B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  The peasantry’s increasing disaffection from Vichy changed into active complicity with the Resistance.59 Until 1943 resisters, largely urban-based, had paid little attention to the peasantry. In the Franche-Comté, none of the resistance tracts produced in 1941, and only 4 per cent of those produced in 1942, addressed the peasantry.60 Resisters were suspicious of a group so assiduously courted by the regime: one OCM cahier denounced the egotism of the ‘hard and wily’ peasants.61 The ‘ruralization’ of the Resistance transformed such attitudes: in 1943, 43 per cent of Resistance tracts in the Franche-Comté addressed the peasantry. This propaganda did not fall on deaf ears. Whereas the demonstrations of 14 July 1942—the first important expression of collective opposition to Vichy—had mainly taken place in towns, in July 1943 they occurred in villages as well.62

  The peasantry, however, never played a large role in the organized Resistance. In the two Normandy départements of the Manche and Calvados, the peasantry comprised 35 per cent of the population, but they only received 10 per cent of CVR cards after the Liberation.63 The picture was the same throughout France. In the spring of 1944, there were members of organized resistance movements in only a third of villages in the Var.64 If one adopts a less restrictive definition of Resistance, however, the contribution of the peasantry seems immeasurably larger. Peasants provided the infrastructure on which the Maquis depended: they supplied food and clothing; they indicated hiding places; they passed on local knowledge; they warned against denunciations. The peasants often talked about ‘nos maquis’ with pride.65 Léon Werth, whose jaundiced opinions of the Jura peasantry in 1941–2 have been quoted above, had changed his view by 1943:

  The peasants’ vision of the Maquis is too strong to be affected by the German or Hitlero-Vichyite propaganda. One could say without exaggeration that the Maquis for them is France, is their liberty (in the most material sense of the word). Whatever the Maquis is, it is theirs. If they talk about it, it is with affection.66

  It would be as wrong, however, to represent the peasantry as united behind the Resistance in 1943–4 as to represent it as united behind Vichy in 1941–2. The relationship between the peasantry and the Resistance was ambivalent, increasingly so as time went on. It became harder to feel sympathy for young men fleeing STO once they had started stealing crops or inviting German reprisals. The peasantry of the Limousin must have had mixed feelings when Guingouin’s Maquis destroyed baling machines to prevent the Germans requisitioning hay.67 At a local level, the Maquis could degenerate into an ‘occupation’ as irksome as the German one. Relations between the local population and the Resistance became even more strained in the winter when maquisards who had taken refuge in mountain chalets had to move closer to areas of habitation and prey on them for survival.

  Government propaganda exploited such tensions by depicting the maquisards as criminals. In one valley of the Haute-Savoie, sympathy for the Maquis was reported to be ‘in serious decline’ as early as July 1943. The peasantry distinguished between local réfractaires and ‘terrorists from outside’.68Instituteurs, who were active in many Maquis groups (Guingouin was one), used their position as local figures of authority to act as intermediaries with the peasantry. Sometimes this role was played by priests. Where intermediaries did not exist, it was vital for Maquis leaders to stamp out cases of criminality which could lose them popular sympathy. In the Morbihan, the Resistance executed about twenty people for supposed acts of banditry.69

  The importance of local support can be shown by the fate of a small Maquis in the Haute-Saône, in October 1943. Made up of fifteen young men (the average age was 20), the group alienated the local population by its uncontrolled behaviour. This included killing a cheese seller who refused to hand over his produce, and killing a young girl who had a baby by a German soldier. As a result, the local population was only too ready to help the authorities, and the culprits were quickly arrested. The group had lasted about forty days. The prefect reported:

  When the terrorist wave started it found a sympathetic ear among people misled by foreign propaganda…But the pillage of farms which could have had no political motive discredited terrorism in the countryside… Thus the police were able to obtain information necessary to carry out their duty, whereas, at the end of September, after each incident, they met with total silence.70

  The relationship between the Maquis and the rural population also reflected local political traditions. In conservative and Catholic Aveyron—the ‘Britanny of the Midi’—where the isolated peasantry viewed outsiders with suspicion, resistance was slow to emerge. Here the peasants’ formal participation in the Resistance was exceptionally low—they held 7.5 per cent of CVR cards although comprising 56 per cent of the population—and the news of the Allied landings in 1944 aroused alarm more than hope. Quite different was the Var with its traditions of sociability and its long-standing Republicanism. In the small town of Salernes the whole community turned out in September 1943 for the funeral of a local maquisard; cafés closed and the local informer for the Germans described the occasion as resembling a state funeral.71 In the Lozère there was a marked difference between the attitude of the Catholic north of the département, where the local clergy were obsessed with communism, and the Protestant Cévennes which displayed the same solidarity towards maquisards as towards the Jews. The prefect noted that tracking down resisters was impossible: ‘no local inhabitant, not even the local authorities, will give the slightest information’.72

  The Cévennes may have been an extreme example, but there are few examples anywhere of Maquis groups being denounced to the police. In general, the peasantry’s attitude towards the Maquis was one of solidarity tempered by prudence, respect tempered by apprehension. Whether one stresses the prudence or the solidarity, there is no doubt that the Maquis could not have survived without the peasantry. In that sense, the small number of peasants ‘officially’ registered in the Resistance underestimates their contribution to it.

