Brossolette, meanwhile, set about creating a co-ordinating committee of the movements similar to that existing in the South since October 1942. This objective was consistent with his original instructions, but not with Moulin’s ‘new instructions’ which Passy brought over in February. Although Moulin envisaged only a single organism for both zones, Brossolette took no notice, believing that he understood the North better than Moulin. His view was that the idea of a single Resistance council was premature until preliminary co-ordination had occurred in the North and he played on the apprehensions of Northern Resistance leaders that their organizations might be annexed by the more developed ones in the South. Brossolette also ignored what the ‘new instructions’ said about the political parties. He found the Northern Resistance leaders hostile to any ‘rehabilitation’ of the parties. Since this coincided with his own views, Brossolette suggested that, instead of including parties, the proposed Resistance council should contain only representatives of France’s ‘spiritual families’. When London reprimanded him for ‘exceeding the limits’ of his mission, Brossolette was unrepentant. On 12 March he communicated his disagreement with the ‘new instructions’: ‘Yes, to the Republic… but not that of yesterday… The fact that you are resigned to admitting the political parties into the running of the Resistance is unanimously opposed in this zone.’15
As soon as Moulin had returned to Lyons from London, he sent Brossolette a message announcing his imminent arrival in Paris and instructing him to postpone any definitive decisions until then. This only spurred Brossolette to move faster. On 26 March, four days before Moulin’s arrival, he held the first meeting of the Co-ordinating Committee of the Occupied Zone. Five movements were represented: OCM, CDLR, CDLL, FN, and Libération-Nord. The Committee declared itself ready to accept a Resistance council which might include representatives of ‘currents of opinion’, but not representatives of political parties. It also rejected the idea of a permanent committee with executive powers: the Resistance council was acceptable only if it remained symbolic.16
Before he could turn his attention to the North, Moulin, on returning to France, had had to confront a challenge to his authority in the South where the movements were no less antagonistic to political parties than their comrades in the North. Claude Bourdet was scandalized that Moulin wished to give a ‘Resistance certificate’ to these ‘ghosts about whom no one had spoken since 1940’; Frenay accused Moulin of being the ‘gravedigger of the Resistance’.17 The Resistance leaders, especially Frenay, were also regretting that they had ceded control of their meagre military forces to the AS. Once it was clear that Delestraint intended to be more than a figurehead, Frenay began to attack him violently in the meetings of the Southern Co-ordinating Committee.18
The conflict with Delestraint was not only about the command of the AS, but also about the strategy it should pursue. London wanted the military and political operations of the Resistance to be separate: the AS was required to wait in reserve for the liberation and then play its prescribed role in the Allied strategic plans, under de Gaulle’s authority. Resistance leaders viewed this distinction between political and military activity as artificial. They refused to accept that their paramilitary forces could be treated like regular soldiers or that the AS had no role until the liberation: there might be circumstances in which immediate action was possible. This disagreement might have remained purely theoretical because apart from the Communists the Resistance had hardly undertaken any military operations, unless the stunts of the corps francs were viewed in this light. But the introduction of STO in February 1943 suddenly opened up new possibilities, as thousands of young men, some of them eager to fight, fled the labour draft. Soon the first so-called Maquis groups were forming in the foothills of the Alps. To exploit this potential, money and arms were urgently needed and the Resistance leaders inundated London with pleas for help. D’Astier wired on 5 March: ‘Grave situation. Country quickly emptied of men. Only salvation total resistance… Country ripe, I repeat ripe, for violent resistance if supported by clear instructions.’19
At this moment Moulin was still in London, trying to persuade British service chiefs that if they armed the AS, it could make a military contribution to the war. His arguments made a favourable impression, but the British view was that premature military action would be suicidal. The impatience of the Resistance leaders therefore jeopardized Moulin’s attempt to prove the seriousness of the AS. Moulin tried to calm the Resistance leaders; they felt betrayed. Even if he had wanted to meet their demands, Moulin’s ability to do so was compromised by the deteriorating relationship between de Gaulle and Churchill. Fearing that British funding might be curtailed at any moment, Moulin had felt it necessary to cut back the funds he transferred to the Resistance in March.20
All these issues faced Moulin on his return to Lyons where he found the Southern Resistance leaders in a state of ‘considerable over-excitement’. Although Moulin managed to win grudging acceptance of the idea of a Resistance council, by arguing that de Gaulle needed political support in his battle against Giraud, no other issues had been resolved when he left for Paris on 30 March.21 On his arrival in Paris, Moulin had two furious altercations with Brossolette. The ‘cold hatred’ he displayed to Brossolette, in Passy’s words, was fuelled by Meunier, who alleged that Brossolette had been criticizing Moulin’s ‘devouring ambition’.22 Moulin was also upset by the arrest of Manhès, and the fact that this event had obviously not displeased Brossolette and Passy unduly.
