank-and-file resisters? At this stage the Resistance recruited primarily from the middle and lower middle classes; there were few manual workers. The seven founders of Libération-Sud consisted of two journalists, two teachers, two businessmen, and one engineer. The initial core of Franc-Tireur was made up of teachers, small businessmen, and engineers. Défense de la France had the highest proportion of students (25 per cent); Libération-Nord was well represented among teachers (45 per cent).44 The Resistance was also overwhelmingly urban. It is often said that Lyons was its capital, but the view from the North was different. Pineau commented of d’Astier: ‘His only defect was to believe that the heart of the Resistance was at Lyons and that our activities, under the rod of the occupier, were only of secondary interest.’45 Lecompte-Boinet was equally caustic about Southern resisters who took themselves so seriously and exaggerated their risks: ‘not for anything would they cross to our side of the line and they treated me as someone of no importance… Their view was that one would never be able to set up anything serious in the Occupied Zone… And the restaurants are so good in Lyons!’46 In fact there were more movements based in Paris than anywhere else. Even in the South, Lyons was not the only significant Resistance centre. At the beginning, Marseilles was more important owing to the presence of so many refugees. It was there that Frenay found his first support.47 In Toulouse, resistance was encouraged by the presence of political refugees attracted by the city’s left-wing tradition. The bookshop run by Silvio Trentin, an Italian anti-fascist refugee, became a meeting point for resisters some of whom were involved in producing, from July 1942, the left-wing Resistance newspaper, Libérer et fédérer.48

  Several factors combined to explain why Lyons eventually became the most important site of resistance in the South. Its reputation as a centre for Catholic theology, centred on the abbey at Fourvière, made it a crucible of Catholic resistance. As the press capital of the Unoccupied Zone, it had a high concentration of journalists, printers, and typesetters, as well as facilities for the production of newspapers. Possibly it also helped that Lyons apartment blocks did not have concierges: there was no one to watch when tracts or messages were left in letter boxes. Perhaps also Lyons’s famous network of covered passages, the traboules, proved useful to the Resistance. They hardly figure in the memoirs of resisters, but it might have been reassuring to know they existed.49 Above all, Lyons owed its reputation as the Resistance capital to Moulin’s decision to centralize his operations there. This is the sense in which Lyons really was a capital. In the North, greater fragmentation meant greater decentralization: Paris may have had more resisters than Lyons, but it had no influence over the resistance in Roubaix.50

  Resistance and the Population: How to Resist?

  If it is difficult to estimate the size of the Resistance at the end of 1942, it is even harder to estimate its impact on the population. One measure of visibility is offered by the distribution of the underground press. At the end of 1941, the combined production of the Southern Resistance press was probably not above 30,000. A year later, the figures were much higher:51

  SOUTH

  Libération-Sud

  July 1941–October 1942: 20,000 per issue

  December 1942: 60,000

  Franc-Tireur

  December 1941: 6,000

  November 1942: 30,000

  Combat

  1941: a few 100 per issue

  1942: about 10,000 per issue

  Cahiers du témoignage chrétien

  1941: 5,000–10,000

  1942: 20,000–30,000

  NORTH

  Défense de la France

  1941: 5,000 per issue on average

  1942: 10,000 rising to 30,000 per issue

  Libération-Nord

  End of 1941: 100

  End of 1942: 1000

  It is impossible to know how many people read these newspapers. Before the end of 1942 few people had probably ever seen one or heard of the organizations the
y represented. This was certainly the case of the historian Henri Drouot who set out in his diary to chronicle in detail every aspect of life under occupation in his native city of Dijon. He collected tracts and ephemera, noted the graffiti on walls, listened to conversations, and scrutinized the behaviour of his fellow citizens. From the start of the Occupation he observed various examples of resistance—Vs and crosses of Lorraine daubed on walls, the odd Communist tract—but of ‘the Resistance’ there is no sign until the summer of 1942. The first stray mention of a Resistance newspaper occurs in July 1942 when he comes across a copy of the first issue of Cahiers du témoignage chrétien.52

