Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  In the end it was the British who came to Mitterrand’s aid. On the night of Saturday, February 26, he embarked at Dartmouth on Coastal Forces Motor Gunboat 502, which was assigned to SOE missions ferrying Resistance operatives to and from France.59 They passed the German convoy route without incident and hove to about a mile off Bonaparte Beach near the Breton village of Beg an Fry, 50 miles west of St Malo. The beach was defended by a German 75mm gun emplacement and a heavy machine-gun nest. Mitterrand and two others took their places in a 14-foot rubber dinghy and, with two British sailors rowing, set out in the darkness for the shore.60 He remembered afterwards ‘what a lot of noise oars can make, splashing in the dark’. But no one heard. They were met by a local fisherman, who made them supper and then drove them in his van along the coast to Morlaix, where Mitterrand took a train to Paris.

  On arrival at Montparnasse station, in the southern part of the city, he was walking along the platform when, as he later recounted, he was stopped by a French police control. ‘Open your bag,’ he was ordered. Wondering which would be the best way to run, he slowly did as he was told. As well as personal effects, the suitcase contained letters from Frenay, a cyanide pill, and on top of his pyjamas, the 7.65mm automatic. The policeman took one look and snapped: ‘This is a check for black-market food. Now get the hell out of here!’61

  In the three and a half months that Mitterrand had been away, much had changed in France. As resistance activity had increased, the Gestapo had stepped up reprisals against the civilian population. The Milice, under Joseph Darnand, who replaced René Bousquet as secretary-general of the police, had become a law unto itself, carrying out arbitrary executions and massacres. In January 1944, Darnand was given ministerial rank and entered the government, together with Philippe Henriot and, later, Marcel Déat, whose Nazi sympathies made even a man like Laval seem patriotic by comparison. Hitler turned up the heat on Vichy, demanding that it participate directly in the fight against the Allies. Pétain and Laval refused, but feared that France, after the example of Norway, would be placed under a Quisling-like figure heading a Nazi puppet government. The Compulsory Work Service (STO, or Service de Travail Obligatoire), introduced a year before at the Germans’ insistence to requisition young Frenchmen to compensate for the labour shortage in Germany, had caused some 200,000 young men to go into hiding, of whom about a quarter had made their way to the maquis.

  The prospect of German defeat intensified the spiral of hatred and fear.

  The Resistance was galvanised by the thought of victory and revenge. The Germans and their French sympathisers responded by sowing terror.

  During Mitterrand’s absence Munier had worked to develop the movement’s paramilitary capacities. Through the maquis in Burgundy, he had acquired a stock of arms which he succeeded in transporting to a cache in the suburbs of Paris.62 In December, after the raids on the RNPG in Vichy, he had shot dead the chief of the local Milice. Munier’s colleague, Jacques Pâris, who had been sent the previous year for training in resistance techniques with the ORA in North Africa, had blown up a railway depot in the Ardèche, south of Lyon, and was reconnoitring new parachute drop zones and training maquisards to man them.

  Not all the news was positive. Towards the end of January, Antoine Mauduit, the founder of ‘the Chain’, was betrayed by an informer and arrested. One of Mitterrand’s first acts after his return was to send Munier to Marseille, where Mauduit was imprisoned, to see if a rescue was possible. It was not. Soon afterwards Mauduit was transferred to Buchenwald, together with Guy Fric, the RNPG leader in Clermont-Ferrand, who had been detained in February. Fric survived the war. Mauduit died on May 9 1945, the day after the Allied victory.63

  Mitterrand’s priority, however, remained the fusion of the three prisoners’ organisations that had been decided in Algiers.

  Michel Cailliau, he discovered, had again been manoeuvring behind the scenes. In his absence, Cailliau had tried to persuade Bénet and Marcel Barrois to agree to a merger under his own leadership in the hope of presenting Mitterrand (and also the General) with a fait accompli. When that failed, he sought to use the communist group, the CNPG, whose formation, it later transpired, he had himself encouraged the previous summer, to dilute his rival’s influence.64

  But Cailliau had reckoned without Henri Frenay.65 In a series of increasingly exasperated telegrams the Commissioner insisted that what had been decided in Algiers ‘cannot be modified’. Mitterrand was to be in charge of the prisoners’ movement in France; Bénet of propaganda, Mutual Aid Centres and returnees’ welfare; and Cailliau, everything connected with the PoW camps in Germany, notably intelligence, sabotage, and measures to maintain prisoners’ morale.

