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Neither the creation of thd Bureau nor the election of Bidault were in themselves challenges to de Gaulle’s authority. After all, the Bureau somewhat resembled the permanent committee Moulin had wanted for the CNR in the first place and Serreulles had supported Bidault’s election because he thought, lacking any firm instructions, that Bidault might eventually be de Gaulle’s candidate to replace Moulin as delegate.73 There was, however, a direct challenge to the Delegation’s authority only four days after Moulin’s death when Resistance leaders met to form a Central Committee of the Movements (CCDM). This body was composed of five representatives of the Northern Co-ordinating Committee and three from the MUR. In other words, it consisted of the CNR minus representatives of the parties or unions. Although recognizing de Gaulle’s authority, the CCDM proclaimed itself the executive authority of the Resistance, setting up subcommittees to run the increasingly specialized services of the Resistance. Serreulles had not even been informed of the setting-up of the CCDM. Although he subsequently obtained the right to chair its meetings, there was no doubt that the CCDM was a potential rival to the CNR, which had been Moulin’s creation.
In the end, however, this threat never materialized. By failing to admit movements like Défense de la France, which had not been included in the CNR and were keen to acquire ‘official’ recognition, the CCDM missed an opportunity to make itself more genuinely representative of the Resistance than was the case of the CNR.74 Another weakness of the CCDM was the under-representation of the Communist Party. On the CCDM, the Communists only had one place (as the FN-FTP) out of eight, on the CNR they had two (as the PCF and as the FTP-FN) out of sixteen, and on the CNR Bureau they had one out of five. For this reason, Villon, who represented the FN on both the CNR and the CCDM, stopped attending the latter. The CNR Bureau became the real centre of power: in February 1944, the CCDM ceased to exist, and its subcommittees were attached to the CNR.75 All this occurred to the chagrin of Brossolette who saw the CNR Bureau as similar to the permanent committee of the CNR which he had succeeded in preventing.76
Communist Policy
The eclipse of the CCDM in favour of the CNR was one illustration of the most striking development in the Resistance during the second half of 1943: the growing influence of the Communists. This was important because the Communists had their own strategy which set them apart both from de Gaulle and from the rest of the Resistance. There were three distinctive features of this Communist strategy: their ambivalence towards de Gaulle; their hegemonic ambitions over the internal Resistance; and their denunciation of attentisme.
Although the PCF had rallied to de Gaulle at the end of 1942, it did not offer him unconditional support against Giraud. The Party treated the two generals equally: having sent Fernand Grenier as a representative to de Gaulle, it also sent one to Giraud. At the inaugural meeting of the CNR the Communists unsuccessfully proposed a motion calling upon the two generals to reach an agreement rather than for Giraud to submit to de Gaulle. Possibly the Communists believed that Giraud would be easier to manipulate than de Gaulle, but their position was primarily determined by Soviet policy: in his eagerness to obtain a second front in Europe, Stalin would happily have sacrificed de Gaulle to win Allied goodwill.77
The Communists’ instrument for hegemony over the Resistance was the Front national. Throughout France, they aimed to create FN committees open to resisters of all allegiances. The idea was to absorb members of the other movements into the FN from below and eventually enable the FN to claim to be the single representative organization of the Resistance. The extent of Communist ambitions for the FN emerged during Rémy’s mission to Paris in October 1942. Having been instructed to extend his contacts with the FTP, Rémy, to his surprise, found himself negotiating directly with a representative of the Communist Central Committee itself. On 28 November, he signed a joint document registering a significant community of views between the Communists and the Free French. Rémy, who was politically naive, congratulated himself on having brought the Communists to rally de Gaulle. He did not see that the document he had signed put the FN on the same footing as the Free French: de Gaulle was presented as the defender of French interests outside France, and the Communists, through the allegedly independent FN, as his equal within France.78
At first, little was known in London about the FN, but BCRA soon realized that it was not a genuinely independent organization.79 In France, Moulin had refused to negotiate with the FN as a separate resistance organization. The Communists did, however, get the FN included by Brossolette in the Northern Coordinating Committee. This decision, which later enabled the Communists to obtain double representation on the CNR, as both Resistance movement and political party, was another of Moulin’s grievances against Brossolette. But Brossolette had merely bowed to the fact that in the North the Communists did have a significant resistance presence, whether via the FTP or the FN, which could not be ignored. He believed it was safer to have the FN on the Committee than outside it. The irony was that Brossolette, by facilitating the Communists’ double representation on the CNR, unwittingly strengthened an institution which he opposed.80
The potential offered by the FN committees was revealed in Corsica in the summer of 1943. In July, the Allies landed in Sicily. It was clearly only a matter of time before Italy left the war, and this meant that Corsica, which was occupied by Italy, could soon be liberated. The FN leaders on the island prepared for an uprising. On 9 September, the day after the Italian surrender, demonstrations occurred throughout the island. FN groups assembled the population in village squares to ‘elect’ selected ‘patriots’ to municipal councils by popular acclaim. Free French forces arrived a few days later, but the FN already controlled 200 municipal councils, including Ajaccio.81
In mainland France, however, the FN committees did not take off, especially in the South where the Resistance movements were highly developed, had a head start over the Communists, and knew that the FN was merely an emanation of the PCF. In May, therefore, the Party changed tack. Since the other Resistance movements had no intention of being absorbed into the FN, the FN declared itself ready to co-operate with them. Instead of inviting individuals to join FN committees, the Communists now invited other movements to form local committees with the FN. In other words, these were to be pluralistic not unitary committees. The Communists proposed calling them ‘Fighting France committees’, to lure the unwary into believing they enjoyed official status.82
