by Philip Short
Whether it should be wielded by de Gaulle or Giraud, or perhaps an alliance of the two, was still an open question. Throughout the spring and early summer, the two generals struggled to assert control over the burgeoning internal Resistance in order to reinforce their own power. Jacques de Montjoye was approached by an emissary of the Armée Secrète (Secret Army), which had been created by de Gaulle’s plenipotentiary in France, Jean Moulin, out of the paramilitary units of the three main resistance movements in the South: Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur. The prisoners’ movement was invited to join them. Mitterrand turned down the proposal. ‘The Secret Army is Gaullist and takes its orders from London,’ he told de Montjoye. ‘[We] should remain independent and [in any case], we are more on the Giraudist side.’
Overtures from the Gaullists continued. In April 1943, Mitterrand went to a meeting in Lyon with a man named Lahire, who turned out to be none other than his childhood friend, Pierre de Bénouville, now a trusted aide to Henri Frenay of Combat, who headed the Mouvement Unifié de la Résistance (Unified Resistance Movement), set up not long before to coordinate the three main movements in the South. They drove to a village near Mâcon, where Mitterrand found Frenay waiting for him in the back room of a bistro. The first contact went well. Frenay thought Mitterrand ‘intelligent and cultivated . . . with a lively appearance and a smile which worried me a little because it reminded me of d’Astier [the dynamic but uncontrollable leader of Libération]’. Mitterrand returned the compliment: Frenay was ‘solid as a rock and a visionary at the same time’.
Frenay wanted to know what the prisoners’ movement represented and how Mitterrand intended to cooperate with other resistance organisations. Pinot, through Bernard de Chalvron, had already been in contact with Frenay’s colleague, Claude Bourdet, as well as with d’Astier and Pascal Copeau of Libération and Eugène Claudius-Petit of Franc-Tireur. At first none of them had been able to understand why the ex-PoWs wanted to form their own group rather than joining an existing movement. But Pinot had explained that the shared experience of the camps had created ‘mutual trust and unity of views’ among the returnees which meant they would be more effective if they worked together. That was accepted. The problem was that Frenay and his friends wanted to deal with one prisoners’ movement, not two. Cailliau, since his break with Montmaur, had redoubled his efforts to launch his own network, which he called the Mouvement de résistance de prisonniers de guerre et déportés (MRPGD). It was numerically weaker than the Pinot–Mitterrand group, but he was de Gaulle’s nephew and that meant he could not be ignored. Frenay was not concerned about Mitterrand’s maréchaliste past – he had himself at one time sympathised with Pétain – and immediately saw the interest of a movement which could exploit the prisoner infrastructure which Vichy had created. The difficulty was how to bring the two groups together.
The next move, apparently at the urging of de Gaulle’s staff in London, came from Cailliau’s side. His deputy, Philippe Dechartre, who had recently been repatriated from Germany, was delegated to meet Mitterrand in Lyon at the end of May.26 He was not enthusiastic. Like Cailliau he thought Mitterrand’s kind of resistance was phoney: too political, too compromised with Pétain and Vichy. Resistance meant ‘blowing up trains, carrying out intelligence work’, not sending off food parcels. ‘I did not like Vichy,’ he said later, ‘and I did not like Mitterrand. I did not like him at all . . . I knew I would have nothing to say to him and he would have nothing to say to me.’ But it turned out otherwise:
The rendezvous was for five o’clock in the morning on the platform of the railway station at Lyon-Perrache . . . It wasn’t a station like today: there were engines belching steam, trains whistling . . . it was cold and foggy, the railway tracks were ghostly . . . and there was that sneaking fear in the pit of your stomach. You kept looking round to see if between the wagons there wasn’t one of those standard-issue raincoats. So there I was on the platform, pacing up and down, when I saw [a figure] emerging from the mist, like a phantom . . . This individual was wearing an overcoat that was rather long, knickerbockers – like golfing trousers tied at the knee – which he wore without stockings; heavy mountain shoes, short socks so that his calves were bare, a long red scarf, a small moustache and his hair slicked down with brillantine.27 It was all a bit over the top: he looked like a South American sub-lieutenant . . . There were just the two of us on the platform, so it had to be him . . . And I said to him: ‘Look, [Mitterrand], I am here only from a sense of duty . . . What you are doing isn’t resistance. I didn’t want to meet you, I’m not in favour of us joining together, but that’s what the General wants so I have to go along with it. But I don’t like it.’ And Mitterrand said to me: ‘I see. So you’re a Bolshevik. All right . . .’ It really started badly. But we were there and we had to do something. So we talked about organisational problems . . . And I have to say, as we kept talking in that fog . . . I began to discover a man that I was not expecting at all. A man who was extremely charming, subtle . . . and prodigiously intelligent. Everything he said to me seemed right – they were things I would have liked to say myself but which he said far better than I could ever have said them . . . Something happened. A friendship was born. A real, deep friendship . . . That day he truly astonished me.28
The same month, the balance of influence between de Gaulle and Giraud underwent a decisive shift when the leaders of the pre-war political parties and of all the main resistance movements, communist and non-communist, in the North as well as the South, with the sole exception of the Giraudist ORA, agreed to take part in a National Resistance Council, headed by Jean Moulin. On May 27, the day before Mitterrand and Dechartre talked in Lyon, they met in Paris and formally pledged allegiance to de Gaulle. Three days later the General flew secretly to Algiers where he and Giraud agreed on June 4 to head jointly the French National Liberation Committee which would become the supreme French military and civilian body in the war against Germany.
To Roosevelt’s dismay, de Gaulle, his position strengthened by the Resistance Council’s backing, now held most of the cards. On instructions from the White House, General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa, threatened to cut off arms supplies to French forces unless de Gaulle toed Washington’s line. He disdainfully refused. A month later the Americans backed off and in August reluctantly joined the other Allies in recognising the new joint leadership.
Meanwhile Frenay made one last effort to reconcile Mitterrand and Cailliau. Towards the end of June, he called both men to Lyon for a meeting with key Resistance leaders. Mitterrand, as was his habit, was late, and Cailliau took the opportunity for a tirade against his rival’s relations with Vichy. It was clear, Frenay wrote afterwards, that they ‘cordially detested each other’. In fact Frenay and his colleagues had already made up their minds. Mitterrand’s movement was the more interesting. Nonetheless, Frenay arranged for the two men to dine together that evening and extracted an agreement that representatives of the two groups would liaise once a month.
Cailliau was not fooled. Frenay supported Mitterrand. His one trump card was that de Gaulle might intervene in his favour. In July he left for Algiers to seek his uncle’s support.
In the summer of 1943, Mitterrand was leading a double life.
He remained a member of the ‘National Committee’ set up at Montmaur in February, which was now enlarged to include Bénet, Pilven and Pinot, giving him and his allies a majority. At the same time he had created the nucleus of a separate prisoners’ organisation, which he called the RNPG (le Rassemblement national de prisonniers de guerre, or National Rally of Prisoners of War), into which the ‘Committee’ would eventually be subsumed.29
To help him run the new movement, he drew on three distinct circles of friends and former associates: veterans of Ziegenhain like Jean Munier, joined later by Bernard Finifter and Patrice Pelat, whose escapes had followed his own; a second circle, consisting of former comrades from the Marian hostel – Bénet and Pilven, but also Bettencourt,
Marot and Alfred Ferréol de Ferry, who was working in Vichy as a translator; and a third one, made up of colleagues from the Commissariat – Maurice Pinot; Jean Védrine, a recent arrival from the camps to whom Mitterrand gave responsibility for work in the Mutual Aid Centres; Marcel Barrois, his partner at the Centre for the Allier, which still served as their unofficial headquarters, and Jean Bertin, a lawyer from Nancy, both of whom now joined Munier as paid full-time agents.
He also had dual identities. One was François Mitterrand, who had worked for the Commissariat and lived in an apartment in the rue Nationale, in the centre of Vichy. The other was a man who used some thirty different aliases, many of them taken from Dieppe, where the civil registry had been destroyed by a bombing raid, making them impossible to verify, and who most frequently called himself Morland, after the Paris metro station, Sully-Morland, on the opposite bank of the Seine from the Boulevard St Germain in his beloved Latin Quarter, a nom de guerre which had the merit of containing the first and last letters of his own name.
