France
Juliette Pattinson
To many British people, fed on a staple of ’Allo ’Allo and Wish Me Luck, resistance during the Second World War was predominantly a French phenomenon. More books have been written in English about resistance movements in France than any other nation’s partisan war effort. And yet unlike Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the French resistance never became a mass popular movement. There were 300,000 resistance veterans plus a further 100,000 who died during the war, either killed in action, executed in French prisons or who died in concentration camps, who were officially recognized by the State after the war. From a wartime population of 40 million, these 400,000 amounted to about 1 per cent.
Yet the actual figure of how many resisted is undoubtedly higher. Definitions of ‘resistance’ and what counts as ‘resistance’ are highly contested. There is a temptation to adopt a narrow military meaning but this greatly distorts the nature and diversity of resistance and omits the large number of men and especially women who participated in myriad ways that have not generally been labelled as such. Implicit in the words ‘The resistance’ is the notion that there was one singular, unified opposition. Rather, there were hundreds of groups and multiple ways of resisting and while de Gaulle might be considered to be the symbol of the resistance, he was profoundly distrusted by many, including the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) and even his own representative, Jean Moulin.
Despite the common objectives to rid France of its German occupiers and overthrow Vichy, the collaborating French government, the resistance was riven by division. But out of a multitude of isolated, small and poorly organized groups emerged an umbrella organization under which many of the larger groups united and to which formal allegiance to de Gaulle was accepted. While tensions between different political factions remained and groups continued to operate independently, this movement towards unity increased efficiency. Nevertheless, the issue of effectiveness remains hotly contested. While militarily, the French resistance was generally of marginal significance, rarely posing a real threat to the occupiers and only making a minor contribution to the liberation of France, it was vital psychologically in terms of morale through the salvaging of national honour, and crucial politically in facilitating a relatively smooth transition of power at the liberation.
As we shall see, the resistance developed in various phases: the Armistice in June 1940 prompted a few individuals to resist and over the next few months small groups formed and distributed newspapers. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 resulted in communists becoming far more involved in resisting and more violent strategies were practised. In 1942, supplies to resistance groups increased as links with London were established. There were moves towards greater unity with the establishment of a resistance council in 1943 and by 1944 groups had increased in size as the Allied invasion became imminent. Just as the resistance changed in form during the occupation, so too did the behaviour of German soldiers. Despite fears of rape, prompted in part by the alleged or actual atrocities committed by Germans in 1914, and actual incidents of looting and massacres in the 1940 campaign, including the killing of 124 civilians in the northern town of Oignies in May 1940, soldiers generally behaved in a disciplined manner. The relatively restrained nature of the occupation by the army contrasted starkly with the far more ruthless non-army administrations in Poland and the western Soviet Union. Yet as the resistance became more active the occupiers met violence with violence. Hostages were shot in reprisal from 1941 onwards and as soldiers with Eastern Front experience were posted to France in 1943 and 1944, several massacres occurred.1
And in addition to the occupiers, resistance forces had to contend with their fellow countrymen who served in the milice, a Vichy uniformed paramilitary organization that hunted Jews and resisters but which never numbered more than 30,000, with disparate groups of collaborationists, which totalled about 200,000 for the entire occupation period who saw Hitler as the saviour of Europe, as well as with individuals who collaborated for personal gain.2 In spite of these impediments, ordinary men and women risked their lives to resist.
This chapter, which takes a broad definition of resisting, covering anti-German as well as anti-Vichy non-compliance, uses official records and personal testimonies to examine the fall of France, the emergence of both external and internal resistance, the different forms the underground war assumed, the social composition of the resistance, the attempt to unify the larger clandestine groups, the overall impact it had and the post-war myths that arose.
