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In fact, the crowds cheering de Gaulle were immeasurably larger, and although the newsreels of Pétain’s visit depict an ecstatic population, this was only achieved by a certain degree of cheating. In the version that appeared once the visit had been memorialized in a documentary, the sad and tired face of an old lady, which appeared in the first version of the newsreels, had been replaced by a more suitable image.27 Even then, the documentary cannot disguise the fact that the crowd’s reaction was far from the adulation of 1940. The applause for Pétain reflected the ambiguity of the situation more than the inconstancy of the French. During Pétain’s visit, the Germans kept in the background, and allowed French flags to be displayed for the first time since the Armistice. In this context, cheering Pétain was a way of showing patriotism.
The complex emotions aroused by Pétain’s visit are recorded in the contemporary account written by Claude Mauriac. His attitude towards Pétain had been similar to that of most of his countrymen: hostility to collaboration from the outset; faith in Pétain turning to disillusion; increasing sympathy for the Resistance. It was no unconditional Pétainist who wrote the following words:
At last, after at least two hours, the Marshal’s car appeared, preceded by helmeted motorcyclists, as we had often seen in the newsreels, and it was exactly what I had expected. What I had not expected was the emotion which suddenly took hold of me, at the sight, under the gold braid of his kepi gleaming in the sun… of Marshal Pétain… slumped between the Prefect of the Seine and the Prefect of Police, both also in full uniform …I was so moved that I failed to observe the reactions of the spectators (which had been the supposed pretext of my long wait), and was even incapable of saying if they had shouted ‘Long Live Pétain’ or ‘Long Live France’ or anything else. This was the miracle of the ‘presence’: on the radio the sparse acclamations which greeted Pétain when he left Notre-Dame had seemed to me ridiculous. But now I was overcome, and although I did not go as far as to shout, I was filled with a feeling of love and gratitude. ‘If he does two tours of Paris like this, he will re-conquer France’, I thought to myself… This morning, with a bit more distance from the event, I was even more amazed, and humiliated, by my reaction, which I have only noted down in my great desire to be always as truthful as possible.
Mauriac reported his reactions to a friend who had another version of the event: ‘what overwhelmed me today was not the sight of the old man, it was a mother showing her 5- or 6-year-old child the French flag which was flying at the Hôtel de Ville for the first time since the start of the Occupation…For the child had never yet seen the French flag.’28 The Paris visit was followed by others to bombed cities of the Northern Zone. In Normandy, Pétain found himself in deserted streets with closed shutters.29 Visits to Orléans and Nancy were more successful. Overall, this evidence that the Pétain myth was not entirely discredited encouraged those at Vichy who hoped for a smooth transition to the post-Liberation regime. For de Gaulle, such a solution was out of the question—he did not wish to receive his legitimacy from Vichy—but it might appear attractive to the French if the alternative was a descent into anarchy or the threat of a Communist seizure of power. Everything depended on the Communists’ intentions, and on de Gaulle’s capacity to control events.
