There were regional variations in the participation of immigrants in the Resistance, reflecting their distribution within the population as a whole. In the southeast, Italians predominated. After June 1940, Italians were much resented in the Italian Zone, for strutting around as if they were conquerors, and this did not initially facilitate contact with the Resistance. Despite such obstacles, 7 per cent of the officially counted resisters in the Alpes-Maritimes were foreigners, mainly Italian.98 In the Nord, the main role was played by Poles who had two movements of their own: the Communist PKWN which had about 10,000 members by June 1944 and the non-Communist POWN which had about 8,000. Their combined total represented about 4 per cent of the entire Polish population of France. The POWN had been founded in the Southern Zone in 1941 by Polish army officers loyal to the Polish government in London. In 1942, it spread to the Nord and built up a considerable working-class base in the mining basin, recruited through Polish community organizations. Although an agreement was signed with the French military resistance in 1944, the movement kept its distance from the French Resistance. Its ultimate objective was to free Poland: one of its tracts read ‘All for Poland. Only for Poland.’ The POWN carried out about 300 sabotage operations, the most successful being to cut the cables of a V1 launching ramp in August 1944.99
In the south-west, there were about 120,000–150,000 Spanish Republican refugees (quite apart from the 250,000 Spaniards already living in France).100 They were among the earliest victims of the Vichy regime, liable to be forced into immigrant labour camps or sent to work in Germany. They were also suspected for their political sympathies: 8,000 Spaniards were deported to Mauthausen. For many Spaniards, resistance was a necessity as much as a choice. For two years, however, Spanish émigré groups were still riven by squabbles dating from the Spanish civil war. The turning point occurred in November 1942 when the Spanish Communist Party, like its French counterpart, converted to a unitary policy, forming its own version of the National Front (UNE). The Spanish Communists threw themselves into the new line with vigour. Up to 30 Spanish clandestine newspapers were produced in France under the aegis of the UNE. The Spanish Communists also formed a guerrilla unit, the XIV Corps, which had about 3,400 fighters in the south-west by June 1944. This represented a considerable local presence: in the Gers département, there were about 800 French FTP fighters and 520 Spanish guérillas. The XIV Corps was supposedly integrated into the FTP in the autumn of 1943, but this did not alter the fact that its ultimate objective was the liberation of Spain from Franco.
Although the Poles and Spaniards had their own organizations, many immigrants also participated in French resistance organizations. It was Poles who ran the important intelligence network R2, which was largely staffed by French agents; it was the Spaniard Francisco Ponzan who, as a member of the Pat O’Leary network, helped Jews, Allied aviators, and French resisters to cross over to Spain; it was a group of Spaniards, threatened with deportation to Germany in the spring of 1942, who were among the first maquisards in the Ardèche; it was German refugees in the Gard and Lozère, hiding in the forests, who joined the ‘Montaigne’ Maquis at La Fare in December 1943.101 One SOE agent sent to instruct the Maquis of Villefranche-du-Périgord in the use of plastic explosives found that his French was of no use to him because all its members were Spanish refugees and understood only Spanish and Catalan.102
There were numerous comparable examples of this kind, but in general those immigrants who did not resist through their own separate national organizations, did so through the Communist FTP-MOI. Although the FTP-MOI was small, it played a role out of all proportion to its size. After the decimation of the Communist Party in Paris in 1942, the four ‘detachments’ (Romanian, ‘Jewish’, Italian, ‘mixed’) of the FTP-MOI were all that remained of the Party’s urban guerrilla organization in the city. In 1943, Communist military resistance in Paris was the work of about sixty immigrants, who carried out an astonishing number of operations. There were ninety-two attacks of various kinds in the first six months of that year, seventeen in August, and fourteen in September. These included:
3 September: the derailing of the Paris–Reims train; the killing of two German policemen in the suburb of Argenteuil, two German soldiers at the Porte d’Ivry, and two German soldiers in the Rue de la Harpe.