  It is in the second half of 1942 that one finds the first signs that the Resistance was making some impact on the population. There was an impressive response to the joint appeal from the Southern movements for people to demonstrate on 14 July wearing the national colours. Sixty-six demonstrations took place, two-thirds of them in the Southern Zone. In Lyons and Marseilles, the crowds numbered 15,000.53 For the first time, the growing disaffection from Vichy had been translated into collective action. In many places, these demonstrations tapped into local political traditions and exploited local symbols of republicanism. In Crest, in the Drôme, there was a demonstration in front of the monument commemorating the anti-Bonapartist rebels of 1851; in Grenoble, there was a procession headed by a woman dressed as the Republic.54 In Béziers the demonstration occurred on the spot where the statue of the nineteenth-century Republican hero Armand Barbès had once stood. This was a symbolically contested site: the statue had been vandalized by the right in January 1936; on 11 November 1940, a group of resisters had organized a small demonstration around it; in March 1942, Vichy had the statue melted down for its bronze, causing local resisters to write on the base where the statue had rested, ‘See where collaboration leads; Barbès you will be avenged.’55

  For Resistance leaders, the evidence that they were acquiring an audience created a novel situation. The first resisters justifiably saw themselves as a tiny elite, a Freemasonry of virtue, like the Carbonari groups in the nineteenth century. When Henri Michel and a group of Socialists called on the population of Toulon to appear at the War Memorial on 11 November 1940, they had expected at least fifty people; only six appeared.56 The first Resistance newspapers were a bottle thrown into the sea; it was impossible to know what happened to them next. When Mauriac’s resistance text, the Cahier noir, pilloried the ‘disgusting spectacle’ offered by the French people, or Frenay castigated their ‘apathetic fatalism’ and ‘despicable cowardice’, they were expressing a common view among resisters.57

  Once this fatalism started to lift, Resistance leaders were caught off guard. As Philippe Viannay said:

  We were looking for people similar to ourselves more than we were trying to convince the masses. We were nomads in a sedentary world. We did not care too much what went on around us. We haughtily ignored the immense troop of cowards and the numerous profiteers … We could forget these sad specimens of the French people, for they did not count for us.58

  Now the Resistance had an audience, its leaders had to decide what they expected this audience to do. Their first propaganda had cautioned people against taking excessive risks. In October 1940, one tract in the North advised:

  In your contacts with the Germans be proud, show the minimum of politeness… Ignore them… Delay when you are asked to carry out their orders… Above all no isolated violent action: the moment has not come. No destruction of electric cables… No sabotage of military matériel.59

  Cochet’s first tract warned people against doing anything premature; they were urged to practise only a ‘spiritual resistance’. Some people considered this to be inadequate. Guillain de Bénouville, eventually a member of Combat, originally got involved with a network not a movement because he considered it less important ‘to preach the truth that I already knew than to begin fighting for it’.60

  One practical course of action was offered by Jacques Renouvin, a former member of Action française. Renouvin achieved notoriety in 1938 by publicly slapping Flandin for his telegram congratulating Hitler after Munich. In 1941 he conceived the idea of corps francs, action groups which would carry out propaganda stunts: daubing statues, bombing newspaper kiosks which sold collaborationist papers, setting off laughing gas in lectures given by collaborators. These operations were little more than pranks, but their purpose was to combat fatalism. Renouvin himself was a colourful figure, immensely tall, and the subject of legends which became part of Resistance mythology. On one occasion, when delivering a time bomb, he disguised himself as a priest and was seen striding down the street with his cassock reaching only his knees. Renouvin was based in Montpellier, and the corps francs were initially attached to Liberté, but by 1942 all Southern movements had them. In July 1942, they launched simultaneous attacks on ten recruitment offices for the relève.61

  The corps francs were only a minority within the Resistance, and their activities were not suitable for everyone. What guidance did the Resistance offer the mass of the population? In November 1941, Libération-Nord exhorted its readers to ‘carry out yourself the struggle to deliver the patrie from an invader who is pillaging it’, but did not explain how. Liberté in May 1941 called on people to distribute its newspaper, prepare demonstrations, and boycott the collaborationist press. In August, Libération offered a much more extensive list of boycott actions including sabotage of any industry working for the Germans.62 At this stage, however, most Resistance movements opposed violence. Resistance was defined as an individual moral stance. Défense de la France urged each person to ‘become in himself a centre of resistance…a rock capable of putting up with isolation’.63