Nonetheless Moulin had to accept the fait accompli of Brossolette’s Coordinating Committee, but the choice of the five movements represented on it caused him problems. These were the movements which Brossolette and Passy had judged to have the best military potential, and not those, like Défense de la France, Voix du Nord, Lorraine, and Résistance, whose main activity was producing newspapers. The exclusion of Défense de la France was particularly anomalous since its newspaper had the largest circulation of any resistance publication in France. Moulin informed London that he had spent much time mollifying these excluded movements.23 Probably Moulin dwelt upon these difficulties in order to discredit Brossolette who had returned to London on 15 April and was launching an offensive against him.
Returning to the Unoccupied Zone, Moulin found that Frenay was also conducting a campaign against him and Delestraint. Frenay accused Moulin of ‘bureaucratizing the Resistance’. He complained that Moulin was trying to control everything, even the Resistance ‘think-tank’, the CGE. Delestraint was blamed for choosing too many professional officers without experience of the Resistance to command the AS. ‘Liberation and revolution are inseparable’, Frenay wrote to Moulin: ‘a revolutionary army names its leaders… they are not imposed upon it…It is not an army we have forged… [but]…a band of partisans who want to fight for their liberties in France even more than they want to fight against the invader.’ Behind these arguments lay Frenay’s agony at relinquishing control over his own forces:
Throughout 1942, the Movements developed entirely independently… Just to talk of Combat… I developed a real ascendancy over my comrades and subordinates… I am the person in whom they placed their confidence… We cannot forget that we are responsible for the men whom we have placed in your hands, whom we recruited and trained… You have harvested the fruit of two years’ work, and you can understand that we cannot so easily disinterest ourselves in their fate.24
Frenay found a way to fight back when the first Maquis groups appeared in the spring. He was quick to see their military potential, and at his instigation the Southern Resistance movements set up a new section—the National Maquis Service (SNM)—to organize the Maquis and provide it with logistical support. Moulin understood the implications of this: ‘the leaders of the Movements, seeing the AS to a certain extent escaping from their control, have tried to reconstitute another AS with the Maquis.’25
While Frenay was attacking Moulin within France, on 15 April d’Astier left for London, where he draft
ed a ferocious report demanding Moulin’s dismissal. Criticizing Moulin’s rehabilitation of political parties and Delestraint’s choices of AS commanders, d’Astier described Moulin as a ‘civil functionary… whose only aim has been to destroy the leadership of the Movements and to incorporate them into his system for the sole purpose of his power’. Even the more conciliatory Lévy, usually ready to mediate between his comrades and Moulin, signed a letter with d’Astier blaming Moulin for the ‘bureaucratization and sterilization’ of the Resistance.26 Moulin realized how isolated he had become. When he drafted his report criticizing Brossolette, he sent it directly to de Gaulle, circumventing BCRA, to ensure that his version of events got through.27
The attacks on Moulin had some effect. On 10 May André Philip of the Interior Commissariat warned him not to proceed too fast with the centralization of the Resistance. On the AS, de Gaulle even conceded some ground to the Resistance. In an Instruction of 21 May, he accepted the principle of ‘immediate action’, leaving its execution to the initiative of the movements.28 Whether this was partly a disavowal of Moulin is not clear but even if it was, its significance should not be exaggerated.29 De Gaulle’s Instruction also reaffirmed that, after D-Day, Delestraint’s authority over the AS must be uncontested. Equally, the gap between Moulin and the Resistance over immediate action was not as wide as it appeared. Since the AS was a force existing largely on paper—it was like a reserve army which had no arms and had never seen service—when the Resistance leaders spoke of immediate action, they had never envisaged major operations. As Bourdet said, the purpose of immediate action was primarily psychological: to prevent the enthusiasm of resisters ‘rusting’ in enforced passivity.30
Moulin’s Victory: The CNR
