by Philip Short
Like many other returnees, Mitterrand believed that the ‘prisoner spirit’ of egalitarianism and fair play should be part of whatever social model would be adopted after the war. But at Vichy his patrician instincts dominated and were coloured by the fascist leanings of many of those around him. The circle of officials he frequented – including men like Simon Arbellot de Vacqueur, Pétain’s press chief, and Gabriel Jeantet, who edited the Pétainist monthly, France, both linked to the pre-war Cagoule; and Jean Delage, who had been his mentor at L’Echo de Paris – was drawn largely from the far Right.17 All of them believed that Pétain was the only rational choice.
The second set of factors was more complicated.
If Pétain’s policy of coexisting with the Germans was untenable, the sole alternative was open revolt. That was what de Gaulle urged from London. Some of Mitterrand’s friends, notably Pierre de Bénouville, had already taken that course. But in the Free Zone, there were no Germans and therefore no military targets. The three main resistance movements in the South – Combat, led by Henri Frenay; Libération, under Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie; and Franc-Tireur (Sharp-shooter), headed by Jean-Pierre Lévy – carried out intelligence-gathering, published clandestine newspapers, intimidated known collaborators and organised demonstrations and boycotts against the Occupation. To Mitterrand, that did not go much further than what he and his colleagues at the Commissariat were already doing. In the Occupied Zone it was different. Since the spring of 1942, a communist movement, the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, had been killing enemy soldiers, provoking harsh reprisals against the civilian population. But even there, Resistance activity was limited. In the winter of 1942, some 20–30,000 French men and women, or fewer than one in 700 of the adult, able-bodied population, actively opposed the Germans. There was as yet no regular channel for parachuting in arms, and tensions between de Gaulle’s Free French and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), both of which wanted to control the non-communist Resistance inside France, meant that the weapons supply was sporadic and parsimonious, when it existed at all.
In these circumstances, to go underground was to take a leap into the unknown. A year earlier, Mitterrand had made such a leap to escape from Ziegenhain. But this time there was no Marie-Louise to goad him into action.
A third factor which might have been expected to influence him – the increasingly blatant complicity of the Vichy administration in the persecution of Jews – had no effect at all.
In October 1940, when Mitterrand was a PoW, Pétain had promulgated decrees excluding French Jews from the civil service, the army, the teaching profession and journalism, and ordering foreign Jews to be interned. In 1941, also before his return, additional decrees extended the list of prohibited professions; authorised, in certain cases, the internment of French Jews; and provided for the confiscation of Jewish businesses. In the Occupied Zone, where similar regulations were in force, Jews were required after June 1942 to wear a yellow star on their clothing.
That summer, at the Germans’ request, Laval’s police chief, René Bousquet, initiated a systematic round-up of foreign Jews throughout France, which he insisted, as a matter of national pride, be carried out by the French police. Before the war Bousquet had been an unusually gifted provincial administrator, one of the youngest ever recipients of the principal French decoration, the Légion d’honneur. He was not pro-Nazi and his motives remain opaque. To some he was utterly cynical, a moral spiv who played both sides in the war, ready to do anything to advance his own interests. To others, perhaps more plausibly, his role in the deportation of the Jews was an extreme case of that perverse reflex which holds that empowering one’s own countrymen, even if it is to do the enemy’s work, is a way of upholding sovereignty.fn1 The one does not necessarily exclude the other. On July 16 and 17 1942, in what was named Operation Spring Wind, Bousquet’s men detained nearly 13,000 foreign Jews from the area around Paris. The following day the first trainload left for Auschwitz.
Towards the end of his life, when Mitterrand was asked about his reaction to these events, his response was chilling: ‘I didn’t think about the anti-Semitism of Vichy. I knew that, unfortunately, anti-Semites occupied an important place around the Marshal, but I did not follow the legislation . . . We weren’t dealing with that. We were concentrating on the plight of the PoWs and the returnees . . .’
In conversations with Elie Wiesel, the Jewish writer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who had become a friend, he was a little more forthcoming and, at the same time, misleading. ‘When I saw the yellow stars,’ he said, ‘when I knew the status of the Jews, it contributed to distancing me from a system which accepted that crime.’ It was an odd choice of words – ‘distancing’, not ‘condemning’ – and in any case he saw no yellow stars until the winter of 1942.18 Until then the plight of the Jews completely passed him by.
