From a secret address in Paris in 1943, Pierre Brossolette, journalist and intellectual turned resister, who had been the quarry of a Gestapo manhunt for seven weeks, wrote to Colonel Passy in London: “For the last eight days I have been on ‘full alert.’ It seems that they are taking a particularly close interest in me at the moment, using every possible form of snare and check.… Fortunately night falls early. It’s the early curfew that saves us. If it were August we would all be behind bars.… So,—Vive la Nuit!” Brossolette was arrested some weeks later, when the nights were still long, and after repeated torture committed suicide at the police headquarters in the avenue Foch to avoid breaking down. Another resister, the professional soldier Maurice Chevance-Bertin, when asked after the war about those days and nights, said: “What I remember best is four years of being constantly exhausted by fear.”
There were three categories of resister. First there were the family men or women who lived at home and distributed pamphlets and sheltered agents and equipment while carrying on with their ordinary lives. They usually lasted a few months before being arrested. Then came the full-time resisters who were married with children. They were more vulnerable than people without close ties. The third category entered the Resistance like monks responding to their vocation and giving up all personal considerations. Baumel noticed many communists in this category.
Their only hope of emotional contact was in a passing episode with the person closest to them, their secretary or liaison agent. Resisters in this third category were the most difficult people to break. “A father,” noted Baumel, “who has been beaten up and who is then told that his wife or daughter is going to be sent to a military brothel on the Eastern Front is faced with a difficult choice.”
There was a curious state of mind recognized at the time by many resisters in occupied France; the longer they were hunted by the German police and their French auxiliaries, the more reckless they grew. The fear they faced every day wore them out. They watched their comrades picked off one by one and knew it could only be a matter of time before their turn came. Sometimes they even felt relief when they were arrested, because they no longer had to fear arrest. And this feeling of relief explained why some were so easily persuaded to talk. Their initial determination ebbed away as they became transfixed by the death that was tracking them down.
If their friends noticed, they might arrange for those who were worn out to be smuggled to safety, although it was difficult to get out of occupied France. The RAF used light aircraft for night landings on rough ground once a month over the period of the full moon, although even these infrequent opportunities were canceled by bad weather. The Lysander could land on a strip 300 yards long, with its motor cut, like a ghost machine. But the maximum number of passengers in a Lysander was three; the Hudson carried ten but made more noise, needed a firmer landing ground and was more likely to be noticed. Otherwise there were the fast patrol boats and submarines of the Royal Navy, deployed on moonless nights off remote stretches of the Brittany coast. This method was better for drop-offs than for pickups; the coastline was heavily patrolled and it was one thing to scramble ashore and make a run for it, quite another to confirm a rendezvous with a rubber dinghy somewhere out on a dark sea.
In these circumstances most resisters were forced to carry on until mischance, exhaustion or betrayal brought the hunt to an end. Farce and tragedy went hand in hand. Colonel Rémy once distinguished himself by dragging a large package on to a small boat trying to take him off the Brittany coast on a stormy night. A capsize was narrowly avoided. The parcel contained a potted azalea he wished to present to Madame de Gaulle. On another stormy night the boat did capsize, and Pierre Brossolette was, in consequence, captured and tortured to the point of suicide.
Six weeks before he was arrested Jean Moulin wrote to General de Gaulle: “I am a wanted man now for both Vichy and the Gestapo.… I need a deputy in each zone.… My task becomes more and more difficult but I am determined to hang on for as long as I can.” One month later he wrote, “Send me the military personnel I have asked for so many times.… Nothing has been done.… The officers of the Secret Army have suffered heavy losses. Those who remain have all had their cover blown.” And six days before the meeting at the doctor’s house in Caluire he sent a final appeal for help. “Now it’s the Secret Army which needs to be saved. I beg you, General, do what I have the honor to request. With great devotion …”
The night the Wehrmacht crossed the demarcation line in November 1942 and entered the Vichy zone, Lyon—“the capital of the Resistance”—became as dangerous as Paris. By that time many of the resisters based in Vichy had acquired settled habits. As early as 1941, when Frenay and François de Menthon started to print their underground newspapers there, Lyon had begun to attract embryonic resistance movements. In 1942 the newspapers of Libération and Franc-Tireur were also edited and printed there. By 28 September 1942 the reputation of Lyon as a center of resistance had become sufficiently notorious for the Germans to send 280 police under an SS major called Karl Boemelburg to hunt for illegal radio transmitters in the Lyon region. Most of these men were army technicians but when German forces occupied Lyon two months later they came with a full detachment of Sipo–SD, the German security police.
