The Éditions sounded a different note from the Communists—complementing them rather than competing with them—but in all other respects the cultural influence of the CNE was unchallenged. When in September 1943 d’Astier set up Cahiers de la Libération, a publication intended to appeal to intellectuals, the Communists detected an attempt to compete with them on the cultural terrain. But the Cahiers never got off the ground. Villon reassured the Party that its rivals had been ‘disappointed in their efforts to recruit intellectuals … Continually they receive the response: “we are in the FN”.’123
Of the fifty writers on the executive committees of the CNEs of the two zones, under a third were members of the Party; half had been associated in the 1930s with left-wing anti-fascism; the rest had no previous left-wing affiliations. This was a testimony to the Communists’ success in projecting an ecumenical image. In 1941, Decour had refused to accept Sartre on the CNE because the Communists viewed him as a degenerate writer steeped in Heidegger; a year later, such reservations were cast aside. But the Communists hesitated as to how far their ecumenism should be extended. They had hesitated even about the designation of their writers’ committee. Originally it was conceived as the writers’ section of the FN and called the FNE (National Front of Writers), a name which prevailed until July 1943 in the North. But in the South, Aragon chose the name CNE to show that the committee was entirely independent even of the FN. This would, in Aragon’s words, ‘permit us to attract people who don’t want to be in the FN’. To make this explicit, he announced that the CNE would attach itself to both the FN and the MUR. This was going too far for the Party hierarchy who refused to allow other professional organizations under its influence to do the same. But in the case of writers, Aragon’s suggestion prevailed in both zones. In this way, the Party created a gamut of organizations which offered a sliding scale of commitment: writers could join the Party, the FN, or the CNE.124
Bringing in the Workers: National Insurrection
The attraction of the Communists lay in their uncompromisingly activist rhetoric. Up to a point, this was a matter of rhetoric only. It might once have been fair to accuse the non-Communist Resistance of attentisme, but not in 1943. The corps francs now carried out executions and sabotage operations every bit as spectacular as the FTP’s; Résistance-Fer carried out railway sabotage; daring operations were also carried out by the Maquis and the AO. In July 1943, all these branches of the MUR involved in direct action were grouped together in a single Immediate Action section (AI) under the overall command of Degliame.
Immediate Action designated all operations undertaken before the Allied landings; the AS remained responsible for military action after that. In September 1943, the Executive Committee of MUR ordered that of all arms received should go to the Maquis, to the AO, and to the AS. Thus of all arms were to go to Immediate Action—a sign of the importance that this had assumed even for the non-Communist Resistance.125 For the Communists, of course, the very existence of a distinction between the AI and the AS was proof of attentisme, but in reality, even among Communist resisters, the FTP were only a tiny minority: most Communist resisters were not throwing bombs or shooting Germans.