  This was similar to the notion of resistance offered by the most celebrated work of resistance fiction, Le Silence de la mer, published by the ‘Midnight Press’ in August 1942. During the Occupation, the true identity of its author, ‘Vercors’, was a secret, even in literary circles (‘the best-kept secret of the war’, said Aragon). In fact Vercors was Jean Bruller, a satirical cartoonist and engraver, who had never written a book before. Quite apart from the message it contained, publishing Le Silence de la mer was itself an act of resistance: it was the first book to appear in occupied France without the stamp of the German censor. Although the first edition ran to only 300–400 copies, organizing the printing, binding, stocking, and distribution of a beautifully produced book was a major feat in itself. By the autumn of 1942 a copy had reached London (taken back by Morandat) where it was reprinted and given worldwide publicity.64

  In Le Silence de la mer, Bruller, writing for a Briandist generation brought up on folk memories of the black propaganda of the First World War, chose not to portray a Nazi. The German protagonist is a musician, a cultured man, more representative of Goethe’s Germany than Hitler’s. Containing few references to contemporary conditions in France, the book has the timeless quality of a parable. It defends the notion of resistance as an assertion of moral dignity. But by the time that the book appeared in August 1942, this vision had begun to seem outdated: timelessness no longer appropriate. Vercors was criticized from London by Arthur Koestler who claimed that the book was ‘psychologically phoney’ and its idea of resistance inadequate to a situation in which people were being massacred. Vercors was criticized for the same reason by the Communists. But he had conceived his book while the Germans were still trying to portray themselves as benevolent occupiers, and writers like Chardonne were happy to take them at their word. If one reads Ernst Jünger’s diary entry for 5 June 1940 (some believed Jünger to be a model for Bruller’s honourable German)—‘I chat for a long time every day with my hostess’—one sees the sense of Vercors’s notion of resistance as a form of moral hygiene.65

  Vercors later recalled a conversation with the writer Jean Cassou in 1940 when they both agreed that the Occupation might last a hundred years. In such circumstances, the role of intellectuals was ‘similar to that of the monks who in the long night of th
e Middle Ages secretly and obstinately passed on the flame of the ancient world, keeping it alight almost 1000 years till the Renaissance’. Once it was clear that this was not to be the case, and other forms of protest presented themselves, Vercors himself accepted that the time for silence had passed.66

  Vercors’s silent resistance could not have been more different from the terrorist tactics adopted by the Communist FTP in 1941. This policy was condemned by de Gaulle and criticized by the Resistance, but it also caused problems for the Communists themselves. Isolated terrorist acts were alien to Communist thinking and had been condemned by Lenin. In September 1941, the French Communist leaders in Moscow believed armed action was premature.67 The first terrorist attacks in France were possibly the initiative of individuals. The Communist press initially said nothing about the attacks, and then claimed them to be a German provocation.68 Not until February 1942 did the Party start to claim responsibility for the attacks. Even then there were dissenters, including the veteran Marcel Cachin, who made a statement opposing attacks on individual Germans. The Party made sure he never spoke out again.69

  Once terrorism had been adopted by the Communists, it had to be given a theoretical justification. One possible defence was that terrorism would unleash German reprisals, dispelling any lingering notions of German correctness and transforming the Communists into martyrs. In fact, this argument was not the one preferred by the Party. In theory, the Communists never separated armed action from their propaganda for mass action: armed struggle was presented as the vanguard of a mass movement which would culminate in national insurrection. To mobilize mass support the Communists tried to build up their Front national movement and revive their trade-union organizations. In factories, the social themes of Communist propaganda were replaced in 1942 by calls for sabotage: ‘it is better to blow factories up than let them work for the Germans’. With such slogans, it is not surprising that the Communists had little audience among workers in 1942.70 They were more successful in exploiting the food shortages. Many food demonstrations in the Occupied Zone were organized by them. Two such demonstrations in Paris, at the rue de Buci market on 31 May 1942 and the rue Daguerre market on 1 August, led to violence and police intervention. These demonstrations had been supposedly protected by the FTP. This was what the Communists meant by linking the activist vanguard and mass social protest.