B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  The entry of Uriage into the Resistance reminds us that the Resistance was composed of many generations, including people who had been loyal to Vichy. The Resistance was created by a process of sedimentation: a Mounier or a Beuve-Méry could move into it without making fundamental ideological adjustments.15 One area of common ground between all these resistance generations was contempt for the Third Republic. Combat in December 1943 attacked the rehabilitation of former Third Republic politicians in terms which Vichy could easily have used: ‘Why not Josephine Baker? There is no reason why the tide of Republican continuity should be allowed to wash up detritus of this kind.’16 Like Vichy in 1940, the Resistance wanted to engender a new elite. The Uriage team, which had started out building an elite for Vichy, ended up hoping to do the same for the Resistance.

  Pétaino-Resisters: An Abortive Third Way

  One fervently Pétainist organization which moved into resistance in 1943 was the prisoner-of-war movement. No group was more assiduously courted by Vichy than the prisoners of war. There was a Prisoner of War Commissariat to assist the reinsertion of prisoners into society, and under its aegis, a Centre d’action des prisonniers, headed by Jean de Fabrègues. The Centre d’action aimed to harness the spirit of fraternity which had existed in the prisoner-of-war camps to the cause of the National Revolution. As well as being pro-Pétainist, the Centre d’action was anti-German, and it was involved with a semi-clandestine organization called the Chaîne. The Chaîne acquired the Château de Montmaur in the Alps, ostensibly as a refuge for former prisoners, but also to prepare a future resistance organization. After the occupation of the Southern Zone, the Commissariat’s loyalty to Vichy became more strained. In January 1943, Laval replaced its head, Maurice Pinot, with someone more committed to collaboration. Several of Pinot’s aides resigned in solidarity, and members of the Centre d’action and the Chaîne met at Montmaur to form an underground prisoners’ movement. Suspended initially between loyalty to Pétain and determination to act against the Germans, they entered fully into resistance in the spring of 1943. Here was a movement, as Pétainist as it was possible to be, pulled by the force of circumstances from loyalty to dissidence and from dissidence to resistance.17

  The figure who came to dominate this movement was not the former head of the Commissariat, Maurice Pinot, but his younger aide, François Mitterrand. In the 1930s, Mitterrand had been a conservative student, sharing the distaste for republican politics so characteristic of his generation. Taken prisoner in 1940, he escaped at his third attempt. After returning to France, he acquired employment as a Vichy functionary, first as a documentarist for the Legion (January to April 1942) and then as a press officer for the board of rehabilitation of prisoners of war (May 1942 to January 1943). His sympathy with the values of the National Revolution emerged in two articles he published in 1942. The first, in April, approved the formation of the SOL and lamented the Legion’s lack of ‘fanaticism’; the other, in December 1942, criticized France for ‘150 years of mistakes’ (i.e. since 1789). This article appeared in the Vichyist periodical France, alongside one by a leader of the Legion denouncing Jews, Masons, and Gaullists. For his services to Vichy, Mitterrand was awarded Vichy’s decoration, the fran-cisque, in the spring of 1943.18

  Mitterrand’s move into resistance was sinuous. While building contacts with Resistance leaders and with ORA, he did not burn his bridges with those members of Pétain’s entourage who were hostile to Laval. He probably looked more to Giraud than de Gaulle. Mitterrand’s first public act of resistance occurred on 10 July 1943 when he disrupted a public meeting addressed by André Masson, the man Laval had put in charge of the Prisoner of War Commissariat. This was a courageous act, and it was celebrated some months later on the BBC by Maurice Schumann—but it was also discreetly approved by Mitterrand’s contacts at Vichy. Mitterrand had a rival in Michel Caillau who had in 1942 started to organize a resistance movement from a group of prisoners with whom he had been in captivity. Caillau had never had any relations with the Vichy regime, and he also happened to be de Gaulle’s nephew. Mitterrand and Caillau discussed the possibility of unifying their efforts until Caillau realized that he risked being absorbed by Mitterrand’s larger organization. His response was to go to Algiers in July to secure the backing of de Gaulle, playing not so much on his family connection as the fact that he had no Vichy past. Caillau returned to France in October, believing that he had prevailed. But Mitterrand himself set off for Algiers in November. Arriving with a reputation as a Giraudist, his first meeting with de Gaulle on 3 December 1943 was frosty even by de Gaulle’s standards. In the end, however, de Gaulle, came down on the side of Mitterrand who returned to France with the mission to unite the prisoner-of-war movements. Caillau had lost, and in March 1944 Mitterrand became head of a single resistance movement of prisoners (MNRPDG).