The Communists’ distinctiveness lay not in the fact that they were the only people carrying out direct action, nor in the fact that all Communists were doing this—neither proposition was true—but in their conception of the relationship between the activist minority and the rest of the population. In 1943, the Communists started calling insistently for a ‘National Insurrection’. They did not use this term to mean the suicidal uprising of an unarmed population against heavily armed Germans. For the Communists, the call for an insurrection was a way of democratizing the idea of resistance. One tract read: ‘Every petition, every demonstration, every strike is a step in the practical preparation of the National Insurrection.’126 Another proclaimed: ‘Acting does not only mean armed action … From the most heroic to the tiniest … there is a whole gamut of activities which correspond to the feelings and attitudes of each person.’127 Whether a woman knitting socks for the FTP or a peasant hiding his grain—all were participating in the ‘daily action’ which was the ‘best school for the National Insurrection’.128 For the Communists, this insurrection was a constant process of self-creation. They did not deny that the other Resistance movements now practised Immediate Action, but they claimed that these movements had too elitist a notion of what this meant. By linking patriotic protest to the tiniest manifestation of social protest, the Communists offered everyone the opportunity to participate in—or the illusion of participating in—the final liberation of France. Immediate Action was open to all.129
Thanks to this open-ended notion of resistance and insurrection the Communists were uniquely placed to exploit the developing militancy of the working class in the second half of 1943. STO had shaken France’s industrial workers out of the apathy affecting them since 1940. Even if for many workers the sticking point was not so much working for Germany as working in Germany, even if many réfractaires regularized their positions after the amnesty and worked in German-protected factories in France, nothing was to be the same again.130 In the autumn of 1943, industrial unrest reached a peak not witnessed since the days of the Popular Front. In September, there were strikes in the shipyards of Marseilles; in October, another major coal strike broke out in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, and also among the miners of Montceau les Mines in Saône-et-Loire. Throughout France, there were strikes on the symbolic date of 11 November.131 Membership of the clandestine CGT union also increased dramatically in the last four months of the year. In the Rhône, membership rose to 50,000, having fallen to 20,000 in 1940; in the Haute-Pyrénées, there was an increase from 934 to 2,664.132
As in 1936, trade-union membership increased after a successful strike. At Toulon, there was a strike in the Arsenal for the first time since 1938. It took place in an atmosphere of highly charged patriotism. Singing the Marseillaise, strikers marched to demonstrate in the Place de la Liberté. By the end of the month, trade-union membership had reached the levels of 1936; union meetings were massively attended; and the fear prevailing in the factories since 1938 had disappeared.133 Everywhere the mood was volatile. In the Peugeot factory, in the Jura, a strike broke out on 16 December after the Germans had forbidden anyone to travel by bicycle in reprisal for the shooting of a German customs officer in Montbéliard.134 In general, the strikes were sparked off by social demands, but the political and the social had now become inextricably intertwined.
The Communists were best at exploiting this working-class radicalism. In the Var, 36.4 per cent of the Communist resistance cadres but only 6.4 per cent of the MUR cadres were workers. The non-Communist movements never successfully adapted to the idea of Resistance as a mass phenomenon. This was particularly true in the North where movements like CDLR, CDLL, and OCM conceived it as the specialized activity of an elite. But it was true even in the South where the Resistance movements never fully overcame their contempt for the initial passivity of the population. In May 1944, a local paper produced by Combat in the Franche-Comté called on people not involved directly in the Resistance not to compromise its activity by idle gossip: ‘You who do not participate directly in action for whatever reason (age, family situation, lack of courage) … the Resistance does not concern you, it is our business.’135 This was clearly an extreme example—and one could find many counter-examples where the population was called upon to act—but it was inconceivable that such a quotation could have emanated from the Communists.
At the base, then, the MUR did not have the dynamism of the Communists. In the Var, it had only one local paper to rival the plethora of specialized Communist publications.136 One member of Libération wrote in January 1944: ‘Instead of developing propaganda our leaders are more concerned to close the entry of our movement to new members … to hold on to entrenched positions or court some prefectoral official.’137 One problem was that the MUR was becoming integrated into the structures create
d by London. Frenay had not been entirely wrong to accuse Moulin of bureaucratizing the Resistance. The MUR leaders, planning for the future Allied landings when the AS would spring into action, were part of a military structure which they did not control.
The compensation might have been that, as D-Day approached, the MUR would find itself treated as indispensable by the Allied planners. In fact, the opposite was happening. At the end of 1943, the MUR found itself competing for the favour of London with a late arrival in the Resistance, but one enjoying the advantage of professional military expertise. It was at the beginning of 1943 that the professional officers from the former Armistice army, disbanded in November 1942, began to reorganize themselves secretly into an organization which eventually took the name of the Resistance Organization of the Army (ORA). ORA was viewed with suspicion by many resisters, who saw it as a late convert from Pétainism. Serreulles was unhappy at using such people in a ‘revolutionary war’. He consoled himself with the thought that Danton had made use of the services of the ancien régime soldier Marshal Soubise, and Lenin of the Tsarist General Kuropatkin, without compromising the purity of the cause.138 ORA officers played an increasingly important role as the military objectives of the Resistance began to take precedence over others. BCRA was happier dealing with ORA professionals than with well-meaning AS amateurs.139 In December 1943, a major step towards the military unity of the Resistance was taken with the decision to unite all its military forces, including the FTP, into a single organization—the French Forces of the Interior (FFI)—with a single command structure. In the allocation of command positions within the FFI, ORA, which had started out as a group of cadres without troops, found itself playing a role disproportionate to its size.