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France was at war with Germany from 3 September 1939 and after a period of little military confrontation known as la drôle de guerre (the Phoney War), it was attacked on 10 May 1940. The Maginot Line, the 400km-long system of fortifications built along the eastern frontier with Germany was circumvented when the Germans crossed the border at Sedan in the heavily wooded Ardennes region and proceeded towards Paris.3 The successful coordination of German land and air operations and the superiority of the armoured divisions that raced across northern France with remarkable speed rendered French counterattacks ineffective. Nearly 100,000 Frenchmen lost their lives in the battle for France.4 In total, 1.8 million French combatants were captured and became prisoners of war, many of whom for the duration of the conflict.5 As German soldiers swept through northern France, hundreds of thousands of French civilians fled their homes. This exode (exodus) saw northern towns shrink in size, while those in the south swelled to accommodate the refugees.6 Paris became an open city as the government fled, surrendering on 14 June 1940 without a single shot being fired.7
France under Axis domination, 1940–4.
Following the resignation of Prime Minister Paul Reynaud on 16 June, the deputy leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, an 84-year-old First World War veteran, assumed power and without delay made enquiries about the terms of an armistice.8 This was signed on 22 June in the same railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne that had been used to accept the German surrender in 1918. The terms of the armistice were particularly stringent. Unlike other defeated countries, France was divided into two: three-fifths of the country, essentially the northern half and the south-west corner, were occupied by the German army and the Alsace and Moselle regions were annexed by Germany; the southern zone remained nominally free, at least until November 1942 when it too was occupied in the wake of the Allied landings in North Africa.
Pétain established his government in the spa town of Vichy and pursued a policy of official collaboration, which included the passing of anti-Semitic laws and, from 1941, the round-up and deportation of over 75,000 Jews.9 Thus, unlike several other occupied countries that established governments-in-exile in London, France retained some sovereignty. While Pétain sought accommodation with the occupiers, another man, a determined advocate of continuing the fight, set himself up in London as an alternative representative of France. The Undersecretary of State for War, Charles de Gaulle, who was invited to fly to London and promote resistance, arrived on 17 June and, despite attempts by the British Cabinet to block him, broadcast his appel or ‘call to honour’ radio speech on the evening of 18 June on the BBC French Service.10 He asserted that France had lost a battle, not the war, that France could continue the fight from its overseas territories with Allied help and that ‘the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die’.11 De Gaulle was not urging French civilians to resist, however; he was calling on his compatriots, in particular soldiers and sailors, who were already on British soil to rally to him and mount an armed military response. As no senior politicians left France for Britain to establish an alternative government, de Gaulle went unchallenged and his role expanded from military to political leadership. This was the first of sixty-seven radio speeches he made during the occupation, each 5-minute slot on the 30-minute daily BBC programme Les Français parlent aux Français (The French speak to the French) prefaced with, ‘This is the XXX day of resistance by the French people against oppression.’ The appel was repeated the following day and recorded for posterity and the text was reproduced in various French newspapers. While de Gaulle’s 18 June speech has retrospectively assumed great importance and has been a central part of postwar Gaullist mythology, it was not perceived as a momentous occasion at the time: very few people heard this original short broadcast by a comparatively junior officer who had little influence and whose name was unknown to most people. As Henri Frenay, leader of Combat, one of the largest networks in the southern zone, later recalled, ‘It was not at the call of the General that we rose up.’12 It is therefore important not to equate the resistance with de Gaulle, who was only ever an external symbol.