Despite the campaigns against Moulin, by the middle of May he had succeeded in the primary objective of his mission: to persuade the Resistance movements to accept a Resistance council. He did, however, abandon the idea of capping this body with a permanent committee. The movements would be less hostile to the council if they believed, in Passy’s words, that it would only be a ‘puppet body’.31
Moulin triumphed because he was able to exploit the rivalries between the movements. He had already done this in 1942—during the merger negotiations he had backed Frenay against d’Astier; during the negotiations to choose a commander for the AS, he had backed d’Astier and Lévy against Frenay—but paradoxically the rivalries increased after the movements decided in January 1943 to amalgamate into the MUR. In this new unitary organization each region was to be headed by one leader chosen from the three movements. Bargaining over the allocation of these posts caused months of friction. Guillain de Bénouville, conducting the negotiations for Combat, complained in June 1943 of the ‘perfidious manifestations of hostility’ displayed by the other movements.32 Pascal Copeau, acting for Libération during d’Astier’s absence in London, was equally acerbic about Combat. He reported that, although there were no major differences between the rank and file of the movements, Combat’s cadres were ‘latent fascists… or reactionary bourgeois who… never pronounce the word Republic except through gritted teeth’; and Frenay ran the movement like a Führer. According to Copeau, some Libération leaders felt that Frenay’s removal was the ‘greatest service one could render the Resistance at the moment’. After the war, Copeau admitted to finding Frenay ‘impossible’, claiming to have ‘schemed with Moulin… to eliminate the “historic” leaders in order to make way for the leaders of the second wave who did not carry all the baggage of their memories of the early days’.33
Moulin had the opportunity to go on the offensive when it was revealed that, in the hope of increasing his funding, Frenay had contacted American secret service representatives (OSS) in Switzerland. He had obtained an initial payment of 1 million francs. In return for further payments, the Americans wanted to obtain intelligence information from the French. Hearing about these negotiations in late April, Moulin accused Frenay of stabbing de Gaulle in the back, and ordered the Southern movements to summon their executive committees to discuss the matter. Even those who did not contest the principle of Frenay’s action were alarmed that he had acted unilaterally. It did not help that Frenay’s representatives in Switzerland, General Jules Davet and Guillain de Bénouville, were very right-wing. Copeau feared that in such ‘dangerous’ hands, the Swiss negotiations took on the appearance of a ‘fascist plot’.34 There were reservations about Frenay even within Combat. In calling the movements to summon their executive committees, Moulin hoped to exploit tensions within the movements as well as between them. He knew that the leaders of the former Liberté movement, who had joined Frenay in December 1941, felt that they had too little influence within Combat. Some of them had become involved in the CGE as a sort of refuge from Combat, and Frenay had been right in detecting an emerging axis between the CGE and Moulin.35
In short, the truth was that the movements were even more suspicious of each other than of London. On 4 June, Copeau wrote to d’Astier:
It is historically established that Gervais [Frenay] has lost the contest with Max [Moulin]. We must not lose it with him. After all, Max inspires greater confidence than Gervais… Certainly Max has taken over things that he should have left to the Resistance. But are we going to continue opposing him over organizational questions?36
Moulin’s victory was consummated when the long-awaited Resistance council, which came to be called the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) held its inaugural meeting on 27 May. As a final gesture of protest, Frenay refused to attend, as did Blocq-Mascart of OCM. They were represented respectively by Claude Bourdet and Jacques-Henri Simon. The Council had sixteen members, eight for the Resistance (representing the five movements on the Northern Coordinating Committee and the three movements in MUR), five for the political parties (Socialists, Communists, Radicals, Fédération républicaine, PDP, Alliance démocratique) and two for the trade unions (CGT, CFTC). In the case of the conservative parties, like the Fédération républicaine and Alliance démocratique, which had sunk without trace in 1940, the choices of representative were somewhat arbitrary. Indeed, there was a last-minute delay while someone was found to represent the former.
