August 1944: 150,000
Combat
1942: 10,000
November 1943: 50,000
1944: 100,000–200,000
Défense de la France
1943: 100,000–250,000
January 1944: 450,000
Cahiers du témoignage chrétien
July 1943: 75,000
September 1943: 80,000
December 1943: 100,00020
The Disintegration of Vichy
The growth of the Resistance was accelerated by the introduction of STO in February 1943. STO not only helped the Resistance win new recruits, it also discredited Vichy even among its hard-core supporters. The regime could no longer convincingly claim to be protecting the population and guaranteeing order and justice. Traditionally law-abiding citizens were now ready to help young people evading the labour draft (réfractaires) who seemed to have natural justice on their side. Doctors forged medical certificates; mayors resigned or pursued a tactic of non-cooperation. The STO had become, in Kedward’s words, a ‘dissolvent of Vichy authority’.21
The law was flouted so blatantly that Vichy came to look ridiculous. At the town of Mende, in May 1943, eighty-three people were supposed to turn up for the labour draft, but only seventeen did so; the bus transporting them broke down, allowing all but two passengers to disappear; on arrival at the destination, the last two escaped as well.22 After Bichelonne’s agreement with Speer in September, Laval announced that there would be no more departures for Germany that year. He offered to amnesty réfractaires who were ready to regularize their position. But STO had already had turned law-abiding citizens into outlaws, and it was too late to win back their allegiance. France in 1943 had become a ‘society in resistance’, which is not quite the same as saying that it was a ‘society of resisters’.
The Vichy State crumbled away at the top and the bottom. Public servants were drawn into NAP, the organization which infiltrated the administration. It had six sections: telecommunications, the police, the prefectoral administration (vital to forge papers), the ministry of supply (vital to obtain ration cards), electricity, the railways (so important that it eventually became an entirely autonomous organization: Résistance-Fer). There was also Super-NAP which recruited amongst the administrative elite. In the summer of 1943, NAP was extended to the North, although in fact many of the Northern movements already had their own infiltration services (OCM in the higher administration, Libération-Nord and the FN in the police).23 The numbers in NAP were not huge, perhaps a total of about 1,500, but for security reasons the Resistance did not want the numbers to be too large. The quality of the recruits, who included a member of Pétain’s cabinet and of Laval’s, was more important than the quantity. Those formally involved in NAP were only the tip of the iceberg of public employees considered favourable to the Resistance.24 In the Var, in the first half of 1943, NAP counted six ‘resisters’ and ten ‘lukewarm friends [amis mous]’ among the twenty-four magistrates of Draguignan and Toulon; and eighty-one ‘friends’ and thirty-five ‘enemies’ in the Toulon police. In the prefecture of Creuse, in December 1943, twenty-nine employees were described as ‘good’, thirty as ‘neutral’, and three as ‘doubtful’.25
The increasing volume of resistance propaganda directed towards the police also found a receptive audience. Tracking down réfractaires who were protected by the complicity of the communities around them was a thankless task. In many cases, the police were themselves sympathetic to the réfractaires.26 The extension of the Bousquet-Oberg agreement to the South in April 1943 caused problems of conscience for police officers who, unlike their Northern colleagues, had no previous experience of working with the Germans. In March 1943, a Communist, Jacques Cardonne, was arrested in Marseilles for attempting to sabotage a train. The Germans asked for him to be handed over, but the French authorities temporized, claiming that he had targeted the French railways not German soldiers. In the end, the French had to back down, but the police chief reported that this had caused dismay among some of his employees. One police commissioner did resign. In June 1943, a specialized resistance network, Ajax, was founded within the police. It passed on information, provided false identity papers, and warned the targets of potential raids. By September 1943, the prefect in Marseilles estimated 90 per cent of the city’s police to be loyal to the underground Socialist Party. At the end of the year, Bousquet felt that even the GMR, which Vichy itself had created, could no longer be relied upon.27
Vichy not only suffered the defection of its public servants but even of those people who staffed institutions closely associated with the National Revolution—such as Uriage, the Compagnons, and the Chantiers de la jeunesse. The loyalty of the Chantiers was severely tested by the introduction of STO. The Germans insisted that when members of the Chantiers reached the end of their period of service, they should immediately be sent to work in Germany. De la Porte du Theil, head of the Chantiers, felt compelled to accept, with great reluctance, fearing that otherwise the Chantiers would be closed down. The first draft of former Chantier members left for Germany in May 1943. The consequences were predictable. Many young men now decided to escape the Chantiers, often with the complicity of the staff. All this increased the mood of disaffection, demoralization, and indiscipline which had long been evident in the Chantier camps. De la Porte du Theil commented: ‘the French State is bordering on total collapse. If we do not check its downhill course, we shall be lost.’ He was himself arrested and deported to Germany in January 1944. This proved the death knell to whatever residual loyalty the Chantiers staff felt towards Vichy.28