By the autumn, the Communists claimed that Fighting France committees existed in eleven départements. Frequently, however, their members represented only fictitious Communist front organizations. The Fighting France committee of the Languedoc announced that it contained representatives of the FN, the FTP, the MUR, and numerous other groups representing women, wine-growers, war veterans, and unions. These supposedly independent groups were mostly emanations of the Communist Party. This manoeuvre was too transparent, and the MUR ordered its representative to resign.83 The Communist Party reprimanded its local organizers for applying Party policy in such a crude manner. One of the more subtle Communists wrote that the Party should avoid establishing ‘puppet committees’ consisting only of Communists disguised in different forms: ‘Better to create a real committee which is not necessarily easy to “handle”, which might even rebel, but which genuinely contributes to widening the movement.’84
Having accepted the idea of pluralistic committees at the base, the Communists were now ready to participate in them at every level. Thus having originally been sceptical about the idea of the CNR, on the grounds that the Front national was the only valid representative of the Resistance in France, the Communists in the end agreed to join it. At its first meeting, they proposed to recognize it as the ‘provisional organ of national sovereignty’. This would have given the CNR the status of a provisional government until de Gaulle’s arrival. Moulin had the motion rejected, but in July, after his death, the CNR passed an Appeal to the Nation which was drafted in similar terms. The Commun
ists had decided to develop the CNR as a possible counterweight to de Gaulle.85
The third distinctive feature of the Communists was their denunciation of what they called attentisme. Condemning the idea that the Resistance should delay military action until an Allied landing, they contrasted the activist strategy of the FTP with the waiting strategy of the AS. This was an oversimplification since many non-Communist resisters were just as impatient as the Communists about waiting for D-Day, and de Gaulle’s Instruction of 21 May had allowed the non-Communist Resistance to undertake immediate action. Nonetheless, the primary objective of the AS was to prepare for the liberation, and it was not entirely untrue for the Communists to assert that no other organization was as ready as the FTP to act immediately.86
Responding to the Communists
In the second half of 1943, the rivalry between the Communist and non-Communist movements transformed the dynamics of the conflict between de Gaulle and the Resistance. Some were quicker than others to appreciate the challenge posed by the Communists. No one had been quicker than Moulin. One of the arguments of his report of October 1941 was that the Resistance risked being thrown into the arms of the Communists if de Gaulle did not act first.87 At the first meeting of the Northern Military Co-ordination Committee in April 1943, Moulin clashed with the FTP representative over the issue of immediate action. Immediately afterwards, he cut funding to the FTP. He told the FTP representatives they should click their heels (‘claquer les talons’) and obey.88
De Gaulle treated the Communists with wary respect. Grenier’s arrival in London had been a major boost to his prestige, but the Corsican events alerted him to the threat the Communists could pose at the Liberation. He wanted the support of the Communists, but on his terms. On 25 August, he invited them to join the CFLN, but the Party delayed its response. De Gaulle’s relations with the Communists were not helped by the arrival in Algiers, from Moscow, of André Marty to sit on the Consultative Assembly. Marty, with a reputation for ruthlessness acquired during the Spanish civil war, was exceptionally abrasive. In October, the Communists finally accepted de Gaulle’s offer of a place on the CFLN, but only if they could decide who would be selected. De Gaulle refused to accept any restrictions on his choice, and stalemate ensued. Having now eliminated Giraud, de Gaulle had less need of Communist support.89 He was also becoming more suspicious of the Communist Party in the light of reports from his representatives in France. Initially they had got on well with the Communists. When it came to asserting the CNR’s primacy over the CCDM, their policy converged with the Communists’, even if for different reasons.90 But from the autumn, the Communists started to cause concern. Bingen in November described them as a ‘dynamic and mysterious force’. Another of de Gaulle’s representatives, Francis-Louis Closon, thought they were planning to take power: ‘the Communists are powerful, well organized, in possession of a general doctrine… Do we have anything constructive to set against them?’91
The MUR leaders were slowest to take the measure of the Communists. The highly developed structure of the Resistance in the South made them confident that the Communists did not pose a serious threat. But the Languedoc Fighting France committee was a worrying portent of Communist methods. An MUR organizer in the Toulouse region in November observed correctly that the Party was using these committees to ‘win itself at our expense… the troops which it lacks without having to resort to direct recruitment in the name of the party’.92 The FN was also trying to obtain a seat on the Executive Committee of the MUR, placing itself on an equal footing with the other three component movements. This was refused on the grounds that the FN was predominantly a northern organization which already enjoyed representation on the central organisms of the Resistance. Instead the MUR leaders offered the FN the prospect of a merger, something the Communists refused because they knew that the MUR was stronger than them in the South.93
Within the MUR, the rivalry between Combat and Libération resurfaced around their attitude towards the Communists. The Combat leaders were deeply suspicious of the Communists, and the Libération leaders more sympathetic. All the tactical realignments occurring in the Resistance at this time were dominated by this problem of responding to the Communists. From the autumn of 1943, proposals were being floated to extend Resistance unity further by forming a single umbrella organization: the National Union of the Resistance (UNR). But the FN was hostile, suspecting a ploy to absorb it into a body controlled by the other movements.94 For this reason, the UNR proved abortive, and instead, in February 1944, the MUR and some Northern movements which had originally been excluded from the CNR and the CCDM—among them Défense de la France, Résistance, Lorraine—formed themselves into the Movement of National Liberation (MLN).