  Women in the Resistance

  The participation of women in the Resistance is also grossly under-represented in the official figures. Of the 1,036 people decorated with the Order of the Liberation—very much a Free French decoration—6 were women. There is no breakdown of the total distribution of CVR cards between men and women, but figures from départements where such a calculation has been made, suggest that on average about 11 per cent of cards were held by women. The formal participation of women in different movements and networks shows some variation:

  The higher female participation in Défense de la France and Témoignage chrétien probably reflects their Catholic nature, and the lower one in Franc-Tireur its recruitment among Radicals and Freemasons.73

  Just as women are under-represented in the official statistics of the Resistance, so also were they not a target of the first Resistance propaganda. For many early resisters, it was the sight of women with Germans which crystallized their decision to act.74 When Jean Texcier drafted his Conseils à l’occupé (it was not the ‘occupée’) in August 1940, he addressed himself to men. He denounced women who consorted with Germans, and exhorted men witnessing such behaviour to administer a salutary whipping: ‘look her up and down, locate the tender spot and savour your pleasure in advance’.75 Texcier did not think to advise women themselves to avoid contact with Germans. In much Resistance fiction, women are frequently depicted as treacherous or frivolous. Even when portrayed favourably, their contribution to Resistance is conceived in passive terms. In Le Silence de la mer, the narrator’s niece is a figure of nobility, but her resistance consists of sewing in a corner and preserving an attitude of dignified silence. In Aragon’s resistance poem La Rose et le réséda, France is depicted as a beautiful female prisoner who will be rescued by a chivalric male. The moral in both cases is the same: show dignity and wait on events.76

  In fact, from the beginning women were prominent both in opposition to Vichy—notably in food demonstrations—and in the formal Resistance. Women were among the founding members o
f Franc-Tireur, the Musée de l’homme group (Germaine Tillion), Défense de la France (Helène Viannay), Libération-Sud (Lucie Aubrac), and Combat (Bertie Albrecht). Madeleine Fourcade, who headed the Noah’s Ark network, had 3,000 agents under her command. Nonetheless, women did not usually rise to these heights. Among the ninety-two leading members of Libération-Sud, there were twenty women (20 per cent)—a higher proportion than in other movements for which such figures are available—and only two of these held top positions.77

  Women had to overcome male reservations about their suitability for Resistance work. One member of Défense de la France was ‘almost scandalized to find so many women: war is not for women’.78 Even Helène Mordkovitch, one of the founders of Défense de la France with Philippe Viannay (whom she married in 1942), was reticent about imposing herself. Unlike Viannay, she never harboured any illusions about Pétain, but it never occurred to her, or to him, that her views on politics should be taken into account on the newspaper, which remained a male preserve. It took her husband two years to reach views she had held from the start.79 Reticence in putting themselves forward after the Liberation probably explains why women held so few CVR cards.

  Some women overcame male prejudice by converting themselves almost into honorary men. Fourcade hid from British Intelligence the fact she was a woman. One woman wrote of her entry into the Resistance: ‘we embarked on our life as men’.80 Juliette Plissonnier, a regional leader of the Communist Resistance, sometimes encountered men who were startled to find a woman in such a position. On one occasion, a male resister who expressed his surprise by uttering the words ‘What! A woman here?’, provoked the response from another male resister present: ‘she’s not a woman, she’s the boss’.81 Lucie Aubrac, however, writes about her resistance experience as inseparable from her femininity. She recounts her life as ‘resister, wife, and mother’. It was during her second pregnancy in 1943 that she masterminded an operation to rescue her husband from prison (something she had already done twice before). The preparation for this involved her playing the role of innocent fiancée on a visit to the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.82 Aubrac was not unusual in being both a mother and a resister. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was mother of two children; Margueritte Gonnet, a departmental head of Libération-Sud, was a mother of eight and pregnant with a ninth baby which was lost in prison.83 The information available from CVR cards is that, whereas the age group 15 to 25 provided the highest proportion of male resisters, among women there was no significant age differentiation (apart from a decline after the age of 50).