This double, or multiple, existence pleased him.
His new life was ‘absorbing, and I like it, [even though it is] difficult and perhaps dangerous, in any case complicated’, he wrote. ‘I have a premonition of what it will lead to and I’m not afraid of that.’ He was confident, he added, that by the time he finished he would have accomplished a great deal of what he had set out to achieve. Another letter that summer radiated the same faith in himself and his uncommon destiny:
I am full of ideas and insights, and I have the feeling that, each time, when it comes to the interplay of events, I am right [in my judgements]. I can love my fellow beings and exert influence on them [not as individuals, each with their own faults,] but only as a mass . . . If a crowd, or a people, be within my grasp, I know I can figure out their truth, their story, what makes them tick . . . It’s a dangerous game, and incomplete, for the greatest men must have loved each individual and drawn from that love the virtues of example and leadership. [I am not in that league] . . . but still, what strength is in me! If I am only given the chance, I feel [my] strength is fit to rule.30
Coming back down to earth, he had the grace to add that, like everyone else, he was a mass of contradictions.
Chief among them was the contradiction between Morland and Mitterrand.
As Morland, he had created a paramilitary group, led by Jean Munier to undertake sabotage and, when the occasion required, to ‘neutralise’ pro-Nazi elements. In the autumn of 1943, Munier and Patrice Pelat prospected sites for parachuting arms, working with the special services of the Giraudist ORA, directed from London by Captain Pierre Lejeune, and with Alain de Beaufort, a Gaullist agent, who was based in Clermont-Ferrand and was later awarded the Military Cross for his work with the British SOE. Morland was listed as a member of the ORA paramilitary network and kept in regular contact with the movement’s chiefs in the South – Colonel Henri Zeller and his deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Pfister – through whom he received most of his funds. Drops were signalled by a codeword broadcast by the French service of the BBC and some of the arms received were reserved for Morland’s movement.31 He developed the tradecraft of clandestinity and donned multiple disguises. In one, he remembered, he looked like ‘an Argentine tango dancer’; in another he was an art gallery owner, carrying a portfolio of paintings. The signal for recognition was to have half of a five-franc note in one’s hand.
As Mitterrand, he remained Marcel Barrois’s deputy at the Allier Centre. He continued to write for Vichy publications and maintained close ties with Paul Racine, a young official in Pétain’s private office. As a cover, a friend appointed him to the Students’ National Service, a fictitious employment which gave him a government identity card. He attended press conferences given by the new Commissioner, André Masson, and forged what would prove a lasting friendship with Jean-Paul Martin, a young civil servant whom he had known in Paris as a law student and who now worked for Henri Cado, the right-hand man of René Bousquet at the Interior Ministry. Almost certainly with Bousquet’s approval, Martin became the movement’s ‘mole’, providing official seals, ‘genuine’ false papers and warnings of impending raids by the Gestapo and the Milice.32
That spring Mitterrand was awarded the francisque, the Marshal’s personal decoration, given for services to the ‘National Revolution’.33 He was not the only Resistance figure to receive it. Bernard de Chalvron of Super-NAP, afterwards a Gaullist ambassador, and Raymond Marcellin, who joined Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s Alliance network and later became de Gaulle’s Interior Minister, were both decorated by Pétain. So was Maurice Couve de Murville, who that year became a member of the National Liberation Committee in Algiers and subsequently served as Prime Minister. All acted under instructions from de Gaulle’s staff in London. To Mitterrand, as to the others, the francisque was an ideal cover.34 Flaunting Pétain’s private emblem while fighting against Vichy indulged his taste for provocation.
The question may be asked (in France it has been asked incessantly for the last sixty years): at what point did Mitterrand break irrevocably with Vichy and commit himself to the Resistance with no possibility of going back?
He himself gave many different answers, some so improbable that they merely cast doubt on the others. A case can be made for November 1942, when the Germans occupied the South. More plausibly the moment of truth may be situated in February 1943, when his movement first contacted the ORA.35 By then Mitterrand had been engaging in Resistance-related activities for the best part of a year. So why did it take him so long to decide? Was he hedging his bets? Or drawing the maximum advantage from an ambiguous situation?