The impact of ORA was also felt at the base. People who had joined the AS because they wanted to make a real military contribution to the liberation were tempted to join the professionals; people who thirsted for immediate action were more tempted by the FTP. At the end of 1943, then, the MUR remained the most important resistance force in the South, but it found itself being outflanked on one side by the Communists, and on the other by the ORA: it could offer neither the dynamism of the one nor the professionalism of the other.140 Some of its leaders took refuge instead in political discussions about the post-war future. The liberation was in sight: but what would happen then?
21
Remaking France
In January 1944, Raymond Aubrac was waiting for the Resistance to organize the transport that would take him and his wife Lucie to safety. Having escaped twice from prison in the previous year, Aubrac was too well known to the Germans to be able to stay in France. Although the Aubracs had been founding members of Libération-Sud, the joy of being in France for the denouement was to be denied them. Aubrac’s sadness at this knowledge was deepened by the news that his (Jewish) parents had been recently arrested by the Germans.
While preparing to take his leave of France, Aubrac wrote a long reflective letter to d’Astier in Algiers. After recounting his own adventures, he gave vent to the frustrations that many resisters in France felt towards London and Algiers: the excessive influence of veteran politicians, the lack of consideration for the sacrifices of the Resistance. He even wondered if d’Astier was not succumbing to the poisonous atmosphere of Algiers. But Aubrac ended his letter on a more upbeat note: ‘This is the last news I have to send you, with a certain melancholy, to which I add my good wishes for the new year which will I hope become Year I.’1 Year I: these two words encapsulated the almost Messianic self-perception of the Resistance that it was struggling not only to remove the Germans from France, but also to inaugurate a new political order. What was the nature of that order to be?
Vichy and the Resistance: Shared Values
‘Pernod, sports stadia, brothels: are these reasons for living?’ This is not Pétain speaking, nor Brasillach. It is François Mauriac in Le Cahier noir.2 Such echoes of Vichy moralism were not unusual in the language of the Resistance. We have seen this in the reception accorded to Le Corbeau and Le Ciel est à vous. Similar ambiguities emerge from another film, Louis Daquin’s Premier de cordée (1943). The title refers to the leader of a group of mountain climbers, and the film illustrates how mountain climbing instils qualities of leadership and solidarity. Daquin, a Communist and resister, subsequently remarked that his film reflected Vichy’s values more than he had realized at the time.3
The Maquis in particular helped the Resistance to reclaim those rural and regional values which Vichy had tried to appropriate. Maquis rhetoric celebrated the cleansing purity of mountain life away from the corruptions of the city. The writer Jean-Pierre Chabrol observed: ‘I thought of myself as Cévenol by birth, but only the Maquis taught me to know my Cévennes.’4 The Éditions de Minuit authors took the names of French regions as their pseudonyms: Mauriac was Forez, Edith Thomas was Auxois, Claude Morgan was Mortagne, and so on. One historian has noted that the images of tranquil rural France celebrated in the London-based publication France libre are interchangeable with those to be found in Vichyite publications.5 No one more skilfully turned Vichy’s rhetoric against itself than Aragon. His poem ‘Le Conscrit des cent villages’, composed out of the ‘beloved names’ of French villages, gloried in the diversity of rural France:
Adieu Forléans Marimbault
Vollore-Ville Volmerange
Avize Avoine Vallerange
Ainval-Septoutre Mongibaud
Fains-la-Folie Aumur Andance
Guillaume-Peyrouse Escarmin
Dancevoir Parmilieu Parmain
Linthes-Pelurs Caresse Abondance6
If the Resistance often sounded a common note with Vichy, this was not only a strategy to reappropriate a language which Vichy had tried to confiscate. By 1943, the Resistance was no longer an isolated elite standing outside society, but a complex micro-society enmeshed in the wider society outside it. Inevitably it became increasingly freighted with the assumptions and values of that society. Thus it would be wrong to view Resistance history as a process of continuous radicalization. For example, it was in the first days of Occupation, when everything was in flux, that women seized opportunities to acquire the kind of leadership roles not previously available to them in French society. Almost all women who occupied leading positions in the Resistance had been there from the start. Those who joined later did not rise to the top: the Resistance became more institutionalized and gender boundaries reasserted themselves.
