Ophuls thought de Gaulle’s myth of an almost-universally resistant France had contaminated everyone who had lived through the war. “There’s something unhealthy about asking all these millions of individuals to lie to each other, to lie to themselves,” he told me. “I don’t think this can possibly be good politics — now or then.”‡ So he set out to correct the record.
The result was one of the greatest documentaries of the twentieth century. After it was — predictably — banned from French television, The Sorrow and the Pity became a huge hit with the younger generation at the movie theaters on the Left Bank in the spring of 1971. Its honesty fit the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s. The film featured interviews with everyone from the local butcher of Clermont-Ferrand to a Paris aristocrat who had served with the French division of the Waffen SS, as well as two former prime ministers of France and Great Britain: Pierre Mendès-France and Sir Anthony Eden.
The two-part, four-hour film filled a twenty-six-year vacuum of information with a brutal portrait of the stark divisions inside wartime France. Recalling a split reminiscent of the one in the Boulloche family, teachers from the lycée in Clermont-Ferrand described how their students were more active in the Resistance than their instructors, because “young people are generally much more sincere, and … more alive.” It also included a searing section on the decision of the French gendarmerie to arrest 4,051 Jewish children in Paris in the summer of 1942 — even though the Germans had never asked them to arrest anyone younger than sixteen. After four days of indecision, all the children were shipped off to Germany — and every one of them was gassed as soon as they arrived at the camps.
All of the Boulloche children of my generation saw The Sorrow and the Pity, and we all agreed it was an important event.§ A year later, the debate about France’s wartime behavior intensified with the publication of Vichy France by Robert O. Paxton, a young American historian who used German archives to document the extent of French collaboration during the war. Most of the Boulloches also read Paxton’s book. But neither the film nor the book lifted the veil shrouding the family’s wartime experiences.
IN THE LATE 1950s AND EARLY ’60s, André, Christiane, her husband, Jean Audibert, and Jacqueline all embraced France’s most progressive cause, by joining the Club Jean Moulin to battle the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète), a paramilitary terrorist group that used bombings and assassinations to try to prevent France from allowing Algeria to become independent.
Christiane around 1960, just before I met her for the first time in Paris.(photo credit 1.24)
France’s withdrawal from its North African colony was a long, bloody process for Algeria and France alike. Once de Gaulle became convinced that it was necessary to leave Algeria, he was the main enemy of the OAS. After an OAS uprising failed in Algiers in April 1961, the organization turned to terror on both sides of the Mediterranean, including several unsuccessful attempts to murder de Gaulle.
André shared the widespread view that the Algerian quagmire posed a serious threat to French democracy. He decided very quickly that de Gaulle was the only politician powerful enough to bring about France’s exit and prevent the return of a right-wing dictatorship in France. Indeed, that was the main reason he and his sisters supported de Gaulle’s return to power at the head of a new Fifth Republic in 1958. After that, André lobbied the general to leave Algeria whenever he saw him.
André said the war in Algeria was “eating the national tissue away like an acid. Civilians are scared of the military, and the military doesn’t trust the government.”
Meanwhile, Christiane remained as fearless as ever. She had become the treasurer of the Association for the Defense of Djamila Boupacha. The young Algerian woman was a famous and beautiful member of the FLN (Front de libération nationale algérien) who was tortured by the French into confessing terrorist activities. She was only twenty-three when she was condemned to death on June 28, 1961. Part of Christiane probably identified with the undaunted young activist.
“It was a period when there were terrorist attacks in Paris,” Christiane told me. “The OAS was carrying out terrorist attacks. And when I was the treasurer of the association, my name and address was on our literature. Which was a risk — there’s no question about that. When they were still very small, I tried to make [my] children understand that if they saw a suspicious package, they had to tell me right away. They thought this was very exciting! They didn’t realize that it was also very dangerous.”
Fortunately, Christiane’s apartment was never blown up, and she celebrated when Boupacha was granted amnesty, after France signed the Évian Accords, which gave Algeria independence, in Évian-les-Bains, on March 18, 1962. Boupacha was freed one month later — the same month that 90 percent of France voted to approve the accords in a referendum.
Jacqueline, who had worked for her brother when he was a minister, later became secretary-general of the UNESCO Clubs, which gave her a forum to lobby for the interests of the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and South America.
In the 1960s, Christiane turned her attention to women’s issues. Since 1920, French law had banned abortion and all information about contraception. Under the banner of “Si je veux, quand je veux” (If I want, when I want), Christiane campaigned for the legalization of both. In 1967, the Neuwirth Act finally legalized the sale of contraceptive devices, but abortion wasn’t legalized until 1975, and advertisements for contraceptives remained banned until 2001, four decades after the pill was introduced in America.
Christiane also became a sought-after family therapist, who continued to see patients well into her seventies. “As you can see,” she said, “we never lost the spirit of the Resistance.”
IN 1978, André Boulloche was approaching the pinnacle of his political career. Twenty years earlier, he had shown his independence by accepting an appointment as de Gaulle’s minister of education, even though the Socialist Party had voted against participating in de Gaulle’s new government. But less than a year later, André had quit over a dispute about government aid to parochial schools. André was against it, while de Gaulle and his prime minister, Michel Debré, were for it. After André voiced his objection, the president beseeched him to stay on, but his minister resigned anyway.