Many others, French Jews included, closed their eyes to what was happening. The Levy-Despas, with whom he had stayed in St Tropez, were Jewish. So was Mitterrand’s flatmate in Vichy that spring, Serge Miller. Even among them the anti-Jewish legislation was not a topic of discussion. Throughout Mitterrand’s time at Vichy, the fate of the Jewish community was a non-issue. Just as, in the 1930s, when he was a law student in Paris, it had not troubled him that some of his friends were anti-Semitic, so now he contributed articles to Pétainist magazines which published strident anti-Jewish propaganda.19
Such attitudes were widespread. Before the war, anti-Semitism was woven into the fabric of continental European societies, no more remarked on than segregation in the southern United States. Some people approved of it; others – like Mitterrand – did not. But almost no one was outraged. Anti-Semitism then, like homelessness today, was part of the landscape.
The Vichy legislation was drawn up in this context. Mitterrand’s friend, Jacques Bénet, said later: ‘For us – for him as well – it was fatally bound up with German domination. The Germans demanded it.fn2 Since they did it in their country, it was almost normal that they imposed it here. We had the choice between lumping it and resisting, and we said to ourselves, “all right, we are going to have to lump it”.’ To Bénet, with hindsight, the situation became intolerable when the large-scale detention of Jews began that summer. However that was a judgement made half a century later. How many French people at the time, other than those whose friends or families were directly involved, felt revulsion at the mass arrests is much harder to know.fn3
Paradoxically it was Hitler, through the revelation of the death camps, who made tolerance of anti-Semitism impossible in Europe. Confronted with the Final Solution, looking the other way ceased to be an option.
But that was afterwards. It was not until 1945, when Germany surrendered, that the full horror of places like Auschwitz and Belsen became widely known.20 In the meantime, those who opposed Nazi policies towards the Jews did so not so much from revulsion against the principles of the Vichy legislation as on a personal, case by case, basis, reacting to the distress of individuals they knew and cared about. French schoolteachers concealed the identities of Jewish children in their classes; families protected Jewish neighbours; householders sheltered Jewish friends. The men and women who risked their lives to save Jewish families from the Gestapo and the Milice were not members of the Resistance or de Gaulle’s Free French in London.21 They were the same ordinary citizens that those groups implicitly condemned for not taking a stronger stand against the Germans and their allies. The image of collective cowardice during the Occupation was palliated in reality by a multitude of acts of individual courage.
As in the case of Vichy, so in the case of French Jews, history was rewritten to serve the interests of those who came after.
October 1942 found Mitterrand still at the Commissariat for Prisoners of War. In the middle of that month, he and Marcel Barrois were received by Pétain to report on the work of the Mutual Aid Centre in the Allier. Mitterrand would later claim that the prisoners’ resistance movement had been formed at this
time from the fusion of several small groups led by himself, Mauduit, de Montjoye, and Guy Fric. This was not true. Nothing changed that autumn. Mitterrand continued to believe in the Marshal, while remaining obsessed with his own doubts and demons. ‘It has been so long that I have not known who I am,’ he had complained to a friend some weeks earlier. He agonised over his loss of religious faith and ‘the vanity of my hopes and my struggles’.
At last, in November, the event occurred which, as he had hoped, would ‘force’ him to commit himself. The Allies invaded North Africa. Three days later, on November 11, the Germans occupied the Free Zone. The myth of Pétain, ‘the shield’, protecting France from the invader, shattered.
At the beginning of December, a third, inconclusive meeting was held at Montmaur. Once again there was no agreement on how best to move forward. But then, in January 1943, the Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, summoned Maurice Pinot and told him that he was being replaced as Commissioner for Prisoners of War by one of Laval’s minions, André Masson. When Pinot refused to resign, Laval dismissed him.