The Communists
The Communist Party was viewed by its opponents as a monolithic organization. But in 1944 the Party leadership was still scattered in three places: Thorez had been in Moscow since November 1939; Duclos and Tillon were in Paris; Marty was in Algiers. Contact between these leaders was difficult, and there were differences of tone, if not policy, between them. Thorez, who had disapproved of Duclos’s overtures to the Germans in 1940, now believed that Marty was being excessively intransigent towards de Gaulle and missing the opportunity to increase Communist influence. He resented being stuck in Moscow at such a crucial moment. On the other hand, it was in Moscow that important decisions were taken. Thorez did not write an article without first securing Soviet approval; Marty sent Moscow every scrap of information he could glean in Algiers.30
At the end of 1943, the Communists realized they had overplayed their hand in trying to impose conditions on their participation in the CFLN. On 4 April 1944, a compromise was reached, and two Communists joined the CFLN: Fernand Grenier and François Billoux. Nonetheless Communists remained extremely suspicious of de Gaulle. Marty told Moscow in April that the CFLN was stuffed with attentistes and de Gaulle was an enemy. Four months later, he described de Gaulle’s government as a ‘ragbag of agents of the Allies and the trusts and also elements linked to the enemy (Frenay)’. Johanny Berlioz told the Central Committee: ‘we are entering the government as into battle for it is impossible to believe in the peaceful coexistence of two systems, either between capitalist and Socialist states, or between the parties within France’.31
The Communists relentlessly attacked the Delegation and the Resistance. They claimed they were being discriminated against in arms drops to the Resistance and that the exploits of the FTP were ignored by Gaullist spokesmen on the BBC.32 Such was the ferocity of these attacks that the Delegation thought the Communists might break entirely with the CFLN. But they had no intention of doing this, and even when calling for an insurrection they were careful to declare that it was to be in the name of the CFLN.33
The Communists’ strategy was to exploit every source of influence in order to maximize their options at the liberation. As well as consolidating their position within the Resistance institutions like the CNR, they tried to develop competing centres of power. At the end of 1943, they began promoting the formation of ‘Patriotic Militias’ to create the embryo of a sort of people’s army. The Communists wanted these militias to be independent of the existing Resistance organizations, but the CNR would only accept them if they were integrated into the FFI. On 26 March, the Communists flouted this instruction by announcing they had set up a Central Council of the Patriotic Militias. In effect, this would have brought the Patriotic Militias under exclusive Communist control. In the face of protests by Copeau and Bidault (further evidence that Copeau was no Communist stooge), Villon backed down and accepted the dissolution of the Council. In fact, at this stage the issue was somewhat theoretical because the militias hardly existed except on paper.34
The Communists also pressed for the creation of Local Liberation Committees (CLL) in factories and villages, below the CDLs. These Committees would organize an insurrection at grass-roots level, and allow local leaders to emerge ‘spontaneously’—as in Corsica. The aim was to fragment power as much as possible at the Liberation. In February 1944, the Communist dominated Parisian Liberation Committee (CPL) went ahead and set up CLLs in the Paris region. Closon worried that these could become like local Soviets, but rather than opposing this tendency outright, he tried to neutralize it by proposing to subordinate CLLs to the authority of the CDLs. When the CNR agreed to the creation of CLLs in March, the Communists had to concede this point. But they continued to harbour greater ambitions for the CLLs. In June, Party cadres were instructed that after the Liberation, they should nominate new municipal councils, taking account of the ‘desire of the masses’. This contravened the CFLN ordinance of 21 April stipulating that in most cases pre-war municipalities would be restored, and that where they were not, the prefect would select a new one in consultation with the CDL.35
The Communists invented the idea of CLLs partly because they felt they were under-represented in the CDLs. They now demanded that this injustice be remedied. In the Alpes-Maritimes, for example, the CDL set up in December 1943 comprised eight members: three MLN, one Catholic trade unionist (CFTC), one non-Communist trade-unionist, one Christian Democrat (PDP), one Communist, and one ‘Catholic’. The Communists successfully lobbied for two more seats, one for the FN and one for a Communist trade unionist. But this still gave them only three out of ten seats. In the spring of 1944, the Communists demanded seats for their various front organizations such as the UFF or the ‘Committees of Wives of Resis
tance Martyrs’. The conflict became increasingly acrimonious until in June the CDL split when the Socialists and MLN refused to have any more to do with the Communists.36 In the Var for similar reasons, the CDL was close to splitting by April.37
By now the MLN’s fear of the Communists had prevailed over its suspicion of the Socialists. In April, it officially supported the Socialists’ desire for representation on the noyaux actif of the CDLs.38 Awareness of the political ambitions of the Communists should not obscure the fact that the Socialists were hardly less determined to maximize their political influence at the Liberation. In July 1944, Morandat reported that Libération-Nord had become essentially a movement of ‘cadres placing its men in municipalities, in administrative posts and in CDLs’.39