  Mitterrand prevailed partly because his movement was larger than Caillau’s. He was also politically more skilful than Caillau: Mitterrand, the former Giraudist, outwitted the Gaullist Caillau as ruthlessly as de Gaulle had outwitted Giraud. But victory had its price. Mitterrand had to jettison his previous ideological baggage. Caillau had warned de Gaulle in December 1943 that Mitterrand remained ‘Maurrassian at heart’.19 Whether or not this was still true about Mitterrand ‘at heart’—as late as June 1943 he certainly had told a leader of Franc-Tireur that there were things worth salvaging in the National Revolution, especially corporatism20—it was no longer something he publicly said. In August 1944, the MNRPDG produced a tract whose rhetoric was indistinguishable from that of the Resistance as a whole. It called for a ‘total revolution in the economic and social structure’ to complete what had been started in 1789; and poured scorn on the ‘enterprise called the National Revolution’ which it described as a means by which capitalists had tried to exploit France’s misfortunes.21

  Mitterrand, whose politics had been entirely in tune with the National Revolution, understood that it was too late to create a conservative resistance grounded in Pétainist values. Giraud had represented the last chance of achieving this, but his political demise was the death knell of any ideological third way.

  The New Elite

  Mitterrand’s evolution shows that it would be wrong to overstate the common ground between Vichy and the Resistance. The Resistance may have talked about Jews in a tone which jars with modern sensibilities, but it opposed Vichy’s anti-Semitism. It might have despised the Third Republic, but it was committed to Republican democracy. Its gender assumptions might have been traditional, but it was not obsessed with the family in the same way as Vichy.22

  The ideology of the Resistance is summed up in the title of a book by André Hauriou, an academic lawyer who was a member of Combat before sitting on the Algiers Consultative Assembly: ‘Towards a Doctrine of the Resistance: Humanist Socialism.’23 This humanist socialism was conceived within the framework of a reinvigorated Republic. In 1944, Défense de la France sent a letter to de Gaulle defining its objectives as ‘the idea of the Republic, the idea of socialism, the idea of nation’. The founding charter of MLN took the slogan: ‘The Republic, Socialism, the Nation.’24 Socialism, broadly defined, was probably the most important strand in the ideology of the Resistance. Even a movement like CDLR, which distrusted politics, was talking in the spring of 1943 of the need for a Fourth Republic and a new social system.25 The socialism of the Resistance was mixed with the Catholic humanism of Mounier, Esprit, and Uriage. Resistance ideology owed much to the nonconformists of the 1930s, but within a Republican tradition to which they had been indifferent or hostile: Georges Zérapha, a founding member of Libération-Sud, had been involved in Esprit, Arthyus of OCM in Ordre nouveau.26

  The Resistance squared its contempt for the Third Republic with its rediscovery of Republicanism by demanding a Fourth Republic that would be saved from the sins of its predecessor by a new elite.27 The first step was to purge France of those who had betrayed her after 1940. Reprisals against alleged collaborators became increasingly
common in 1943. In August 1943, de Gaulle spoke for the first time of the need to purge the guilty—‘France will know that she has been avenged’—but he also insisted that the purge must be carried out by the State.

  By what criteria were collaborators to be judged? How could they be punished without recourse to retroactive laws offensive to the Resistance’s commitment to justice and its repudiation of the methods of Vichy? The CGE discussed this problem in 1943, and concluded that Article 75 of the Penal Code, condemning treason and intelligence with the enemy, would cover most cases. As for those whose did not merit the harsh penalties applicable under Article 75, the CGE proposed the new offence of national indignity. This was not categorized as a crime—hence avoiding the problem of retroactivity—and was punishable by the loss of civic rights for a specified period. These recommendations were adopted by the CFLN in June 1944.28

  Even before the Liberation of mainland France, the CFLN had to decide how to handle the purge in North Africa. Pétainism had been strong in North Africa, especially in the army, but an excessive purge of the army conflicted with de Gaulle’s desire to bring France back into the war militarily at the earliest opportunity. Some resisters wanted General Juin to be punished for his hesitations in November 1942; de Gaulle, aware of Juin’s popularity in the North African army, wished him to command the French forces in the Italian campaign. The case for pragmatism and reconciliation conflicted with the call for justice and revenge. In January 1944 the Consultative Assembly unanimously voted a motion condemning the ‘delays in the punishment of traitors’.