His tenure was marred by harsh publicity when his marriage blew up while he was minister. It led to an ugly divorce and a trial to determine the custody of his three children. This was especially difficult, because divorce was still very much a scandal in Catholic France in the late 1950s (as indeed it was for any American politician in this period).
Less than four months after his divorce, he married the beautiful Odile Pathé, the daughter of Charles Pathé, a founder of Pathé pictures, the legendary French film company. Odile had first met André immediately after the war, and she had her own book-publishing company. When all the left-wing publishers in Paris ignored George Orwell’s Animal Farm because it was a barely veiled attack on Stalinism, Odile rushed to London and secured the book for her publishing house, after two memorable lunches with the author. Les Animaux Partout was published by Éditions Odile Pathé in 1947.
President Charles de Gaulle at a ceremony commemorating the Resistance. André Boulloche, his education minister, is at the far right.(photo credit 1.25)
Following his resignation as de Gaulle’s minister and his new marriage, André gradually rebuilt his career with the hyperactivity that was his trademark. His children ended up living most of the time with their mother and saw their father only on alternate weekends. The children sometimes found their father terrifying. His experiences in three concentration camps were not without their consequences.
“He had a terrible violence in him which he contained,” said Jacques Boulloche, his youngest son — named, of course, for André’s dead father. “But sometimes it got out of hand. And when he was driving, he was a tyrant. I was terrified. It was quite something. He raced with everyone — he would not allow himself to be passed. It was crazy. And then, w
hen he got to [his constituency in] Montbéliard, it was the opposite. As soon as someone was trying to cross the street, he stopped. It was unbelievable. Because, you know, he would say, ‘That’s a voter!’ It was very funny. He was the sort of person who could not allow any car to go faster than he was going.”
He could also be a violent disciplinarian with his children — and his dog. He was “very rough” with Jacques, who had been a poor student when his father was minister of education — a record his father considered a personal embarrassment. “I got terrible, heavy spankings,” Jacques said.
“On the other hand, when I was bigger, I had a lot in common with him through science. I have very lovely memories of when I was at his house in Montigny-sur-Loing. I had a little chemistry lab in the basement, and I did chemistry experiments. And every weekend, he would ask me, ‘What do you need?’ Then during the week there was a store next to the National Assembly which sold stuff for chemistry labs, and he would go there and buy me whatever I needed. That was really nice. That’s how he encouraged my scientific spirit.” So despite the beatings he had suffered as a child, Jacques [fils] admired his father enough to sustain another ancient family tradition — he named his son André.
“My father was above all scientific,” Jacques told me. “I don’t know why he went into politics, because he wasn’t someone who knew how to communicate at all. He was a very hard worker. He was a technician, and he was very methodical. When he had a file, he analyzed it. He was, first and foremost, a polytechnicien.”
But with hard work, André Boulloche methodically overcame his lack of the common touch. In 1965, he was elected mayor of Montbéliard, a small city on the eastern border of France next to Switzerland and Germany. In 1967, he added the position of deputy in the National Assembly. With two full-time jobs, he was constantly in motion between Paris and Montbéliard; he told a national news magazine that the secret to his success was a “good airplane.” Two years later, he was a member of the directors’ committee of the Socialist Party and vice president of the Socialist group in the National Assembly.
By 1978, André was mayor of Montbéliard, a deputy in the National Assembly, and a rising star in the Socialist Party.(photo credit 1.26)
These were remarkable achievements, especially because there had never been any warmth between him and François Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party. Boulloche had been much closer to Mitterrand’s earthier predecessor, Gaston Defferre, the celebrated mayor of Marseille. Raymond Forni, a young friend and colleague in the National Assembly, remembered his mentor’s attitude toward Mitterrand this way: “Boulloche was certain that he was working for France — and Mitterrand was working for himself.” But despite the coolness between them, Mitterrand recognized that Boulloche was a man to be reckoned with. By 1978, André had become his party’s chief spokesman on economic affairs, and most people expected Mitterrand to make him the first Socialist finance minister since the war, if Mitterrand was elected president in 1981.
But a fateful plane trip during the 1978 parliamentary campaign changed all that.
FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND was invited to participate in a debate at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges by Christian Pierret, a thirty-two-year-old Socialist candidate for the National Assembly there.ǁ Pierret’s district adjoined André’s. When the party leader was too busy to participate in the debate, André Boulloche stepped in for him at the midday gathering in the provincial city in the Vosges Mountains.
André’s noontime appointment was less than a hundred miles from his own city of Montbéliard. But if he took a regularly scheduled airline, he wouldn’t be able to get back in time for his own campaign meeting that evening. So he asked his secretary to arrange another way to get there. Christian Pierret offered him an air taxi. “I don’t like to take those little planes,” André told his secretary. “But if I have to, I will.”