  The functions performed by the few women Resistance leaders were no different from those performed by men. But lower down the scale some resistance tasks came to be considered as the speciality of women. Women ran the Resistance social-service sections which had originally been the brainchild of Bertie Albrecht in Combat. The 21-year-old Segolène Manceron, who worked for the Social Service of Libération-Sud in 1942 insisted on being moved to another section, in protest against the assumption that women were good for nothing else.84 In all Resistance movements, women acted as liaison agents—carrying instructions and arranging rendezvous—and as couriers of arms and supplies. Women could move around without exciting the same suspicion as men, flirt their way through security checks, and hide compromising material in shopping bags, ‘pregnant’ pouches, prams, even nappies. Often the identities of liaison agents are only known today through their Christian names or their code names—but they were the lifeblood of the Resistance.85

  The activities of many women resisters were no less dangerous than those of men, even if less spectacular. History has remembered that, by the end of the war, Albert Camus was an editor of Combat. Less celebrated is the story of Jacqueline Bernard who effectively acted as the editorial secretary of Combat from its inception until her arrest in the spring of 1944. She was, in Frenay’s phrase, the ‘sinew’ of the movement.86 History has remembered the resistance exploits of André Malraux who spent most of the Occupation writing on the Côte d’Azur, joined the Maquis in March 1944, and ended the war as the flamboyant ‘Colonel Berger’ at the head of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade. Less well known is the story of Malraux’s estranged wife Clara who, although a Jew and mother of a young daughter, was involved in the most dangerous variety of Resistance work from the very beginning. Using her perfect German, she worked for a network which sounded out German soldiers who might be liable to desert, and then arranged false papers for them to do so. This went on until the funding of the network was stopped because its activities were judged too dangerous.87

  Women also contributed to Resistance in more informal ways. As one woman recalled about her childhood in the Toulouse region:

  My father was a resister and Communist… so he received a lot of men and women in the house. People might say that my mother was not a resister. But who got up in the morning to look after the resister who had to depart before dawn? Who mended the socks and washed the clothes of the resister while he was asleep? Who prepared the food he took away with him? Who received the police when there was an alert? I think therefore that my mother resisted quite as much as my father.88

  It could of course be argued that this was not a choice for resistance, merely the continuation of normal life which the context transformed into acts of resistance. But there is no reason to assume that this wider context was not perceived, and welcomed, by the women involved. Christian Pineau, who regularly took refuge with a family in Lyons, remembered that the mother of the household looked after all his needs. One night he came upon her ironing his clothes at two in the morning. When he reprimanded her for exhausting herself on his behalf, she replied: ‘It is for France.’89

  Often women in the household were highly exposed to danger while fielding the police to allow a resister the time to escape. It has been remarked that the image of the ‘woman at the doorway’ is a recurring image of the period.90 There is a striking scene in The Sorrow and the Pity where two former peasant resisters—both male—are interviewed around a dinner table. A woman observes the scene from the doorway without ever crossing into the room although she intervenes three times in the discussion to set the record straight. By 1968, when the film was made, the doorway had receded into the background because it fitted less easily into dominant narratives of the Resistance; in 1943 it was very much to the fore.91 This version of Resistance as an extension of running the home and protecting the household, went beyond the immediate family. Women provided much of the support structure on which the Maquis depended. Maquis groups were adopted by ‘Godmothers’, who provided food and medical help, and organized shelter. Odette Belot, a hotelier in Saint-Pons (Hérault), was known as the ‘Patronne de la Résistance locale’.92

  It was rare, however, for women to participate in the Maquis. Unlike Yugoslavia and Greece, women in France did not generally perform combat roles in the Resistance. When they did, like Madeleine Baudoin who carried out commando raids with the corps francs in Marseilles, it tended to be in the urban Resistance where resisters lived in ‘normal’ society. Here the presence of women was not unusual and even added an appearance of normality to the life of resisters. In the male community of the Maquis, however, women were seen as a complicating intrusion.93 This was not only true of the Maquis. The leader of the Phalanx network was summoned to London in May 1944 because he was suspected of having affairs with his agents. One of his critics told the British: ‘If women must be used, then it is preferable to use older women… less likely to be a source of temptation to colleagues… Sentimental complications are always to be feared.’94 In late 1943, there was an order for women to be phased out of the Maquis.95 In short, if women did not fight much in the French Resistance, it was partly because men did not want them to.

  Foreigners in the Resistance

  If the participation of women in the Resistance was undervalued at the Liberation, the same was true of the participation of another category of resisters: foreigners and immigrants. The dominant rhetoric of the Resista
nce was patriotic.96 Foreigners who settled in France were not keen to stress their foreignness after the war: for them, the Resistance was an initiation into Frenchness. On the other hand, many political refugees from Eastern Europe or Italy participated in the Resistance as part of the fight against fascism, returning to their own countries immediately after the Liberation. For these reasons, the role of foreigners in the Resistance was largely ignored at the Liberation—although as a proportion of their total number in France, the active involvement of foreigners in the Resistance was certainly greater than that of the French. Foreigners participated in most aspects of resistance, but they also had specific skills to offer. Political refugees who had been in the International Brigades provided much-needed combat experience in 1943–4. Refugees who spoke German were used to test out or undermine the morale of German soldiers. The Communists had a ‘German Work’ (TA) section entirely devoted to this purpose. It also ran a German language newspaper, Der Soldat im Westen, which spread defeatist propaganda.97