  By the time Mitterrand returned at the end of February, Cailliau had run out of arguments.

  On March 12 1944, a Sunday, delegates from the three movements met in an artist’s studio near Port Royal, in the Latin Quarter,66 under the chairmanship of Antoine Avinin, one of the founders of Franc-Tireur, representing the National Resistance Council. Mitterrand and Bénet represented the RNPG, and Robert Paumier, the communists. Cailliau did not attend. Mortified by his rival’s success, he sent in his place Philippe Dechartre, accompanied by Jacques Bourgeois, the head of the MRPGD in the Northern Zone. Mitterrand, who spoke first, questioned Paumier’s right to be there, arguing that his group, the CNPG, was ‘unknown in London and Algiers’, and that de Gaulle had asked him to merge his movement with Cailliau’s, ‘not with [the Communists]’ (which was bending the truth but a good line of attack). Dechartre, supported by Avinin, backed Paumier’s candidacy, and Mitterrand – as he had no doubt expected – was forced to give way.

  The Executive Committee of the new unified movement, to be known as the MNPGD, the National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees, comprised Mitterrand, Bénet, Dechartre and Paumier, which deprived Mitterrand’s group of its built-in majority. To that extent Cailliau’s rearguard action had succeeded. But it was a hollow victory. Mitterrand remained first among equals and could usually count on Dechartre’s support. The following day Cailliau announced his withdrawal from the movement and left for North Africa. To the end of his life he never understood why his uncle had preferred Mitterrand and died, in 2000, a still-embittered man.

  The MNPGD came under the authority of the National Resistance Council,67 which meant that financially it was secure. It had a modest amount of weaponry. It was more united on paper than on the ground, but the struggles of the past year were over and its mission was now clearly defined: to mobilise the 600,000 returned prisoners behind de Gaulle’s leadership for the insurrection that would accompany the coming battle for France. A tract that summer set out the movement’s goals:

  Disorganise the enemy’s communications. Sabotage the railways. Derail trains and cut the tracks. Hunt down the killers from Darnand’s Milice who are massacring Frenchmen for the Boches. Disorganise the enemy’s [economic] production and use force to stop the deportation of French workers to Germany.

  Step up the armed struggle in all its forms against German army units . . .

  Civil servants, sabotage the orders of Vichy. Policemen, soldiers and gendarmes, come over to the patriots and bring with you your arms . . .

  Let there be no quarter for the murderers! . . . In all your meetings, everywhere . . . let the great voice of vengeance and justice ring out against the barbarous foreigner who wanted to enslave our land . . . Remember all the martyrs that the Boches have shot down, those patriots who died singing the Marseillaise and proclaiming their love for our France.

  Let nothing stop you in your thirst for vengeance and freedom!68

  Over the next three months, Mitterrand consolidated his authority. Although the movement’s leadership remained officially collegial, Dechartre left for Algiers to seek additional funds and arms, which meant he was replaced by a less senior figure; Bénet accompanied him; and Paumier was also replaced, leaving Mitterrand the only one of the original four still in place.69 Shortly afterwards he
took direct control of the Northern Zone, with Munier and Pelat in charge of military operations and a communist, Georges Thevenin, in Paris (where the communists were so well organised that it made no sense to name anyone else); while the South – the former Free Zone – was entrusted to Etienne Gagnaire and Jacques Pâris.

  Conditions, however, were becoming more and more dangerous. ‘The beast that is being beaten to death is multiplying its terror,’ Paumier wrote.