The German manhunt designed to destroy the French resistance had become steadily more determined since 21 August 1941. It was on that day that the communists implemented their assassination policy with the shooting of an unarmed German naval cadet at a Paris metro station. At that time all police activity in France was directed by the Wehrmachf’s high command, which responded with a policy of reprisal killings that proved ineffective; the communist assassinations continued. In December 1941 Hitler published Nacht und Nebel, the decree which punished hostile action against German forces in occupied territory with death. “Night and Fog” (a phrase borrowed from Goethe) was the name given to this punishment because the guilty were to be deported to the Fatherland and executed there, no news about them being given either to their families or to the Red Cross. So the deterrent effect of the death penalty was increased by the uncertainty of its victims’ fate. Then in May 1942 the German army ceded ultimate control of police operations to the RSHA (Reich Security Service) which in France had previously been restricted to the surveillance of immigrants, communists and Jews.
The new service was directed by SS General Karl Oberg, who was comfortably installed by Reinhard Heydrich in a spacious headquarters in Paris on the Boulevard Lannes, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. Oberg’s organization, most of which was established at nine separate addresses on the nearby avenue Foch, absorbed the army’s existing police services including the uniformed personnel of the GFP (Field Police). In addition Oberg had 2,000 professional members of the RSHA, who were frequently recruited from the SS. Finally the members of the RSHA could call on up to 8,000 full-time French agents, who worked beside them in civilian clothes, armed and carrying German police identification. When these auxiliaries arrested their fellow countrymen they habitually announced themselves as Police allemande. The RSHA was organized into seven sections, each with its own area of responsibility, and deployed across France in units known as “KdS” (Kommandos Sipo–SD). In November 1942 a KdS of six sections was sent to Lyon. Section IV, popularly known as “the Gestapo,” was responsible for antiresistance and in Lyon was led by SS Lieutenant Klaus Barbie. He had 200 men under his command, all but a dozen of whom were French volunteers. After the war, Barbie remembered the glory of it: “I was only a lieutenant,” he said, “but I had more power than a general.”
Like any police force the Gestapo relied on information. Routine police work provided much of this, telephone taps, tailing, round-ups and searches, random barrier controls and paid informers. It also received a huge amount of information from anonymous tip-offs, known as “denunciations,” many of which proved to be reliable. If the denunciations were signed then their authors were paid. Living conditions in France during the occupation were sufficiently difficult for payment to be an effective means of obtaining information. Already by November 1941 the standard ration card in the city of Lyon restricted people to 1,160 calories a day, which was half the prewar average. Sugar, ersatz coffee, bread, meat, butter, cooking oil and cheese were rationed. Flour, rice and chocolate were unavailable. There were only occasional supplies of fruit, vegetables and eggs, all at inflated prices. Milk was sold at nearly three times its prewar price and was restricted to pregnant women and children. Crows were on sale in the food market at 10 francs each. Soap was reserved for those doing unusually dirty work. Some people, particularly old people, starved to death. Those who could afford black market prices dealt with what they called the “Bof” (Beurre, oeufs, fromage)—“the swine who sold the food.” One English woman married to a French doctor watched her husband set to work on a length of two-year-old “rosette de Lyon” saucisson and break his jaw.
January 1943, Lyon is dying of hunger and cold. No coal, the apartments icy, we wash in cold water. Rendezvous in the Place Bellecour with my liaison chief, the most important and the most exposed link in our chain. She arrives gray with cold, her eyes red, her fingers swollen in the cutting wind. She is the wife of one of our deported comrades. I take her into a café for a glass of something burning hot. We sit on a bench and she starts to talk. She is visibly afraid. Her hands tremble, and she keeps glancing at neighboring tables.… She talks of food, the ration has just been cut again, 125g of bread a day, 60g of meat (a week), nothing in the market except turnips and swedes.… No spuds, no milk, even for children. She is having trouble finding new recruits. She knows we have no news of her husband.
The daily routine, evoked by Jacques Baumel.
The Gestapo also obtained information as a result of the fear inspired by its brutal methods, which were authorized by German law. The fundamental principle was laid down by Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior in 1933. “Law is what serves the Volk. Crime is what harms the Volk.” In June 1942 Himmler authorized “the third degree” (torture) to obtain information. It could be used without prior approval against communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists and members of resistance movements. All in all, the Gestapo detachment sent to Lyon possessed the means necessary to carry out its task. But in addition it had the help, and frequently the rivalry, of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, which had its own structure of informers. The Abwehr held an extensive archive of information about French affairs, which it had been compiling with the help of French agents since before the war, and which it sometimes shared with the RSHA.
