Jean Moulin is remembered in France today as the great hero of the wartime Resistance. Yet few modern heroes remain so enigmatic. Sixty years on, mystery shrouds such elementary facts as his true political beliefs, the manner of his betrayal and even the time and place of his death.
In 1941, Moulin—who had been a senior civil servant before the outbreak of the war—slipped over the Spanish border out of wartime France using a passport he had forged himself to reach London and take his place as the most eminent recruit to the cause of the Free French. There he agreed to act as General de Gaulle’s emissary to the Resistance and was entrusted with the mission of uniting the movement and reforging it as an instrument of national liberation. Despite his high rank he was twice smuggled back into France, where he lived underground and frequently on the run in conditions of grave danger.
By May 1943, Moulin had succeeded in creating a united resistance movement, ranging from the ultra-right to the communists, under his personal political leadership. To achieve this he had had to overcome the bitter rivalries dividing the ambitious individualists who had created the original networks. One month later Jean Moulin was betrayed to the Gestapo and captured in Lyon. Despite the torture he suffered at the hands of the SS officer Klaus Barbie, Moulin remained silent and paid for his courage with his life. Two postwar treason trials held in Paris failed to uncover the identity of his betrayer. Twenty years later, during an emotional ceremony at the Panthéon, his heroism was officially recognized and he was consecrated as a national symbol.
Jean Moulin came from what the French call a “a republican background.” In the undeclared civil war that divided French society during his lifetime and that of his father before him, the Moulin family was always on the progressive side of the argument, egalitarian, anti-monarchist and anticlerical. Moulin first achieved political influence during the 1930s, when the Spanish Civil War led to the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance between radicals, socialists, communists and other “anti-fascists.”
For many thousands of European and American idealists this exhilarating intellectual adventure was brutally terminated in August 1939, with the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
It was then—in Koestler’s mocking simile—that the men of the Popular Front faced the bitter truth as did Jacob in Genesis, who awoke on the morning after his wedding night to find that after seven years of struggle he had won not the beautiful Rachel but her hideous sister, Leah. Jean Moulin’s dedicated support for the Popular Front led to postwar accusations by fellow resisters that his commitment to communism may have survived the Pact and that he may even have been a communist agent. In 1989 Moulin’s wartime radio operator, Daniel Cordier, outraged by this suggestion, defended the reputation of his old commander in the first of what was planned to be a six-volume study that must be one of the quixotic biographical monuments ever conceived. But despite Cordier’s loyal efforts the arguments continue, reflecting the divisions in French society that were established a century ago and persist to this day. In such circumstances it is sometimes easier for an outsider to make out the truth.
My own interest in the life of Jean Moulin began in the early 1980s when I was writing about the political maneuvering that preceded the trial in Lyon of the man who arrested him, the former SS officer Klaus Barbie. Barbie eventually received a life sentence after being convicted of wartime crimes against humanity. Over the years Barbie made numerous contradictory statements about the raid he had conducted on the house in Caluire and “the traitors of the Resistance”; none were entirely convincing and it seems likely that when Barbie died in a French prison he revenged himself by taking the truth with him to his grave.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the story of Jean Moulin is that a life that has been the subject of so many inquiries should remain so discreet. We glimpse Moulin in a succession of silhouettes: an incident with some army recruits in Montpellier when he was aged eighteen, an encounter with a brutish gatekeeper, a fragment of verse which is all that remains of a dinner with the depraved poet Max Jacob, some drawings scribbled on a café tablecloth during the occupation of Lyon. Pieced together, such moments can form the outlines of a man’s life; certainly they reveal someone whose vitality and humanity stand in strong contrast to the heroic effigy they lowered into the crypt of the Panthéon.