8 September: a grenade attack on a German lorry at Saint-Ouen; an attack on a German convoy at Stains.
10 September: a grenade attack on a PPF meeting in the Rue Lamarck.
10 September: the shooting of a German soldier.
13 September: the derailing of a German train between Paris and Troyes.
The most spectacular exploit was the assassination on 28 September 1943 of Julius Ritter, Sauckel’s deputy in France. Only after carrying out the attack did the group learn the identity of their victim, whom they had been tailing for several days.103
During the summer, there were a series of arrests. The military head of the FTP-MOI in the Paris region, Boris Holban, asked permission to transfer his men out of the city, where their existence had become so perilous. Instead he was told to intensify military action.104 Those who had not been arrested were consolidated into a single detachment under the command of the Armenian Missak Manouchian. Finally, the ‘Manouchian group’ was itself arrested in November 1943. A lot of ink has been spilled over this affair. Some believe that Manouchian was betrayed by an informer, but this was probably not true. The French police had a special unit (BS2) just to track down immigrant Communist resisters. Thanks to an elaborate system of tailing, they gradually identified most members of the group. By the end so many French policemen—possibly 100—were involved in the full-time activity of tracking down a tiny handful of resisters that no traitor was required.105
Paris was not the only city with FTP-MOI groups. In Lyons, there was the Carmagnole group which comprised about thirty members at the start of 1944, a quarter of them Jewish. The nationalities included Poles (a third of the total), Spaniards, Italians, Hungarians, Austrians, Romanians, Germans, and French. They carried out 241 actions, including thirty-four attacks on Germans in broad daylight.106 In Grenoble, there was the Liberté group, founded in March 1943 by four Polish Jews. Between September 1943 and March 1944, this group was responsible for almost all the Resistance actions in the city, including fifty-four out of fifty-nine sabotage operations.107 In Toulouse, there was the Marcel Langer group, also known as the 35th Brigade of the FTP-MOI. Langer was a Polish Jew who came to Toulouse after fighting in the International Brigades in Spain. Even after his arrest in March 1943, the group, which included Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Romanian Jews, and Brazilians, continued to wage sporadic guerrilla warfare. In March 1944, it planted a bomb in a cinema notorious for showing German films. This operation miscarried when the bomb detonated earlier than intended, killing a spectator (and two members of the group). The Communists, not wishing to be associated with the killing of innocent French citizens, even in the name of France, disavowed the action of the Langer group. It has even been suggested that when resisters working in the préfecture informed the Communist Party that the police was on the group’s trail, the Party did not pass on this information.108
Whether this allegation is correct—and in resistance history allegations of betrayal are commonplace—it reveals that there were problems in the relationship between the ‘French’ Resistance and the foreigners within it. There was a danger of offering a flank to Vichy propaganda depicting the Resistance as a hotbed of Communists, Jews, and foreigners. In Paris in 1943 this allegation was not far from the truth. Twenty-three of the Manouchian group were given a highly publicized show trial, before being executed in February 1944. A poster was produced—the notorious ‘Affiche rouge’—displaying the supposedly sinister faces of the group with their unpronounceable names—Szlama Gryzwacz, Wolf Wasybrot, and so on—printed underneath. Nine of the people on the poster were Jews; half of them were under 25; three had seen their entire families arrested in the Vel d’Hiver round-up. T
here has been controversy whether, as Manouchian’s widow believed, the PCF deliberately sacrificed the Manouchian group in order to rid itself of resisters with embarrassingly foreign names.109 Why else did the Party reject Holban’s request to be transferred from the capital? But there is no evidence that the Party leadership was motivated by any consideration other than the fact that it had no one left in Paris to replace the MOI whose exploits were vital to boost the Party’s reputation for daring activism.110