In Lyon, Barbie’s section IV was first set up in the Hôtel Terminus, by the Perrache central railway station. Torture chambers and cells were constructed in the hotel cellars. Later, section IV moved to more spacious accommodations in the Ecole de Santé Militaire, the former Military School of Medicine. There was also an “information bureau,” staffed by French auxiliaries in the great central square of Lyon, the Place Bellecour on the corner of the rue Paul Lintier, the little street in which Barbie requisitioned a private office. The information bureau was set up after another section, No. VI, was overwhelmed with the flood of signed denunciations. Among those who worked at the bureau was a man named Falkenstein, a Bof who specialized in supplying German soldiers. He was caught by section V of the KdS, which dealt with German army crime. On his way to be interrogated, in the prison van traveling between Fort Montluc and the interrogation center at the Ecole de Santé Militaire, Falkenstein had a lucky break. The van broke down and one of the prisoners tried to escape. Falkenstein ran after him and dragged him back. Section V then employed him as an informer inside the prison. After some time Falkenstein identified and denounced one of the warders who were taking messages out for the prisoners, many of whom were resisters.
At that point Falkenstein was freed and given a job with Barbie’s section IV, assisting in the information bureau. There he worked for “Monsieur Jacquin,” the head of the bureau, and assisted Tony Saunier, the accountant who requisitioned Jewish property for the Sipo–SD on a commission of fifteen percent. Falkenstein also made himself useful to Francis André, known as “the bath attendant,” or gueule tordue (twisted face—he had suffered a serious cosmetic injury while serving as a member of the Communist Party’s security service before the war). André, who specialized in questioning people while half-drowning them in a bathtub, was executed after the liberation for a nominal list of 150 murders. But Falkenstein was never punished. After a few months at the information bureau he returned to the black market, was rearrested and reimprisoned. He was freed when Lyon was liberated, together with the surviving members of the Resistance, and by the time they had worked out who he was, he had disappeared. Like other cynics he may have reasoned that since the black market was repressed by both the Vichy and the German police it was a patriotic activity.
Soon after the occupation of the Vichy zone the Gestapo began to enjoy a long run of success against the Resistance. The first breakthrough came in March 1943, when a random Vichy police contrôle led to the arrest of a courier working for Combat. The result was that the names of the Secret Army’s leadership, with pseudonyms, code names and functions, as well as a 143-page report by Frenay on the state of the armed resistance in the southern zone, was passed by the Vichy police to the Gestapo. Then, on 27 April, in Marseille, one of the Gestapo’s most efficient units arrested and “turned” a member of Combat called Jean Multon, also known as “Lunel.” Without being tortured Multon agreed to tell the Gestapo everything he knew about his group. Other members of Combat discovered what had happened and Frenay gave an order for Multon to be executed, but he was too well guarded. Early in June, having done the maximum amount of damage in Marseille, Multon was sent “on loan” to the Gestapo of Lyon.
For the last seven months of his life, between November 1942 and June 1943, as the German police closed in, Jean Moulin was engaged in the most complicated task he had ever undertaken, attempting to unite and direct the competing interests and explosive personalities who made up the French Resistance. The coordinating committee which had been set up in the southern zone on 27 November 1942, following Frenay and d’Astier’s return from London, was followed by the creation of a solidly united administration, the MUR (Mouvements unis de résistance), organized by its formidable secretary, Jacques Baumel, a medical intern from Marseille who had abandoned his studies in 1941 to join Combat. The birth of the MUR, which swallowed the identities of Combat, Libération-Sud and Franc-Tireur, was delayed by the reluctance of all three of its leading members to lose their autonomy, and by the reluctance of the leaders of Combat to lose control of their military capability. The MUR was intended to be the political master of the Secret Army, and Combat supplied seventy-five percent of the manpower of the Secret Army; it therefore seemed logical to Frenay that the paramilitary organization he had created should be under his command.
Among les petits soldats (the rank and file of the Resistance), who were impelled by naïve motives of patriotism and in many cases belonged to more than one group, as they eventually discovered, the objections to fusion were incomprehensible. But d’Astier and Lévy flatly refused to place their movements (Libération and Franc-Tireur) under Frenay, claiming that he was “right-wing,” which was true, and “authoritarian,” which might have seemed less of a disadvantage. The compromise reached was that a serving general, Charles Delestraint, once de Gaulle’s commanding officer, became military commander of the Secret Army but remained in theory under the direction of Frenay, who was the “military delegate” to the MUR. D’Astier was the political delegate and Lévy was in charge of information and intelligence. The final compromise seemed well balanced and in the struggle that preceded it Frenay and Moulin were, briefly and for the last time, on the same side.