Even that bastion of conservatism the Académie française began to distance itself from the regime. One sign was the election of Georges Duhamel to be its perpetual secretary in 1942; another was the bestowal of its annual literary prize on the writer Jean Schlumberger, a founder of the NRF who had refused to have anything to do with it under Drieu’s editorship. For the prudent members of the Académie, this was certainly equivalent to an act of resistance.29 Of all the institutions supporting Vichy, none found find it harder to break with the regime than the Church. In March 1943, Cardinal Liénart of Lille (who had remained silent about the fate of the Jews) declared that it was not a duty for a Christian to submit to STO. This position was officially adopted by the ACA in April. But the Church did not go as far as to advise disobedience, and in October 1943 it condemned the ‘theologians without mandate’ of Témoignage chrétien, who were doing so. In February 1944, the Church condemned the extension of STO to married women, because of the effect this would have on families, but the same declaration also attacked ‘terrorism’, which was the word used by Vichy to describe the Resistance.30 As Church leaders inched towards a more hostile stance, always stopping short of condemnation, they became less and less representative of the lower clergy or the Catholic laity. In the Catholic Haute-Savoie, the parish clergy actively helped réfractaires.31 The strongest resistance to STO came from the Catholic Action (ACJF) youth organizations whose members were the most directly affected by it. At a meeting at Avignon in March 1943, the ACJF protested against STO. The Bishop of Avignon who attended and spoke in favour of the regime was greeted with glacial silence. In November, the ACJF moved from dissidence to resistance by creating the Équipes chrétiennes to bring together those of its members who had been acting on an individual basis in different resistance movements.32
Vichy was powerless to staunch the haemorrhaging of its support. The public now saw little of Pétain who came to seem almost irrelevant: in 1941, he had made forty public declarations, in 1942 thirty-seven, in 1943 only eleven. People no longer talked about Pétain in their letters: of 90,000 letters read in the Var by the censors in December 1943 and January 1944, only 151 mentioned him, a quarter in critical terms.33 Pétain’s age was often commented upon. If he inspired any sentiment, it was pity rather than hatred.34 A planned visit to the Auvergne in August 1943 was cancelled, despite preparatory fanfares, because it was felt Pétain was unlikely to be accorded a
sufficiently enthusiastic reception.35
The Legion of Veterans meetings were sparsely attended and it now confined itself largely to charitable work. Laval’s attempt win back support through a cosmetic republicanization of Vichy’s institutions had no impact: the new conseils départementaux were hardly noticed.36 In the Hérault, the reports on public opinion in the summer of 1943 were ‘little more than a catalogue of the issues which were driving the public further and further from the regime’.37 One Propaganda Delegate noted in September 1943: ‘the population hangs upon every word of the radio, believes every false rumour and awaits with impatience the landing of the Anglo-Americans. As for the young they prefer anything to going to work in Germany. This opinion is well established and all efforts to modify it are absolutely fruitless.’38
The Maquis
Against this background, it was easy for réfractaires to find help. Their first objective was to secure a hiding place. Some took refuge in the countryside, hiding out with relatives, or in deserted farm buildings and forestry camps in the mountains. It was in the mountains that the first Maquis camps were formed, the word maquis coming from the local word for the scrubland countryside of Corsica. By April the term maquisard was in general use. At first, many who went into the hills were soon driven down again for lack of food or protective clothing. Once the MUR had set up the SNM in April to provide logistical support, the Maquis became less of a leap into the unknown. Even so, most réfractaires did not join any Maquis group. Instead they chose individual forms of escape, using personal connections. Of the 2,000 réfractaires in the Isère, only about 300–400 were in Maquis groups; in Tarn, only 19 per cent; in the Doubs, 5 per cent. In the three Britanny départements of Ille-et-Vilaine, Côtes-du-Nord, and Morbihan, almost 10,000 réfractaires took refuge in the summer of 1943 on thousands of scattered farms; the Maquis was almost non-existent at this stage.39
The number of réfractaires swelled enormously during the summer of 1943. In Ariège, réfractaires represented only 13 per cent of those liable for STO in March but 81 per cent by July; in the Lot, 11 per cent in March, 95 per cent in July. Churchill’s speeches encouraged réfractaires to believe that an Allied landing was imminent. But with the onset of winter—the greatest enemy of the Maquis—and no sign of the Allies, many took advantage of the amnesty. Almost two-thirds of the 2,844 réfractaires in the Alpes-Maritimes had returned to normal society by April 1944.40 There was a constant process of coming and going, but overall numbers certainly declined from the autumn.