The weather was calm, with ten miles of visibility, when André took off at two thirty in the afternoon of March 16 from the airstrip outside Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He was alone with the twenty-three-year-old pilot, Renaud Mary, who was the son of the president of the commuter line they were traveling on.a Now André was returning to his own adopted city of Montbéliard, which was only a half an hour away by plane. He expected to address a thousand constituents at his own political meeting that night.
As he had all his life, the sixty-two-year-old politician was pushing himself as hard as he could. The first round of the election had gone badly for the Socialists, and this was no time to let up. The second, decisive round of the election was only four days away.
Montbéliard was the city that Boulloche had “parachuted” into in 1962 to create a new political base for himself. He had chosen it partly because it was a region of liberal Catholics and devout Protestants. Boulloche was a very liberal Catholic himself (none of his children had even been baptized) and his new constituents quickly embraced him. Three years after his arrival in Montbéliard, he was elected mayor.
His political accomplishments were the result of pure determination. A technocrat who had been an engineer of bridges and highways before the war, Boulloche didn’t start out with any aptitude for politics. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of a typical politician: One reporter wrote that the man with the gray crew cut and a somber countenance looked like a “secular monk.” He once described politics as “an infernal life.” But this was also someone who brought an unbreakable will to bear on everything he did.
“Are you ever discouraged?” a radio reporter asked him in 1976.
“Yes, but not very often.”
“What do you do when that happens?”
“I wait for it to pass.”
When he first arrived in Montbéliard, Boulloche had bonded with the workers of Peugeot, whose factories employed thirty-seven thousand workers in the region. His constituents recognized him as a gifted administrator. After thirteen years at City Hall, his adopted city boasted an improved public transportation system, a bustling cultural life, a new sanitation system, and a rebuilt city center.
After his first decade as mayor, André declared, “I think I can say without exaggeration that my team has completely transformed the place. People who come back after being away for fifteen years don’t even recognize it.” Now, whenever there was an election, the popular Socialist had the luxury of being able to spend much of his time assisting the campaigns of his less-well-established friends and allies.
AS THE LITTLE AIRPLANE headed south, it followed a flight path parallel with the Rhine. Suddenly, Boulloche’s preoccupation with the election was replaced by a more palpable danger. Half an hour into the flight, cruising at 150 miles an hour, the small aircraft started bouncing in high winds. Without warning, they were at the center of a violent winter storm. As they approached Montbéliard, snow and sleet blanketed the windscreen and hail rattled the cockpit, cutting their visibility to less than three hundred yards. The provincial airstrip at Montbéliard had no radar, and it waved them away. A policeman on the ground spotted them circling overhead; later he remembered that it had looked as if they were searching for the proper path.
From there they headed for Belfort-Fontaine, which was ten miles away. Raymond Forni, who represented a neighboring constituency, spotted the red-and-white plane when it was trying to land at the second airport. But the storm was fierce there too, so they decided to make for Basel-Mulhouse, an international airport equipped with radar for all-weather landings. It serves Basel, Switzerland, and Mulhouse, France. By now they had been flying for nearly two hours. Boulloche had been trained as a pilot in Morocco after the war, but he never got to fly because of a shortage of planes. Now he climbed into the copilot’s seat to try to help guide the plane to safety.
It was four twenty-three in the afternoon. The weather had cleared up at Montbéliard, but the pilot and his passenger didn’t know that, and the storm had followed them to Basel-Mulhouse.
“I can’t come down — I’ll manage by myself.”
Those
were the last words the tower at Basel-Mulhouse heard from the plane’s young pilot. As he headed east toward Frankfurt, air traffic controllers watched the plane disappear from their radar screens. The Piper started losing altitude because of the weight of the ice on its wings. At the same moment, its radio stopped working, because the antenna had been torn off by the storm.
A MOMENT LATER, buffeted by severe winds, or disoriented by the storm, the pilot changed direction by forty-five degrees — and slammed into the side of the Hochblauen, twenty-three hundred feet up the side of the thirty-eight-hundred-foot mountain.
This unconquerable man — the one who had survived three German concentration camps — had crashed in the Black Forest of Germany.
The little Piper was demolished, its shattered shell suspended upside down from the branches of a tree. Boulloche and the pilot were ejected from the plane at the moment of impact. They tumbled out of the cockpit into a foot-deep cushion of snow. The pilot’s face was smashed in, and André had a punctured lung. They were dazed and bleeding and suffering enormous pain. And yet, somehow, they were still alive.
When they realized they were able to walk, they began to limp down a path leading into the valley. They were assaulted by sheets of wet, white snow dropping out of the black sky. After struggling toward the valley a few hundred yards, they reached a shed built of logs, which had been erected to shelter summer tourists.
There they stopped to rest. Two miles away in the distance, they could hear a faint church bell, chiming five o’clock in a nearby village.
BACK IN PARIS, it was Boulloche’s secretary, Andrée Vauban, who was the first to raise the alarm. André had told her that he would be back in his office in Montbéliard by four thirty in the afternoon, and he would call her when he arrived. When she hadn’t heard from him by five o’clock, she called Montbéliard to check up on him.
The Cost of Courage Page 19