‘Twenty three who cried the name of France’, was how a poem by Aragon described those on the Affiche rouge. After the war the plaques to the immigrant Jews killed in the Resistance read ‘Fallen for France’. Was this how the immigrants who fought in the FTP-MOI saw their action? Certainly they were expected to celebrate the patriotic themes of French history which dominated Communist propaganda. But the Party was successful at offering multiple identities to those who fought with it. One Party directive to the MOI insisted it must ‘popularize to the largest possible extent the tradition of the old Italian, Polish, Hungarian patriots who came to defend the liberty of France because they considered it as their second homeland… It is necessary to strengthen the sense of double patriotism of the immigrant workers.’111 Only the Communist press gave much coverage to the execution of the Manouchian group. It was the Communists on the CNR who pushed for the publication of a manifesto denouncing xenophobia and proclaiming that the Resistance welcomed immigrants who fought in its ranks: ‘whether Jews, Poles, Italians, Spaniards… they are dear to the French, worthy of the names… united to them by the bond of blood shed in the same cause’. This was certainly a more ringing embrace of the immigrant contribution than was to be found in most resistance propaganda, and it marked a different approach from Maurice Schumann’s denial on the radio in April that the Resistance was made up of Jews and bandits.112
Recruiting the Professions: Communists and Writers
The ability to offer multiple identities was one key to the Communist success in the Resistance. Communist propaganda was, as Guillon remarks, ‘homogeneous in thought but diversified in form’.113 Although the Communists insistently repeated the same themes at every level from the Central Committee to the tiniest local paper, at the same time they also addressed specific interest groups in order at appeal to the widest spectrum of opinion. They had organizations recruiting specifically among women and immigrants, and a press targeted at all varieties of regional, local, or class identity. In the Var alone their newspapers included La Lutte patriotique de Draguignan, Le Cri du Haut-Var, La Défense paysanne du Var, and Le Cri des mineurs du Var.114 Sometimes these front organizations were very thinly disguised: in the Jura in 1942 the tracts of the ‘Committee of Housewives’, the ‘United Forces of Patriotic Youth’, and the ‘Front national’ were all written by the same hand.115
Another distinctive feature of the Communists was that they targeted not only individuals but also specific professional groups. The FN was organized into sections of architects, teachers, university professors, journalists, lawyers, and doctors. Of course most resisting doctors, journalists, lawyers, and so on were in other movements. Once these other movements also decided to create professional sections comprising those doctors or journalists or lawyers who had joined them, the Communists had to decide how to react.116 This dilemma arose in September 1943, with a proposal to create a single resistance medical committee (CMR) of all doctors in the Resistance. The FN doctors’ section elected to join the Committee, despite being in a minority on it. This was in line with the Communist tactic of accepting a presence on ‘pluralist’ committees (i.e. sitting alongside representatives of other organizations) if they could not establish ‘unitary’ ones (i.e. where everyone was in the FN). Eventually the tactic paid off, and the FN doctors managed to increase their influence on the Committee by winning the support of the distinguished paediatrician Robert Debré who had his own scores to settle with other participants.117
The one professional group which the Communists succeeded in organizing almost exclusively under their aegis were writers. This was done by the National Writers’ Committee (CNE) whose origins went back to the summer of 1941 when the Communists were starting to build the FN.118 The Communist writer Jacques Decour was instructed to get writers to participate in a clandestine literary review to be called Les Lettres françaises. Decour secured the co-operation of Jean Paulhan, not himself a Communist, who had an unrivalled address book of literary contacts, based upon fifteen years as editor of the NRF. From his office next door to Drieu in the Gallimard offices, Paulhan worked at setting up an underground network of resistance writers. By the end of 1941, a small group of writers had been assembled, and enough articles had been collected for the first issue of Les Lettres françaises. Before it could appear, Decour was arrested in February 1942, and shot three months later. With him perished most of the contents of the first issue of Les Lettres françaises. G. Sapiro, ‘Les Conditions professionnelles d’une mobilisation réussie: Le Comité national des écrivains’, MS 180 (1997), 179–91; M. Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cutural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950 (Manchester and New York, 1989), 30–54.
Another Communist writer, Claude Morgan, who had assisted Decour in 1941, was designated to replace him. Everything had to start again from scratch because, for security reasons, Morgan had not been told the names on Decour’s list. He was also one of the few writers in France not to know Paulhan. From what he had salvaged of Decour’s efforts, Morgan managed to produce an issue of Les Lettres françaises in September 1942. Its four scrappy typed pages, on cheap brown paper, were a solo effort; they were not the mouthpiece of a ‘writers’ committee’ since no such committee existed. In the autumn of 1942, through another Communist writer, Edith Thomas, herself a Gallimard author, Morgan met Paulhan. The work of forming a writers’ committee was resumed.