  De Gaulle parried this move by making an example of some prominent figures: Flandin, Buisson, and Peyrouton were arrested in December. Three months later, Pierre Pucheu was tried by a military court in Algiers. Pucheu had arrived in North Africa in May 1943, having been promised a safe-conduct by Giraud, whose failure to respect this commitment further discredited him among conservatives. Pucheu was especially hated by the Communists for his alleged role in selecting hostages for execution in 1941. Although his trial failed to prove that he had done this, he was found guilty, and sentenced to death. De Gaulle refused to commute the sentence, and Pucheu was shot on 20 March 1944. After the war, former Vichy supporters never forgave de Gaulle for this. They claimed that Pucheu’s life was the price that de Gaulle had paid for Communist support. In fact, almost the entire Resistance was clamouring for Pucheu’s death.29

  In the eyes of the Resistance, the objective of the purges was not only to punish the guilty, but also to make way for France’s new elite. Franc-Tireur declared in 1944: ‘France will not allow the remaking of the country to be entrusted to the “well-born”, to the “notables”, to the grand bourgeois, to the members of the Conseil d’État, the Finance Inspectors … it was not the Conseil d’État which set up the Maquis… or in the École des sciences politiques that the FTP groups were recruited.’30 In fact, Resistance leaders came from the same social strata as the pre-war governing elites.31 The only novelty about them was their relative youth. The Resistance did not respect hierarchies of age, and offered opportunities for the young to seize their chances: in Libération-Sud, the average age of the central leaders was 33; the average age of the regional leaders to whom they gave orders was 39.32 In Franc-Tireur the 55-year-old Marc Bloch took orders from the 31-year-old Jean-Pierre Lévy. Lévy looked so young for a resistance leader that BCRA even experimented with dying his temples grey.33

  All resisters would have agreed with OCM that the ‘Resistance is a comradeship that we hope will be indissoluble.’34 But how to ensure that they would not be pushed aside at the Liberation? For most resisters this required the disappearance of the pre-war political parties. Frenay wrote in October 1943:

  It would be puerile to suggest that in this great test of France, men died for the Radical Party or the Alliance démocratique, but there are certainly men of the Radical Party and the Alliance démocratique who died for France in the Resistance. Thus the reconstitution of the political parties, as they existed before the war, would be a grave error.35

  Frenay wanted the MLN to form the basis of a new party perpetuating the ideals of the Resistance. Even those sceptical about a resistance party hoped that the MLN would become a moral force in post-war France offering a progressive alternative to communism. Fusing socialism and progressive Catholicism, it would represent a socialism cleansed of the doctrinaire Marxism and anti-clericalism of the Socialist Party.36 The problem with this idea of a Third Force between conservatism and communism—a French travaillisme as it was dubbed—was that it required the Socialists to offer themselves up for sacrifice. But their refusal to join the MLN in 1944 showed that they were not ready to do this. Another obstacle was that various Christian Democrats in the Resistance were discussing the possibility of creating a new confessional party.37 This was the origin of the post-war MRP. A resistance party without the Socialists or progressive Catholics was clearly doomed to insignificance.