To turn the question on its head, why did he stick out his neck at all when more than 99 per cent of his fellow citizens were unwilling to lift a finger if it might expose them to the slightest risk?
He probably did not know himself. All that can be said for certain is that by the summer of 1943 his mind was made up.
On July 10, in Paris, some 3,500 ex-prisoners gathered in the Salle Wagram, close to the Arc de Triomphe, for a pro-Vichy PoW congress in the presence of André Masson and several other ministers. Halfway through Masson’s speech, as he was defending Laval’s policy of sending French labourers to Germany in return for selective POW releases, a young man got up on a chair and shouted: ‘Monsieur, you have been lying! . . . We have no lessons in patriotism to receive from you!’36 François Mitterrand, for it was he, accused Masson of ‘a shameful deal . . . using our comrades in [the camps] as a means of blackmail to justify the deportation of French workers’.37 The Commissioner, shaking with rage, threatened to have him brought before Laval and Pétain. Paul Racine, who was present, thought he would be arrested. But the hall was on Mitterrand’s side. He was asked to show his identity papers; then, surrounded by supporters, he left.38
The protest was courageous to the point of foolhardiness, although not out of character for a man who had repeatedly told those close to him that he would prefer to die taking risks than ‘watch [life] pass by from my window’. Whatever his prior hesitations, the Rubicon had now been crossed.39
From then on, Mitterrand and his colleagues were suspect. In the autumn, a roguish aristocrat named Georges Dobrowolsky, who had been with him at Ziegenhain and subsequently joined the prisoners’ movement in Vichy, was arrested at the Spanish border. Interrogated by the Gestapo about the RNPG’s activities, ‘Dobro’ remained silent. He was shot.40 Some weeks later, Mitterrand’s former flatmate, Serge Miller, was arrested in Paris. He, too, refused to talk and was sent to a concentration camp.41 It was clear to all of them that it was only a matter of time before the net closed around the movement’s leaders.
Meanwhile in Algiers, the struggle between de Gaulle and Giraud was coming to a head. The Gaullists began systematically absorbing and, where that was not possible, marginalising the forces the Giraudists had controlled. It was time for Mitterrand’s movement to broaden its ties beyond the ORA and build bridges to de Gaulle’s representatives. In
Paris, Maurice Pinot met d’Astier, the head of Libération, who was about to leave for Algiers.42 Mitterrand contacted de Chalvron at Super-NAP and Frenay’s associates, Claude Bourdet and Pascal Copeau.
During this time his old adversary, Michel Cailliau, had not been idle. He had spent part of the summer in London, where he had met Colonel Passy, the head of the Gaullist intelligence service, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action), and registered the MRPGD as a prisoners’ resistance organisation under the name the ‘Charette Network’, which ensured that, after the war, its members would have the status and benefits accorded to the Free French armed forces. Then he went to Algiers, where he stayed as de Gaulle’s guest. By the time he returned to France in October 1943, he felt certain he had convinced the General that his own movement, the ‘Charette Network’, was the only one worth dealing with, and that Pin’–Mitt’, as he called it, was anti-Gaullist, devoted to Pétain and ‘waiting to see which way the wind blew’. Mitterrand, he told his uncle, was a collaborationist, wedded to the extreme Right. He was clever and untrustworthy.
Two weeks after Cailliau’s return, Mitterrand joined Maurice Pinot and Védrine at the farm near Bellegarde-en-Marche where they had met to discuss strategy in February. It was the weekend of Halloween.
They agreed to reinforce the clandestine network which Bénet and Védrine had been setting up among the Mutual Aid Centres and to start an underground newspaper, l’Homme libre (‘The Free Man’), named after the nationalist journal which Georges Clemenceau had founded before the First World War. But the main business at hand was the despatch of an envoy to de Gaulle. Pinot wanted to send Marcel Haedrich. But Mitterrand insisted that he had a better chance of winning the General’s ear and Barrois and Bénet agreed. Nominally the movement’s leadership remained collegial, but Pinot, the oldest and most influential among them, preferred to remain in the background. Insensibly, the others began to accept Mitterrand as their chief.