As the Resistance gave increasing priority to military organization, its rhetoric became more ‘masculine’. Its cult of virility was no less insistent than Vichy’s. It was after all Sartre who identified collaboration with passivity and homosexuality, and, by implication, resistance with virility. In his novel Iron in the Soul this idea is embodied in the homosexual Daniel who is stunned by the beauty of the Germans arriving in Paris: ‘longing to be a women so that he could load them with flowers’.7 Resistance polemics against the Minister of Education Abel Bonnard often highlighted his notorious homosexuality: ‘active collaboration and passive pederasty’ as one publication put it.8 Jean Guéhenno wondered in his wartime diary why so many homosexual writers were collaborators. He deplored the influence of ‘these writers almost exclusively turned in on themselves, so weak, so vain’; the young lacked virile models.9 There were of course homosexuals in the Resistance—for example, Pascal Copeau, Denis Rake, the SOE agent who appears in The Sorrow and the Pity, the young Jewish writer Roger Stéphane, the future novelist and critic Jean-Louis Bory—but, like women, they do not fit into the dominant narrative of the Resistance.10
Of the approximately 1,000 Resistance newspapers, seventy-six directly targeted women. Eighty-eight per cent of these were inspired by the Communist Party which created an organization exclusively for women, revealingly entitled the Union of French Women for the Defence of the Family and the Liberation of France (UFF). Despite some references to the Soviet partisanes, and to Louise Michel, a heroine of the Commune, the Communists add
ressed women primarily as housewives and mothers. They accused Vichy of betraying the promises it had made to women, but they did not offer women a different role. The same was true of the Resistance in general—to the limited extent that it discussed the issue.11
Anti-Semitism was another area where the frontiers between Vichy and the Resistance were not as sharply defined as might be supposed. The ambivalence towards the Jews which had surfaced in some Resistance publications before 1942 did not entirely disappear. A BCRA report in January 1943 noted that people who helped the Jews after the round-ups acted out of ‘compassion’ not ‘esteem’. To resolve the Jewish problem ‘in a way satisfactory to both justice and public opinion’, the opposition to Germany should be separated from any commitment to restore the Jews to an excessive role. Further BCRA reports later in the year observed that however much sympathy people felt for Jews, ‘one cannot deny that there is a Jewish question’. The French were not anti-Semitic but they ‘cursed the banks of Israel’.12 In October 1943, the CFLN drafted a questionnaire to evaluate the political attitudes of the Resistance. One respondent wanted Jews ‘kept out of all governmental and public functions’; another demanded the ‘relegation of all Jews, Freemasons … and former politicians’.13 When the staff of Uriage entered the Resistance, they took the decision to create an order to defend the principles in which they believed. One rule read: ‘Israelites are not admitted as members of the Order or as novices. If we are resolutely hostile to anti-semitism, particularly as practised since the armistice, we ought not to underestimate the danger of a Jewish revenge nor ignore the existence of a Jewish international whose interests are opposed to those of France.’14
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