  Those who knew Mitterrand that spring were struck by his cold-blooded recklessness. He wore a light-blue English suit, purchased in London, at a time when anything English raised a red flag of suspicion. He smoked English cigarettes, which had a distinctive, instantly recognisable odour compared with the dark tobacco of Gauloises and Gitanes. The writer, Marguerite Duras, found him ‘carefree to the point of folly’. ‘Your courage was reasonable, careful and quite mad,’ she told him years later. ‘It was as if . . . behaving almost suicidally had become the true passion of your life.’ François Terrasse, Marie-Louise’s brother, encountered him on the metro and felt his behaviour was so provocative that he might be arrested any day. Philippe Dechartre recalled: ‘He had no nerves . . . He was at home in the Resistance. He was in the place where he should be.’

  Was he following the contrarian adage that the best way not to be noticed is to stand out in a crowd? Or was it just his usual delight in pushing his luck to the limit – the small boy at Touvent who would put his finger within a millimetre of a forbidden object and claim he was doing nothing wrong?

  In his own way, Mitterrand was prudent. He frequently changed his appearance and constantly changed his address, staying sometimes with friends from his Jarnac days – with Jean Bouvyer, the one-time follower of the Cagoule, who was living with Mitterrand’s sister, Marie-Josèphe; or with Jean’s mother, Antoinette – at others with Marguerite Duras and the ménage à trois which she maintained with her husband, the writer, Robert Antelme, and her lover, Dionys Mascolo, at their apartment in the rue Dupin. Mitterrand had met Antelme and his friend, Georges Beauchamp, shortly before his journey to London, when Jacques Bénet had brought him to Paris to meet Resistance contacts. Beauchamp quickly became a trusted member of his inner circle. Other hideouts were provided by Patrice Pelat’s girlfriend, Christine Gouze, whose family in Burgundy, unbeknown to Mitterrand at the time, had been sheltering Henri Frenay when they had first met near Mâcon, what seemed like a century ago.

  But no matter what he did, the Gestapo was closing in.

  In April 1944, Marcel Barrois, Mitterrand’s colleague from the Aid Centre in Vichy, who had deputised for him during his absence, was arrested and deported to Dachau. Three months later, along with more than 500 others, he died of suffocation and thirst, when SS guards refused to open the shuttered wagons of a train which was immobilised in temperatures of 40 degrees.

  The Germans did not always have the upper hand.

  Munier had a rendezvous in the Place St Michel with Michel Grilickès, a maquisard whose family had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Three Germans in civilian clothes got out of a police car and walked towards them. Without blinking, Grilickès shot all three dead and vanished into the crowd. Munier was awestruck. ‘That was a boy,’ he wrote later, ‘possessed of a truly astonishing promptitude of attack.’

  Not long afterwards, he and Mitterrand were at lunch with several others at a restaurant in Montparnasse when a German police patrol entered. Instead of asking for identity papers, as they usually did, they asked people at each table to identify each other. ‘We [always] called each other by code names,’ Mitterrand explained. ‘They had realised that we never knew the “real” names figuring on each other’s identity cards – a necessary precaution in the event of arrest and torture.’ The group was about to be exposed when Munier produced a document which stopped the police in their tracks. It was an ausweis, a military pass, in the name of Jean Munier, signed by Adolf Hitler in person. They saluted and left.

  Munier explained afterwards how it had come into his possession. In August 1942, he had been working in a kommando in Kassel when the city was bombed by the Allies, leaving many hundreds injured. He and another prisoner had seized the opportunity to escape. As they were making their way out of the city, they heard a woman’s moans coming from the debris of a ruined building. They stopped and dug her out of the rubble, together with her baby. By then it was too late to flee. However, when German soldiers arrived to recapture them, the local townspeople said they were heroes and demanded that they be released. For some weeks, nothing happened. Then, one day, Munier was summoned by the head of his kommando and presented to ‘a highly decorated officer’, who told him that the woman they had rescued was the wife of one of Hitler’s staff officers. They were to be repatriated immediately, ‘by order of the Führer’.

  It was, Mitterrand said, ‘literally a magic paper’.70

  But miracles could not happen every time. On June 1, the Executive Committee of the MNPGD convened at Jean Bertin’s apartment in the Avenue Charles Floquet, not far from the Eiffel Tower. During the meeting, the doorbell rang. When Bertin came out, the visitor put a revolver to his chest and told him he was being taken for questioning. The others escaped through a ground-floor window. During his interrogation, it became clear that the Germans had mistaken him for Mitterrand, whom they knew only under the nom de guerre, Morland. He was deported to Buchenwald.