The first meeting of the CNR took place in the Parisian flat of a former associate of Pierre Cot. It was not a particularly cordial occasion: the Resistance representatives eyed the politicians warily. Moulin, having reassured the participants that the presence of politicians did not signify any commitment to the existence of the same parties after the liberation, read out a message from de Gaulle. Then the Council voted a motion calling for de Gaulle to be recognized as the single head of a French provisional government.37
De Gaulle and Giraud
Moulin’s telegram announcing the imminent formation of the CNR arrived in London on 14 May. The next day the Free French published the news, giving the impression that the CNR already existed and had expressed its loyalty to de Gaulle. This premature announcement—the CNR was not to meet for another ten days—annoyed Moulin who was worried about offending the susceptibilities of the movements.38 London’s precipitation occurred because the negotiations between de Gaulle and Giraud had reached a critical juncture, and de Gaulle needed all the support he could muster.
After the inconclusive encounter at Casablanca in January, de Gaulle had returned to London, and Giraud to Algiers, but negotiations between their representatives continued for the next five months.39 Behind the struggle for power lay differences of principle. Giraud’s sole concern was to secure American arms so that the French army in North Africa could re-enter the war. His indifference to political questions suited Roosevelt whose policy was to negotiate with local French authorities on an ad hoc basis without offering any political guarantees for the future. For Roosevelt no one had the authority to speak for France: ‘France’, he said, no longer existed. For de Gaulle, the political issue was central. He set out his negotiating position on 23 February 1943 in a memorandum calling for a single political authority to
represent French interests in negotiations with Allied governments. Without such an authority, the French would be at the mercy of their eventual Allied liberators, and ‘France’ would not be among the victorious nation-states. De Gaulle also insisted on the repeal of Vichyite legislation still prevailing in North Africa, and the dismissal of those former Pétainists—Boisson, Noguès, Peyrouton—who still held power there.
On 14 March, Giraud took a step in the direction of de Gaulle by declaring all Vichy’s legislation to be null and void, and committing himself to republicanism. This speech, which Giraud later called the first democratic speech of his life, was the work of Jean Monnet whom Roosevelt had despatched to act as Giraud’s political adviser. It eased the path towards an agreement with de Gaulle, and Catroux left for Algiers to negotiate with Giraud on de Gaulle’s behalf. Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s representative in North Africa, tried to act as a mediator. By the start of April, de Gaulle declared himself ready to leave for Algiers to discuss the final details of an agreement. But on 4 April, Eisenhower informed de Gaulle that his presence would not be opportune during the final stages of the Tunisian campaign. De Gaulle saw the hand of the British behind this attempt to exclude him from Algeria. In fact, the real culprit was Catroux who felt that de Gaulle’s presence would do more harm than good. De Gaulle knew nothing about this, but he was suspicious of Catroux’s ‘inclination to concession’.40 Catroux himself was driven to distraction by de Gaulle’s intransigence, and frequently came close to resigning. His frustration was so evident that the Americans, perpetually in search of an acceptable alternative to de Gaulle, had hopes of weaning Catroux away from him. This was probably wishful thinking: despite his bouts of irritation with de Gaulle, there is no evidence that Catroux contemplated playing an independent role.41
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