But the truce was short-lived. For however elegantly presented the reconciliation might be, the kernel of the argument remained. It was not just a question of who was to command the Resistance; the real issue concerned the nature and purpose of the movement. “Rex’s” mission had not just been to unite the Resistance and link it to the Free French. He had been sent to dissolve the Resistance as it existed in January 1942 and remold it as an instrument to serve de Gaulle’s project for the liberation of France. De Gaulle regarded an autonomous Resistance as a dangerous obstacle to his plans. He had no sympathy for Frenay’s semi-mystical belief, shared by many of the petits soldats, that from the sacrifice of the Resistance a new France would emerge. For de Gaulle the Resistance was of no importance, until it could influence the destiny of France. He showed little imaginative insight into the predicament of the individual resisters until after the war, when he met hundreds who had returned from deportation. Realizing, nonetheless, that the symbolic role of the Resistance was crucial, and that its military role was of growing importance, de Gaulle was determined to recruit the Resistance (or the “resistance” as he invariably spelled it) under his banner. He abandoned the formula Français libres (Free French) and replaced it with Français combattants (Fighting French). The Fighting French were composed of the exterior and interior resistance, and he expected the highest military standards of loyalty and discipline from each. Moulin’s real task, as his personal representative, was to take whatever steps were necessary inside occupied France to achieve those standards. By the beginning of 1943 the “Free French” (as they were still known in English) had approximately 260,000 men under arms, mainly stationed in North and West Africa, as well as 40 air force squadrons, 25 warships and 17 submarines. These forces were trained and equipped by the British and American armies. If de Gaulle’s reliance on the British for status and information continued until well after D-Day he was at least able to establish the strength of his claims to leadership by outmaneuvering Roosevelt’s protégé, General Giraud, in Algiers and by establishing, through the work of Jean Moulin, his command of the Resistance.
On 11 February 1943, on the eve of departing for London to report on the success of “Mission Rex” and receive new orders, Moulin called a meeting of the executive committee of the MUR. Once again a fierce argument broke out, this time over the question of how to deal with the thousands of young men who were about to “take to the maquis” (bush) to avoid the STO, the Vichy forced labor program. Frenay and d’Astier saw this as an obvious chance to gain an important number of new recruits; Moulin suspected them of intending to build a second Secret Army outside his personal control. In response to their demands for a heavy budget increase Moulin cut their allowance by forty percent, explaining that he was removing those funds which were intended for the Secret Army. In future these would be managed by the army’s own staff under the authority of its commander, General Delestraint; in other words Moulin would have direct financial control over all military spending.
Moulin’s professional training as a prefect had given him a mastery of the use of budgets as a means of control. In throttling the Resistance’s finances he was doing what both London and Washington had, at various times, done to de Gaulle. Funds were provided, a dependency was established, then the tap was turned off. It was a simple matter for him to arrange. The money arrived in bundles of banknotes, great packages of them parachuted at night by the RAF with the weapons and radio transmitters. Moulin controlled the delivery of this money, its distribution and the way it was spent. His decision was evidence of his ruthlessness; for no sooner was the MUR in place than Moulin was ready to set to work again, sapping the power of the Resistance’s leaders to the point where they would either obey orders or be pushed aside.
If Moulin enjoyed a degree of success in 1942 in herding the southern zone resistance movements into his net, he did not apparently achieve the same results with the French Communist Party. The PCF, having followed Moscow’s instructions to work as closely as possible with the noncommunist resistance, had gone some way toward infiltrating and controlling it. Starting with the Front National, a movement which, as its name suggested, was apparently broadly based and which never acknowledged its true communist allegiance, communists—either undeclared members of the party, or fellow-travelers, or in some cases Soviet agents, all generically termed “submarines”—riddled the membership of every movement they could penetrate. Since they were often talented and always well trained they rose quickly to influential positions. Several of the key appointments in this infiltration operation were made during the course of 1942 by Moulin. First Georges Bidault, who was nominally a Christian Democrat loyal to Combat, was persuaded to join the Front National secretly, and further persuaded to take a communist secretary, Annie Hervé, to assist him at the BIP, the resistance propaganda agency. Pascal Copeau, a communist “submarine” who was deputy leader of Libération-Sud, became a close collaborator of Moulin’s. Yves Farge, another “submarine,” was selected by Moulin to prepare a major—and ultimately disastrous—resistance uprising on the plateau of Vercors.