The participants in the MLN each had their own agenda. Défense de la France wanted an ‘official’ recognition which had so far eluded it. For MUR, the objective was to lay the foundations of a political force which would carry the ideal of the Resistance into the post-war world, and replace the discredited parties. But the MUR leaders held different views about the political identity of this new movement. Those from Combat, like Bourdet, wanted it to be non-Communist, even anti-Communist. Bourdet hoped to involve other Northern movements, like OCM, CDLR, and CDLL, in order to counterbalance the influence of Communist sympathizers within MUR. The Libération leaders, like Copeau, wanted the MLN to be a grouping of the progressive non-Communist Resistance which the FN would want to join. The aim was to tame the Communists not oppose them: a merger between the MLN and the FN would anchor the Communists in the Resistance mainstream and anchor the Resistance on the left.95
Neither MUR faction got exactly what it wanted from the MLN. Copeau failed to entice the Communists, but as a result he blocked Bourdet’s attempt to bring in other Northern movements. He wrote to d’Astier: ‘I succeeded in keeping out OCM, CDLR and CLL in order not to create a bloc which would be predominantly bourgeois where I would not be able to prevent anti-Communist plots of the Bourdet variety.’96 There was another attempt at full unity in March 1944 when all the non-Communist movements—CDLR, CDLL, Libération-Nord, OCM, MLN—signed a Charter intended to be the foundation of a future union of the entire Resistance. But when in April the FN confirmed that it was not interested in joining, the whole idea fizzled out.97
These attempts to create a single resistance movement—with or without the Communists—were complicated by other conflicts cutting across the division between Communists and non-Communists. There was the conflict between the ‘official movements’—those admitted to the CNR or CCDM—and those still lobbying for recognition.98 Merger negotiations between Libération-Nord and the smaller La Voix du Nord foundered because the latter refused to give up its independence. Serreulles agreed to continue funding La Voix du Nord as a separate organization: ‘We must do our best’, he wrote in July 1943, ‘to avoid the emergence of a distinction between recognized and non-recognized movements.’99
Another important conflict was that between the South and the North: movements like OCM amd CDLR remained suspicious of ‘politics’ and feared that in the MLN they would lose their independence to the Southern movements.100 There were also conflicts of generation: Maurice Chevance-Bertin, one of Frenay’s first recruits, nostalgically recalling ‘the heroic improvised Resistance of the beginning’, felt that ‘the historic leaders’ like himself irritated the second generation like Copeau.101 He was right about Copeau who later mocked the ‘war veteran mentality’ of the first wave of leaders: ‘their stories of the early days when for the first time, all alone, with only 3 fr. 25 in their pocket they had produced the first mimeographed tract… all that appeared quite outmoded to us’.102 The Resistance was changing so fast that when Jean-Pierre Lévy returned to France, after having been in London between April and July 1943, he felt almost a stranger within his own movement.103
The most important conflict was between resistance movements and political parties. Resisters could not overcome their contempt for the part
ies. ‘Parties’ really meant the Socialists, since the others did not count, despite a token presence on the CNR. All the disdain of the resister for the politician is contained in Bourdet’s recollection of meeting a group of Socialists: ‘they had the air of solid bourgeois from the Midi, dark overcoats, hats the same. If I wasn’t worried that my imagination was getting the better of my memory, I would say that they were probably a bit pot-bellied.’104 Having no resistance movement, the Socialists tended to spend time planning post-war policy or navel-gazing. Le Populaire of February 1944 devoted its front page to the anniversary of the Riom trial rather than to the increasingly bloody battles taking place in France.105 Resisters saw this as typical of the politicians’ mentality.
Socialists in Marseilles and the south-west did form their own military resistance units, called Groupes Veni (the pseudonym of their leader Colonel Lefevre) in imitation of the FTP. When Daniel Mayer warned that these groups, totalling 20,000 men, might secede from the MUR if the Socialists were not treated properly, resistance leaders accused him of being a traitor. The Socialists could not win: if they threatened to form their own resistance organization they were accused of jeopardizing Resistance unity; if they confined themselves to being a party they were accused of being politicians who could not understand the Resistance. In fact the threat to secede was hollow since the Veni groups probably had no more than 6,000–10,000 members. An agreement was signed in November 1943 integrating them fully into the MUR.106