By the Liberation, the Communists had about a quarter of the places on the CDLs of the North and 35 per cent of those in the South.40 Their greatest achievement, however, was to succeed, by a mixture of luck, subterfuge, and determination, in acquiring significant control over the military organization of the Resistance, starting with COMAC at the top. Originally COMAC had three members: one from the North (Jean de Vogüé of CDLR), one from the South (Maurice Chevance of MLN-Combat), and one from the FN (Pierre Villon). The Communists, therefore, had one out of three seats. The Delegation tried to reduce this to one out of four, by arguing that General Revers should be allowed to sit on behalf of ORA. But Revers’s Pétainist past aroused hostility from more than just the Communists. After he had formally repudiated Vichy, he was granted a seat on COMAC in February, but only in a consultative capacity.41
At this point, the Communists had several pieces of luck. On 24 March, Claude Bourdet, Combat’s representative on the Executive Committee of the MLN, was arrested. He was replaced by Marcel Degliame who proceeded to form a powerful axis with Libération-Sud’s representative, Pascal Copeau. Now that the two dominant figures on the MLN were both sympathetic to the Communists, when Chevance, the MLN’s representative on COMAC, left on a mission to Algiers, he was replaced by the Communist Maurice Kriegel. This meant that two of the three full members of COMAC were now Communists. On 5 May, Pontcarral-Jussieu, head of the AS, was arrested, and in his place COMAC appointed Alfred Malleret (Joinville), another undeclared Communist. Malleret in turn appointed the Communist Rol-Tanguy to command the FFI in the crucial Paris region. By the spring of 1944, the Communists held some twenty-two of the thirty-eight top military posts in the Resistance, although, owing to arrests, this figure fluctuated.42
COMAC now began to assert its independence. On 13 May, it declared that it had the right to issue operational orders to the FFI in France. A COMAC directive of 24 May called for ‘mass resistance of an insurrectional nature’. Although COMAC accepted theoretically that the FFI would act within the framework of Allied plans, the role it was claiming for itself was bound to result in conflict with the CFLN. De Gaulle had, after all, only just appointed General Koenig to command the FFI from London.43
This was not simply a conflict between the Communists and de Gaulle. The non-Communist member of COMAC, de Vogüé, often sided with the Communists. Like many non-Communist resisters, he resented outside interference in the affairs of the Resistance.44 When the Communists complained that the CFLN had discriminated against them in the choice of provisional secretary-generals, they played on the touchiness of the Resistance at attempts to exclude it from decision making. When it came to working out the balance of power between the provisional secretary-generals, chosen by the CFLN, and the ministerial commissions to advise them, chosen by the CNR, the anti-Communist Blocq-Mascart was among those in favour of strengthening the latter.45 The attitude of the Resistance to the CFLN was tellingly illustrated by Laffon’s warning in July that the Resistance was unhappy at a new replacement for the post of Commissaire de la République in Rouen: ‘if they reject any idea of a foreign AMGOT, they are also irritated by the idea of a French AMGOT’.46
The distinction between the ‘activist’ FTP and the ‘attentiste’ AS was increasingly blurred when in April 1944 the AI (Immediate Action) division of the MLN was merged with the AS to form a single organization: the Free Corps of the Liberation (CFL). By eliminating the distinction between immediate action and action after D-Day, the CFL undercut Communist accusations of attentisme: the CFL was to the MLN what the FTP was to the FN.47 Staking out a position between the CFLN and the Communists, the MLN moved closer to the latter.
In reality, the creation of the CFL made little difference on the ground. Where local Resistance leaders had accustomed themselves to waiting for orders from London before acting, the invention of a new abbreviation did not change anything. Madeleine Baudouin, a member of the MLN’s Groupes francs (part of the AI) in Marseilles, remembered that her group, which carried out daring actions with minimal resources, found the AS excessively cautious. Despite being formally linked with it in the CFL, they felt more affinity with the FTP. The same was true of the saboteurs in the Workers’ Action (AO) section of the MLN who were also now formally part of the CFL.48 In other words, the line between immediate action and attentisme passed not between the non-Communist Resistance and the Communists, but through the non-Communist Resistance. The attraction of the Communists was that they were unambiguously in favour of immediate action, and this won them support from members of non-Communist movements who found their leaders too timid. The lure of military action was so compelling that even Philippe Viannay asked to be given an FFI command in the spring of 1944, although his resistance comrades felt it was absurd for him to stop doing what he had done brilliantly for three years— produce a newspaper—in favour of something for which he had neither training nor experience.49
What Kind of Insurrection?