By the summer of 1943, Morgan had gathered about fifteen members including Jean Guéhenno, François Mauriac (who had already offered a piece for Decour’s abortive review), Michel Leiris, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Edith Thomas’s flat became their meeting place. Their main activity was the production of Les Lettres françaises which appeared monthly until the Liberation. From October 1943, it was properly printed, with about 12,000 copies produced monthly. It also incorporated a clandestine journal for French film-makers, L’Écran français, and another one for the theatre, La Scène française. The CNE’s success occurred as much for professional as political reasons. As an underground reconstitution of the writers in the Gallimard stable, it also allowed aspiring writers to gain access to that powerful network without passing through the NRF, which was now tainted by Drieu’s editorship. Writers actively involved in the Resistance tended to be younger and less well established than those who supported Vichy.119
In the South, the organization of writers developed in a slightly different way.120 Until 1942, writers like Aragon had exploited the possibilities of legal expression offered in reviews like Confluences, Poésie, and Fontaine. Once these avenues were closed off, it was Aragon, himself a Gallimard author, who played Paulhan’s role of literary impresario. The poetry which Aragon had published in the first two years of the Occupation had given him the stature, in Claudel’s words after the Liberation, of a ‘national poet’, somewhat on the model of Victor Hugo exiled in Guernsey under the Second Empire. He was quoted by de Gaulle in a speech at Algiers in October 1943. Aragon’s achievement was not only to give expression to French patriotism in his poetry, but also to confront the language of collaborationism on its own territory. Where Montherlant in the NRF celebrated the masculine and warrior civilization represented by medieval chivalry—the contemporary analogy was clear—Aragon riposted that medieval chivalry was also about ‘courtesy’, justice, and ‘the defence of the weak’. Aragon’s essay ‘La Leçon de Riberac’, suggesting that the traditions of troubadour poetry could be revived to convey covert messages when open expression was impossible, was attacked by Drieu in the NRF in
October 1941. That Drieu should feel it necessary to use the full weight of the NRF’s authority to attack someone who was writing in the small literary reviews of the Southern Zone showed how literary ‘legitimacy’ had shifted to the opponents of collaboration.
It was these small reviews which provided the network of contacts around which Aragon began to construct an underground literary resistance in the South. Because intellectuals in the South were more dispersed than in the North, he organized them into so-called ‘stars’, groups with five branches which would eventually interconnect with each other. Out of this developed a journal, Les Étoiles, and a committee of writers. About twenty writers eventually sat on this Southern committee, but allegedly as many as 300 had offered their support. It included Communists like Aragon and Georges Sadoul, Catholics like Stanislas Fumet and Louis Martin-Chauffier, and writers without specific affiliation like Albert Camus. Some of the names claimed by the committee had only the most tenuous connection with it. Roger Martin du Gard, who spent the Occupation in Nice, cut off from politics, received a visit in 1943 from Georges Sadoul, who introduced himself as a friend of Paulhan. Sadoul informed du Gard that a committee of intellectual resistance was being set up, including figures such as Paulhan and Mauriac. Despite his rule of avoiding all political commitments, du Gard, reassured by the presence of such names, agreed to be associated with them. This is as far as his commitment went despite subsequent visits by Sadoul. At the Liberation, du Gard was surprised to find himself proclaimed by the Communists as a member of a committee which he had never attended.121
The only rival to the Communists for influence among writers were the Éditions de Minuit which had published Le Silence de la mer. This had been followed by other books: A Travers le désastre by Jacques Maritain (from his American exile) in November 1942; L’Honneur des poètes, a collection of pieces by twenty-one poets, published in July 1943; Le Cahier noir by Mauriac in August 1943. The output steadily increased, and in the first seven months of 1944 thirteen books were published, all under pseudonyms. Originally the Éditions had been entirely independent of the Communists, but they gradually became more entwined with each other, if only because several contributors to the Éditions were also involved in the CNE. From June 1943, the poet Paul Éluard, who had recently rejoined the Communist Party, was in charge of the publications list of the Éditions. A quarter of the members of the publications committee were Communists. But the Éditions never entirely lost their autonomy. Aiming not to publish ‘resistance’ literature but ‘clandestine’ literature, not politics but art, their publications did not espouse the activist line of the Communists. While the Communists popularized the slogan ‘everyone get a Boche’, the Éditions held on to the idea of the ‘good German’ until the very end.122
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