  That same evening, another meeting was to be held at Marguerite Duras’s flat in the rue Dupin. She was absent, but Robert Antelme, his sister Marie-Louise, and two other volunteers were there. Munier arrived early and chatted to them for a while. But he was uneasy. ‘I felt something was wrong,’ he said later, ‘and I decided to leave.’ On the street outside, a man in gold-rimmed spectacles demanded to see his papers. Munier punched him in the face and ran. The street was blocked by two police cars, with a German officer standing between them. ‘Before he had time to react, I hurled myself on top of him, thrust him violently aside, and left my pursuers behind.’ Munier found Pelat and together they telephoned Duras’s apartment to warn them that the Gestapo was outside. An unfamiliar voice answered. Mitterrand, meanwhile, had been waiting for Robert Antelme at the Brasserie Lipp, ten minutes’ walk away on the Boulevard St Germain. When he did not appear, he, too, telephoned the apartment and got the same unfamiliar voice. Antelme and his three companions were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

  Next day, Munier and Grilickès recovered one of the movement’s arms caches and a stock of false papers from another supposedly safe house nearby, minutes before the Gestapo arrived. Dionys Mascolo returned to the rue Dupin and while the writer, Albert Camus, kept watch outside, took the movement’s archives from their hiding place, which the Germans had failed to discover, and concealed them among piles of authors’ manuscripts at the office of Camus’s publisher, Gallimard. A week later, Munier and Pierre Steverlynck, who ran the underground printing shop which produced the movement’s tracts, walked into a Gestapo ambush. Steverlynck was wounded and died in hospital four days later. Munier got away.

  After the Normandy landings on June 4 1944, the pressure intensified further.

  Pierre Coursol, who had succeeded Marcel Barrois at the Aid Centre in Vichy, was interrogated about Mitterrand’s whereabouts and severely tortured. At the beginning of July it was the turn of Henry Guerin, a close friend of Bernard de Chalvron of Super-NAP, who had been arrested some weeks before. Guerin had been Maurice Pinot’s representative in the Occupied Zone and had resigned with him in January 1943. He, too, was asked about Mitterrand’s activities. His Gestapo interrogators were brutes, he remembered, and after beating his backside raw, subjected him to what would later be called ‘water-boarding’. ‘The bath was full of excrement and other kinds of filth,’ he wrote later. ‘One of them had a stethoscope to check your heart, and when he thought you couldn’t take any more they got you out.’fn5 In August he was deported to Dora, a sub-camp of Buchenwald.

  The succession of
raids and arrests convinced Mitterrand that there were traitors in the movement. His suspicions fell on Jacques Bourgeois, the former head of Cailliau’s network in the Northern Zone, and his deputy, Albert Médina. They both had artistic backgrounds, not a typical profile for members of the Resistance – Bourgeois had been a music critic; Médina was an actor – and shared a flat near the vast white basilica of Sacré Coeur which dominates Montmartre. The evidence against them was circumstantial and came in part from Marguerite Duras, then engaged in an ambiguous relationship with a French Gestapo agent named Charles Delval, who had told her that he would free her husband if she would lead him to Mitterrand. Delval had taken part in the raids on June 1 and appeared well informed about the movement. Duras had deflected his overtures but, on Mitterrand’s instructions, continued to see him in the hope that he would reveal his sources.71 By the end of July, Mitterrand had concluded that Bourgeois and Médina would have to be liquidated on the grounds that even if they were not traitors, they had neglected elementary security and, by their imprudence, were putting lives at risk.

  At that point, the military situation abruptly changed. For six weeks after the Normandy landings, the Allied armies had made slow progress against determined German defences. In the last week of July, they broke through. Hitler refused to authorise a retreat, and by the weekend of August 12, the German Seventh Army was bottled up near the town of Malaise. Three days later, French, American and British troops began landing in Provence.