During this period in 1942 de Gaulle’s emissaries met with great difficulty in trying to contact the PCF leadership. So well concealed were the communists, and so professional was their underground organization, that it was many months before a formal link could be set up. The man who eventually achieved this was a member of the Gaullist intelligence service named François Faure.
Under the leadership of “Colonel Rémy”—one of Colonel Passy’s first recruits—the BCRA had created a Free French resistance network in both zones called the Confrérie Notre Dame (CND). Faure was among its agents and he, through personal friendship, made contact with the leadership of the Communist Party in March 1942. The FTP, the armed wing of the Front National, then asked Faure to return to London to establish an official link with the Free French. The FTP claimed to have information that would interest the British and said they were in a position to paralyze supply lines to the Russian front; in return they wanted a radio operator who could set up a permanent link with London. This offer was welcomed enthusiastically by the BCRA and the British agencies. Faure was sent back to France and a liaison officer was parachuted with him on 28 May. But both Faure and the liaison officer were arrested by the Gestapo shortly after arriving, and contact with the FTP could not be reestablished.
Meanwhile, Moulin, as we have seen, had been in touch, through Manhès, Pierre Meunier and others, with both the communist underground and Soviet intelligence agents in the northern zone in 1940, 1941 and 1942, but had never mentioned any of his northern zone activities to London. So it was by chance that in July, after the arrest of Faure, he was asked by London to reestablish Faure’s link. In consequence he made a brief visit to what was still the occupied zone from 2 to 19 July. On 25 July he told London that he had so far failed to make contact with the PCF but that he had been in contact with Soviet intelligence agents in the northern zone. Since Moulin had contact with the PCF through Madame Dangon and her husband, and with the PCF and Soviet intelligence through Meunier, Chambeiron, Panier and Manhès, his answer seems to have been misleading. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that he asked for no separate links to be formed with the PCF while he was at work, in order “to simplify matters.”
This request was ignored and in November contact was finally reestablished—not by Moulin—with a representative of the PCF’s central committee. On 11 January 1943 the Communist Party’s delegate, Fernand Grenier, arrived in London. Two weeks later, on 26 January, Colonel Passy received a message that a man called Henri Manhès, who had just arrived from France, was claiming to be Moulin’s “delegate in the northern zone” and was asking to see him. Moulin was not supposed to be operating in the northern zone and had been reminded of this as recently as November 1942. Now here was Manhès going further and stating that as Moulin’s delegate he had been in touch with the northern zone communists.
All this gave Passy pause for thought, and he decided to take the highly irregular step of being parachuted into the occupied zone to see what was going on. It was as though the head of MI6 had decided to drive up the avenue Foch for a tour of inspection. He was accompanied on this mission by a senior SOE “shadow,” Yeo-Thomas, an RAF officer who spoke rapid and faultless French with a strong Parisian accent. Forest Yeo-Thomas was an ideal SOE agent, being a military officer not lacking in courage (he was eventually awarded the George Cross) and capable of working alone in enemy territory on his own initiative. His SOE file card described him as “more French than British in outlook,” a barbed compliment, whereas to his friend Colonel Passy he was “as French as he was English,” which was a wholehearted compliment. Passy was also accompanied by a formidable recruit to the BCRA, Pierre Brossolette, an uncompromising anti-communist who was one of the most talented men to have worked for de Gaulle and someone whom Moulin quickly perceived as a dangerous rival.
Pierre Brossolette came from a background very similar to Jean Moulin’s. Both were born into families with an established republican tradition, both were the children of antimonarchist, anticlerical schoolmasters, both attended their father’s schools, both fathers were the dominant parent, both boys were highly intelligent; but Brossolette, four years younger, worked a lot harder at school and, living in Paris, he entered the republic’s academic fast stream, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, from which in 1925 he graduated second in his class, behind Georges Bidault. Then, when he might have chosen any available university position in the country, Brossolette decided to become a journalist. Politically he associated himself with the “Young Turks” of the radical-republican movement; he also joined the Grande Loge de France, the country’s second largest group of freemasons. In the 1930s he flirted with pacifism, supported the League of Nations and joined the SFIO (Socialist Party). His prominence as a journalist, in both radio and the press—before the war he was the most celebrated anti-fascist journalist in France—made him one of the favored targets of the extreme-right and a well-known public figure. He married young and was never attracted by communism.