The following day, Mitterrand and most of the rest of Pinot’s colleagues resigned en masse. At the time it was an exceptional gesture, which could have ended in all their arrests. Laval toyed with that idea, but then thought better of it. For Mitterrand, the time for self-questioning was finally over: the moment of truth had arrived. He told his cousin, Marie-Claire Sarrazin:
I don’t worry [any more] about what lies ahead. On the contrary, things are looking good – under different forms but all of them rather cheering – and I am going to lie low for a bit . . . I almost despaired when I saw that all our work over the last few months had been wiped out at the stroke of a pen, but my taste for uncertainty – that uncertainty that carries the seeds of triumph – has won out. This new departure is both a separation [from what came before] and a coming closer to the things that remain true. I am starting [again], and not from my point of origin.22
His letters that month showed an enthusiasm he had not felt since the previous summer. On paper he was merely one of the three members of the ‘steering committee’ appointed at Montmaur in August, but he was determined to make that a springboard to a more prominent role. He established links with the Chantiers de Jeunesse (Youth Worksites), a national service organisation which Vichy had set up after the Armistice, and the Compagnons de France, aimed primarily at teenagers, which was among the few organised groups at that time to accept and protect Jewish members. Both movements supported Pétain, were hostile to Pierre Laval and opposed the Communists and de Gaulle. Like the Mutual Aid Centres, they were resources which Mitterrand could use when the nascent prisoners’ resistance took wing.
In February 1943, the pieces began to fall into place.
At the beginning of that month, Mitterrand and five others met, with Pinot’s blessing, at an isolated farm near the hamlet of Bellegarde-en-Marche, 50 miles east of Clermont-Ferrand, where they decided their first priority should be to sabotage the attempts of the new Commissioner, André Masson, to mobilise the PoWs behind Laval. They also discussed the opportunity of military action but decided it would be premature.23
Pinot, meanwhile, had been in touch with Bernard de Chalvron, one of the co-founders of a Resistance organisation called Super-NAP, from the initials of Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (Infiltration of the Public Administration), which placed informers in senior government posts in Vichy and in Paris. That month, Pinot and de Chalvron met General Georges Revers, one of the leaders of the ORA, the Organisation de résistance de l’armée (Army Resistance Organisation), formed by dissident army officers after the Occupation of the South. Pinot introduced Mitterrand and it was agreed that he should act as the public face of the future prisoners’ movement because, as de Chalvron put it, there were ‘obvious political reasons’ why it could not be headed by Pinot, who was identified too closely with the Vichy administration.
One more meeting was needed before Mitterrand’s dispositions were complete. On February 13, he returned to Montmaur for a fourth time for discussions with Mauduit and other members of ‘the Chain’. Jacques de Montjoye and Etienne Gagnaire, of the Prisoners’ Action Centre in Lyon, were also present, as was de Gaulle’s nephew, Michel Cailliau. A battle was brewing. Cailliau was courageous, naïve, excitable – ‘de Gaulle in caricature’, as his colleague, Edgar Morin, put it – deeply hostile to the Left and suspicious of Jews and Freemasons.24 He regarded Mitterrand and his associates as ‘milk and Vichy water’.
Cailliau urged immediate armed struggle and an intelligence operation to help the Free French and the Allies. Mitterrand agreed that they should prepare for direct resistance against the enemy but insisted, ‘this is not the moment’. Cailliau afterwards quoted him as saying: ‘So you kill a German, and provoke the shooting of fifty hostages in reprisal. Is that what you want?’ – which was Maurice Pinot’s position. Sabotage was legitimate and should be encouraged,25 Mitterrand said, but the new movement’s main task should be to prevent the returned PoWs, now numbering more than half a million, from being herded into Vichy-led movements which supported Pierre Laval. In the end, Mitterrand’s arguments won the day. Cailliau was appointed, together with Mauduit, Mitterrand, Jean-Albert Roussel from the Mutual Aid Centre for the Allier and, later, Jacques de Montjoye, to a ‘National Committee for Prisoners’ Struggle’, which was to head the new movement. But the episode caused bad blood. From the start Cailliau had found Mitterrand antipathetic. Now he hated him.