  Nor was the Resistance, despite its rhetoric of unity, able to transcend the conflicts that had existed in French politics before 1940. On education, for example, most strands of the Resistance, from OCM to the Communists, agreed on the need for greater democratization through the removal of the barriers between the primary and secondary systems. But they had no common view about Vichy’s policy of subsidizing Catholic schools.38 Although the issue was tacitly shelved in order to preserve the façade of unity, dissension lay only just beneath the surface. Only five days after the Normandy landings, Maurice Schumann attended a lunch at Bayeux in honour of the Resistance. As one historian describes the scene: ‘for the first time the members of the various movements discovered that they included Catholics, atheists, Freemasons, and even priests. By the end of the meal the assembled company were already quarrelling over subsidies to the confessional schools.’39

  Making Plans

  The Resistance avoided the intractable issue of religion and education with good reason, but many other issues were debated in great detail. An extraordinary amount of time was devoted to drafting plans for the post-war world. This had not been true at the beginning. The first issue of Libération-Sud proclaimed in July 1941: ‘Tomorrow will be the time for political doctrines. Today our objective must be to escape the wretched condition of a conquered people.’40 But priorities began to change when the question became not if, but when, France would be liberated. In November 1942, Défense de la France asked: ‘What do we want to do after the country is liberated?’ A year later, another publication observed: ‘in the heat of battle … essays, political theses, draft constitutions are springing up almost everywhere, circulating, being discussed.’41 The journalist Jean-François Revel recalls that his own role as a messenger boy for the Resistance involved carrying around elaborate plans for the future of France with no relevance to the struggle against the Germans. After the war, he made himself unpopular by writing a satirical story in which a resister is arrested and found to be carrying not plans for sabotage, but a study of the oil resources of Central Anatolia.42

  The pioneer of reflection about the political future was OCM. Although no other movement matched the detail of the OCM Cahiers, others also created specialized publications to discuss reforms: Défense de la France started producing its Cahiers in the spring of 1943, and Libération-Sud in September 1943.43 But post-war planning was not confined to these publications: between November 1942 and August 1944, a fifth of the content of the newspaper Défense de la France concerned the post-Liberation political future.44 The most detailed planning was done by the CGE, set up for this purpose in 1942. Although its members were recruited from the Resistance, the CGE began to work closely with the Delegation, and its outlook became increasingly governmental. For this reason, it needs to be distinguished, as a centre of reflection, from the rest of the Resistance. D’Astier complained that the CGE was ‘a circle too closed to the wishes of the most activist part of the Resistance’.45 Originally the CGE had six members recruited from the Southern movements
. There were three jurists (de Menthon, Paul-Henri Teitgen, and the former Radical député Paul Bastid), a trade unionist (Robert Lacoste), a high-ranking civil servant (Alexandre Parodi), and a professor of economics (René Courtin). In 1943, Moulin added three members from the North: Michel Debré, a young civil servant; Pierre Lefaucheux, an engineer; Jacques Charpentier, a lawyer. They were a homogeneous group, all (except Lacoste) members of the liberal upper bourgeoisie, most with legal backgrounds—exactly the kind of people Franc-Tireur had said should not be in charge of the post-war destinies of France. Thinking governmentally was what these mandarins had been trained to do.

  The Socialists also spent much time discussing post-war reforms. In 1942, the CAS set up study commissions to examine post-war policies, and by March 1944 it had produced four different draft programmes.46 The Communists, however, devoted little attention to post-Liberation arrangements. They avoided detailed commitments, wanting the situation at the Liberation to be as open-ended as possible. Communist propaganda concentrated on the present: the denunciation of attentisme and the call for an insurrection. To the extent that the Party did start discussing post-war reforms in the second half of 1943, it was in order not to leave the initiative entirely to the Socialists.47 In 1943, the Socialists and CGT had both presented draft programmes to the CNR. Not to be outdone, Pierre Villon proposed an alternative draft on behalf of the Communists. This formed the basis of a programme that was adopted by the CNR in March 1944. This CNR Charter, as it came to be called, demanded the punishment of traitors, the reestablishment of the freedom of the press, the introduction of a system of social security, and the implementation of a ‘directed economy’. The Charter was vague on details, and designed to be as consensual as possible. Its most radical proposal was for the ‘return to the nation’ of various key economic sectors including mining, energy, banking, and insurance. The vague term ‘return to the nation’ was a compromise between the Socialists, who wanted a commitment to full-blooded nationalization, and the Communists, who wanted to avoid antagonizing conservatives.48 The CNR Charter was the nearest that the Resistance came to producing a single programmatic statement about the future. At the time, however, it was not seen as particularly important. It was only after the Liberation, when people feared that the Resistance was being betrayed, that the Charter acquired legendary status.