How was the military action of the Resistance supposed to fit into Allied plans? The truth was that the French Resistance had hardly figured in Allied planning before D-Day. The priority for arms drops in 1943 were Greece and Yugoslavia where genuine guerrilla war was occurring. Churchill’s sudden decision to arm the Maquis was a typically impulsive gesture, but not part of any strategic reconsideration of the Resistance.50 The Allies did not expect more from the Resistance than to disrupt German communications after D-Day. The same view was held by BCRA which drafted an ‘Instruction on the military action of the French Resistance’. This was approved by the Allied General Staff, and communicated to FFI regional commanders in March 1944.
The Instruction anticipated a three-stage liberation battle: the coastal region (five days), the bridgehead (four to six weeks), and finally the Liberation of the rest of the country (four to six months). The Resistance would be provided with specific objectives: preventing the movement of German reinforcements to the coast (Tortoise Plan), sabotaging rail transport (Green Plan), disrupting radio communications (Violet Plan), targeting electricity lines (Blue Plan). The Instruction also envisaged the possibility of mobile operations by Maquis guerrilla groups based in secure mountain bases, but there was to be no insurrection. One BCRA official wrote in May: ‘it is important for the success of our plans that there is in France no general insurrection, nor partial uprising, nor general strike’.51 The only concession to the possibility of an insurrection was the idea that, in some mountainous areas of the south-east, military action might lead progressively to an insurrection, within the framework of Allied military planning, and assisted by an Allied airlift. This was dubbed the Caiman Plan.
Nothing could have been more different from the views of the Communists who were ever more feverishly calling for an insurrection. In the Communist scenario of liberation, strikes and demonstrations would lead on to the construction of barricades and the seizure of arms, and in the final stages, the masses, led by the Patriotic Militia, would join the armed action of the FTP. Such insurrectionary rhetoric was not confined to the Communists. Lorraine declared in February 1944: ‘It is no longer the time to wait for D-Day. Fire on the Milice and the Boches. Forward towards direct action, towards the national insurrection.’52 The word ‘ins
urrection’ summoned up romantic images of nineteenth-century barricades. In October 1943, a manifesto of the resistance movements in the CCDM declared:
There is no liberation without insurrection. This could take diverse forms, but what the Resistance owes to itself and to its martyrs is something more than a palace revolution or a coup d’état. As a manifestation of the strength of the masses the Insurrection will give a popular and democratic base to the provisional Government… and immediately impose on it revolutionary economic and social measures.53
Such language sounded similar to that used by the Communists, but in fact it lay somewhere between the BCRA/Allied conception of liberation as an operation carried out by trained fighters, witnessed by a non-participating but supportive population, and the Communist idea of liberation as an insurrection involving the whole population.54 The Communists saw insurrection as a continuous process moving from civil disobedience to a levée en masse, and occurring independently of Allied operations; the manifesto confined it to the ‘short space of time… between the departure of the Germans… and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons’. The Communists wanted the insurrection to be as open-ended as possible; the manifesto wanted it to consolidate the legitimacy of de Gaulle’s provisional government. The Communists wanted it to be as spontaneous as possible; the manifesto warned that it must not be ‘left to fantasy or improvisation’. D’Astier telegraphed to Parodi in May that he hoped for a ‘short insurrection’ of three to four days, ideally forty-eight hours. This restrictive notion of insurrection as the culmination of liberation rather than the means by which it occurred, was acceptable even to the cautious officers of ORA.55