For Mitterrand, things could hardly have gone better. He was exactly where he wanted to be, at the centre of a web of influence which encompassed the ORA, Maurice Pinot and his followers, the Chantiers, the Compagnons, and the Mutual Aid Centres. Pinot, Mauduit and de Montjoye – all a decade or more his senior – remained the dominant figures. But he was well placed for whatever might follow. And his winning streak continued. In March the ORA agreed to subsidise the future Pinot–Mitterrand movement – Pin’–Mitt’, as Cailliau derisively called it – providing funds for Mitterrand himself and for a secretary, sixteen-year-old Ginette Caillard, who had worked previously at the Commissariat.
That month Mitterrand called Jacques Bénet and another friend from his student days, a discreet young Breton named Pol Pilven, to come and help him. Two others, Jacques Marot, who was working with the Compagnons in Lyon, and André Bettencourt, agreed to undertake special missions. Bénet proved a gifted organiser and spent the spring and early summer laying the foundations of a Resistance network among members of the Mutual Aid Centres who wanted to do more than social work and were ready to confront the Germans directly.
Meanwhile the relationship between the nascent prisoners’ movement and the ORA was fleshed out. One consisted of ex-PoWs, all former soldiers; the other of army officers: there was a natural synergy between them. By April 1943, Mitterrand was in regular contact not only with General Revers, but directly with General Aubert Frère, the overall chief of the ORA who had once been de Gaulle’s commanding officer. More funds were made available and he was able to take on Jean Munier, who had been repatriated from Ziegenhain during the winter, for 3,000 francs (£16 or US $65) a month, as his first full-time agent.
By this time Michel Cailliau’s relations with the other members of the ‘National Committee’ set up in February had reached breaking point. He was in disagreement not only with Mitterrand but with Mauduit and Montjoye over money, facilities and policy. At the end of April, he announced that he was leaving and would not return until the Committee was ready to undertake ‘real resistance’.
Such rivalries were not unusual. The Resistance was not always a selfless, chivalrous fraternity. It was not that kind of war. Its leaders were strong characters, under enormous pressure, at the mercy of informers, risking torture and death if caught. Working together did not come easily.
But in this case the fracture went deeper. In 1943, de Gaulle was not yet the unchallenged symbol of French resistance that he would later become. He had a rival: Gene
ral Henri Giraud, ten years his senior and with a war record as impressive as his own. Giraud had been captured in May 1940 and incarcerated in the fortress of Koenigstein, near Dresden. After nearly two years of preparation, he staged a spectacular escape on April 17 1942 and made his way to Vichy. The US President, Franklin Roosevelt, who loathed de Gaulle, regarding him, correctly, as troublesome, haughty and impervious to American control, saw in Giraud the possibility of a ‘third way’ between Vichy and the man of whom Churchill said that the heaviest cross he had ever had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine.
When the Allies invaded North Africa as a first step towards the reconquest of Europe, the Americans turned to Giraud to win over Vichy’s troops in the region to their cause. In December, he was named head of the Civil and Military Command in Algiers. The following month, at Casablanca, he and de Gaulle shook hands in the presence of their respective mentors, Roosevelt and Churchill. For most of the next year, they engaged in a stubborn struggle for power.
Cailliau, naturally, supported his uncle. Mitterrand was in Giraud’s camp.
Not only was the ORA, which financed the prisoners’ movement, a Giraudist organisation, but Colonel de Linares, one of the founders of Mauduit’s group, ‘the Chain’, was Giraud’s aide-de-camp. Mitterrand also had ties to Giraud of a more personal kind. The general’s son, Henri, whom he had met before the war, had served in the cavalry with his sister Colette’s husband, Pierre Landry, and the two had become close friends. His brother Robert’s father-in-law, Colonel (now General) Cahier, was a Giraudist, as was Jacques le Corbeiller, who had helped find him his first job in Vichy and was now on Giraud’s staff.
Equally important, Giraud, unlike de Gaulle, had not broken with Pétain. He condemned the Vichy government’s policies, but not the Marshal himself. It was possible in the spring of 1943 to be both maréchaliste and Giraudist. That was Mitterrand’s position. He believed that Pétain had behaved honourably. But the 86-year-old Marshal had shown himself to be powerless to protect France. The shield having sundered, only the sword remained.