Early in 1941 Brossolette, from his bookshop in Paris, started to write for the underground journal of one of the very earliest resistance groups, formed by three members of the staff of the Musée de l’Homme. The group was broken in the spring of 1941, when many of Brossolette’s comrades were arrested and shot at Mont Valérien. In April 1942, having made contact with Colonel Rémy, Brossolette was flown to London and recruited directly into the BCRA.
In London Brossolette quickly gained the reputation of being one of the very few men who were intellectually and temperamentally capable of standing up to de Gaulle. From June to September he undertook his first clandestine mission in France, during which, unknown to Moulin, he traveled through both the occupied and Vichy zones. He contacted Rémy, one of the most talented agents ever sent into occupied France but who had become both unrealistic and a megalomaniac. The colonel was apparently unaware that his CND network was falling to pieces around him; on several occasions he himself had narrowly escaped arrest; he had also developed a careless habit of turning up for the wrong rendezvous at the wrong time. Meanwhile he was repeatedly disobeying (“modifying” was the favored word) his orders while simultaneously proposing grandiose schemes for the future. By this time Colonel Rémy had been involved in undercover work in France for nearly two years and Brossolette suggested that his superior be given a rest; Rémy was flown out shortly afterward.
The chief object of Brossolette’s mission was to talk leading socialist politicians into leaving France and joining de Gaulle. In three months he managed to persuade André Philip and Louis Vallon to leave, and they were immediately given ministerial status on reaching London. Brossolette also converted a prominent Pétainist supporter, Charles Vallin, and made contact with pro-Gaullist leaders of the Catholic Church. Brossolette himself did not return to England until his three “trophies” and their families, and his own family, had all been taken to safety. On his return to London Brossolette broke cover and started to broadcast to France. On 22 September 1942 the announcer introduced him as a star of the Resistance who had declared his loyalty to de Gaulle. “For two years Pierre Brossolette has battled beside the French fighting inside France. Now he is in London …” And Brossolette chose to sing the praises of the resistance “foot soldiers” who died in obscurity. He compared them not to soldiers but to the ship’s stokers working below decks on the Atlantic convoys until their ship went down. “They are fighting beside you, although you do not always know it.… They are among you tonight, my brothers-in-arms. Let us salute them together.… For they are the stokers of glory (les soutiers de la gloire)!”
In the latter part of 1942 serious differences developed between Moulin, isolated in France, having to wait for days or weeks for replies to his coded messages, with his radio operators being tracked steadily by the German police, and Brossolette in London, at Passy’s elbow in BCRA headquarters and with privileged access to de Gaulle. Moulin wanted to abolish the redundant distinction between northern and southern zones, since both were now occupied; this would enable him to become de Gaulle’s delegate to the entire Resistance. Brossolette wanted to maintain the distinction, since the movements had separate histories, and he wanted to be sent as de Gaulle’s delegate to the northern zone. Moulin discovered that it was Brossolette who had written the instruction, carried by Frenay in November 1942, reminding him that he was restricted to the southern zone. Then, just when links with the Communist Party were being formed, came Passy’s discovery that Moulin had been operating, through his own delegate Manhès, in the northern zone for a year. The thin line between “modifying” and “disobeying” orders seemed to have been crossed. This was the background to the “Mission brumaire,” the code name for the journey undertaken by Passy, Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas in January 1943.
Brossolette arrived on 26 January and Passy followed on 26 February.
Moulin, with his habitual tactical skill, chose to return to London from 13 February to 21 March, by which time he had been in the field for a year and six weeks. The official reason for his return was to bring General Delestraint, the newly appointed military commander of the Secret Army, to talk to de Gaulle and meet Passy and the British. But Moulin also timed his London visit to coincide with the absence of Brossolette; furthermore he was able first to meet Passy with de Gaulle, and then to be in London after Passy’s departure. He may also have been expecting to confer with his indispensable colleague Henri Manhès, whom he had sent to London on 26 January. In the event Manhès climbed out of the plane Moulin and Delestraint were preparing to board. When Manhès saw Moulin among the figures crouched on the edge of the field waiting to board the plane he shouted, “Wait! Don’t go, Jean, don’t go.” Moulin hesitated but the French liaison officer in charge of the flight said, “I’ve got my orders,” and pushed Moulin through the plane door. By the time Moulin had returned on 21 March, Manhès had been under Gestapo interrogation in the avenue Foch for ten days.