In October 1943, the SNM estimated the numbers of maquisards in the Southern Zone at approximately 15,000. But just as not all réfractaires were maquisards, so not all maquisards were ‘resisters’. Hiding was not the same as fighting. The first Maquis camps were mostly not intended as bases for military operations: there were both maquis-refuges and maquis-combats.41 The myth of the fighting Maquis was first popularized by Schumann’s BBC broadcast in March 1943, claiming that there was a ‘rising in the Haute-Savoie’.42 Such a rising did not yet exist, but in the popular imagination the idea of it transformed the maquisard from passive fugitive to activist hero. The heroic image was further elaborated in a series of directives issued by the SMN in the summer. Those submitting to the ‘tough discipline of the Maquis’ were summoned to renounce links with friends and family until the end of the war. They were depicted as rugged fighters of the countryside, pure and uncorrupted by the city: ‘the men of the Maquis are the elite of the country’.43 C. Bougeard, ‘Les Maquis de Bretagne dans leur environnement social’, in Marcot (ed.), La Résistance: Lutte armée et maquis, 291–301: 292.
What military support could the Maquis offer the Resistance? The answer to this question became caught up in the debate between advocates of immediate action and advocates of a waiting strategy. Moulin had feared that the Maquis might upset the careful planning of the AS. His resolution of this dilemma was to accept the so-called Montagnards Plan which envisaged the creation of a sort of Resistance fortress on the Vercors plateau, in the Alps. The objective was to concentrate large numbers of men able to attack the Germans at the opportune moment. This offered the Maquis a military role which slotted into the long-term strategy of the AS. The SNM, on the other hand, favoured immediate Maquis operations. But from the autumn, when the likelihood of an imminent Allied landing receded, it became more cautious, and gradually lost its autonomy to the AS.44 As for the Communists, their opposition to attentisme made them initially suspicious of the Maquis, fearing it would drain the towns of potential fighters and immobilize them in the countryside. They talked derisively of ‘Maquis camping’.45 When the FTP formed its first Maquis groups it designated them ‘combat groups’, thereby making no distinction, apart from location, between them and its town-based groups. Both were supposedly partisan fighters committed to immediate action.46
Sometimes there were conflicts between FTP and AS Maquis. In the Haute-Savoie, a member of the AS reported an FTP Maquis to the police; in Tulle, in March 1944, when the FTP Maquis freed resisters from the town prison, two of the prisoners gave themselves up because their rescuers had been Communists.47 Such incidents were exceptional, and when rivalries did exist, they had little to do with ideology. Proximity or chance usually determined an individual’s choice of group. Some groups were run by charismatic leaders who were a law unto themselves, and inspired fierce personal loyalty. In the Lot, the leader of the Maquis was a trade unionist called Jean-Jacques Chapou, who was admired on all sides. Suddenly, in February 1944, he announced that he was changing his allegiance from the AS to the FTP, but his groups remained loyal to him. His Maquis remained the same except for its name.48 The Limousin Maquis of the Communist Georges Guingouin was commonly known as ‘Guingouin’s Maquis’.49 Some Maquis leaders were flamboyant and romantic figures, like the leader in the Drôme who wore a black cape embroidered with a coat of arms and his resistance pseudonym, L’Hermine.50 As Vichy’s authority disintegrated, there was a risk that parts of the countryside would break up into warring fiefdoms.
The theoretical debates over strategy had little relevance to the problems facing most maquisards. Immediate military action was not feasible because they lacked arms, but total inactivity made no sense either. Quite apart from the need to stave off boredom, Maquis groups were forced to prey on the local countryside in order to feed and clothe themselves. It was a short step from this kind of activity to small acts of sabotage or punitive acts against collaborators. Maquis leaders developed guerrilla tactics to maximize their limited resources and exploit the local terrain. No one did this more effectively than the former army officer Henri Romans-Petit, leader of the AS Maquis in the Ain. Organizing a network of camps in the densely forested hills, he taught his Maquis to be highly mobile in order to convey an impression of strength: unexpected small-scale raids were followed by a rapid retreat.51
Despite the inventiveness of leaders like Romans-Petit, the military contribution of the Maquis was infinitesimal in 1943. Maquis military actions were less important than those carried out by the Groupes francs of the MUR, by Résistance-Fer, and by the urban FTP forces. In the Côtes du Nord, where the number of resistance attacks increased from 70 in the first half of the year to 182 in the second half, there was as yet no Maquis in existence. The operations were carried out by FTP groups, whose members then dispersed and returned to their families and jobs. Only later, when the police had discovered their identities, did they form into a Maquis.52 Most Maquis actions were about survival: raids on Chantiers de jeunesse to seize provisions, thefts of ration cards from town halls. Neither Vichy nor the Germans viewed the Maquis as a military threat at this stage. When General Jodl provided Himmler with a summary of the military situation facing the Germans in November 1943, the only guerrilla groups he saw fit to mention were the Yugoslav partisans.53 Nonetheless, having lost faith in the Vichy police, the Germans did start to launch direct attacks on Maquis camps from the autumn: in the Corrèze (September 1943), on Mont Ventoux (October), and in the
Cantal (January 1944).
Although the Maquis had little military significance, it did contribute to undermining Vichy’s authority in the countryside. The maquisards assumed the romantic aura of bandit heroes, outlawed and persecuted by an unjust society, descending periodically into the towns to dispense a ‘people’s justice’. One such occasion was the ‘occupation’ of the little town of Oyonnax in the Jura by the Ain Maquis, on 11 November 1943. Three hundred maquisards, dressed in uniforms, arrived in the town at midday. Watched by an enthusiastic crowd, they paraded to the war memorial, deposited a wreath, and then slipped back into the countryside. The operation, which had been meticulously planned by Romans-Petit, was publicized by the clandestine press throughout France, and by de Gaulle on the radio.54
There were no Germans in Oyonnax, but this did not matter. The objective of the operation was to demonstrate symbolically the power and discipline of the Maquis, staking a claim to supplant Vichy’s legitimacy in the countryside. When the maquisards robbed shops they sometimes provided receipts to show that these were not thefts, but requisitions, even taxes, carried out in the name of the future Republic.55 In the Lot, the theft of ration cards became almost a routine: secretaries at the town halls waited at the end of each month for them to occur. The Maquis imposed its authority over the local countryside, fixing prices for the black market: Guingouin posted up lists of approved prices which he signed ‘Prefect of the Maquis’. Sometimes individuals were ‘fined’ for making excessive profits on the black market. In the Cévennes, a Maquis ‘police’ punished acts of pillage, and warned the population to beware of ‘false’ maquisards.56
The Peasantry and the Resistance
The descent into Oyonnax was a symbolic representation of the extent to which the Resistance had moved from town to countryside. In the Var, the Resistance initially spread up the coastline and along railway lines; in 1943, it moved into the rural hinterland. This does not mean that many peasants joined the Maquis. Peasant réfractaires could usually fall back on their own resources to find refuge in the countryside. The Maquis was largely made up of urban workers: in the Aude, the peasantry accounted for half the réfractaires and only 6 per cent of the maquisards.57 But the Maquis brought the Resistance into contact with a peasant population that had so far largely ignored its existence. This was no longer possible. As the mayor of one village said: ‘they were there in our countryside face to face with us… We could not be neutral.’58
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