Indeed, the resistance began inside France as an individual response to the occupation borne out of frustration with Vichy’s attentisme (wait-and-see policy), the inactivity of the Church, trade unions and political parties, and the prevalence of the defeatist ‘hangover’13 among the population. Isolated acts of individual defiance included Edmond Michelet, who in June 1940 typed out and distributed a protest against the armistice in Brive-la-Gaillarde; a Parisian photographer who displayed in his shop window a large portrait of Pétain with the sign ‘sold’ emblazoned across it, implying that he had ‘sold out’; and a jockey racing at Longchamps in autumn 1940 who decorated his silk shirt with a large cross of Lorraine, the double-barred cross that was adopted by the Free French. Some scrawled anti-German slogans or daubed ‘V’ signs on public walls. Brigitte Friang, a university student in Paris, recollected struggling to find expression for her opposition: ‘[we] began to slash German propaganda posters, which were all over the city. It was stupid because the result was not worth the risk we took. We were just trying to find some way of contributing to the resistance.’14
While these small-scale impulsive acts of resisting were insignificant in the broader context, they were a visible sign that not everyone was passively accepting the German occupation. Gradually, small groups of people from similar backgrounds with shared political views met to discuss what they could do to undermine Vichy and the occupiers and, consequently, several distinct organizations formed. In the occupied zone, the first groups to be established produced clandestine leaflets. The earliest group is generally acknowledged as Musée de l’homme, named (somewhat spontaneously in 1945 when it was being dismantled) after the Parisian museum at which many of its members worked and which provided a duplicating machine to make copies of their pamphlets. Another group, dating from summer 1941, was Défense de la France (France’s Defence), founded in Paris by students of the Sorbonne. Principal movements in the occupied north, which had a broader remit than the groups above which focused solely on producing pamphlets, included Ceux de la Résistance (The Men of the Resistance) and Ceux de la Libération (The Men of the Liberation), both of which were paramilitary groups providing intelligence to MI6, and which by the end of the occupation had up to 25,000 and 35,000 members respectively, drawn from all classes; Organization civile et militaire (Civil and Military Organization), a highly organized, very secure group which supplied MI6 with information and counted among its 40,000 members mainly right-wing, anti-communist Pétainists such as military officers, businessmen and public administrators; Libération-Nord (Liberation-North), which was more moderate politically and had a large number of trade unionists among its members; and Front national (National Front), an umbrella organization established by the PCF but which encompassed all political views and had up to 30,000 members, only 25 per cent of whom were committed communists, the rest having joined because they were impatient for action.15
Movements in the south were much larger than those in the occupied zone. Initially, this was because there were no German soldiers present in the south but it was following the German invasion of the unoccupied zone in November 1942 that the southern groups really grew. The three key southern movements were Combat (Fight), formed by Henri Frenay, a right-wing nationalist, in Lyon, which by the liberation had about 65,000 members; Libération-Sud (Liberation-South), established by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie in Clermont-Ferrand in December 1940 and which had about 19,000 members; and France Liberté (France Freedom), later renamed Franc-Tireur (Free Shooters), a radical leftwing group formed in Lyon in November 1940 by Jean-Pierre Lévy. This group organized a series of highly successful demonstrations, provided intelligence to the Allies and had a paramilitary wing which conducted sabotage operations and minor attacks on collaborators. All of these large groups, none of which were followers of de Gaulle, produced pamphlets and newspapers putting across an alternative message to that propounded by Vichy and the occupiers. There were also several groups in the unoccupied zone that solely produced newspapers, including Le Coq Enchainé (The Chained Cockerel), Les Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien (Christian Witness Notebooks) and L’Insurgé (The Insurrectionist). At this early stage of the occupation, the resistance was in an embryonic form: the groups were small, lacked coordination, had generally poor security and achieved very little.
These groups lacked the organization and activist experience of the communists. As a consequence of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the PCF were divided in their response to the occupation: some, who maintained allegiance to Moscow and adhered to its demands to abandon their anti-fascist tactics, advocated fraternization and sought accommodation with the occupiers, petitioning unsuccessfully in June 1940 for the right to publish their newspaper L’Humanité, while others, such as Georges Guingouin and Charles Tillon, rejected party directives and, acting independently, immediately began resisting.16 Communists were not uniformly operational until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 when the PCF was released from the constraints imposed on it by Moscow. Over the next six months communist groups undertook over 100 acts of sabotage and carried out the first assassination of a German soldier on 22 August 1941 when Pierre Georges, who used the pseudonym ‘Colonel Fabien’, shot an officer at Barbès Rochechouart metro station. In keeping with this turn towards armed struggle, the PCF established in February 1942 a military branch under Tillon called Franc-Tireurs et partisans (Free Shooters and Partisans—not to be confused with Levy’s Franc-Tireur). Not all resisters, however, supported the communist ‘pinprick’ tactic of attacking German soldiers for fear of reprisals, preferring instead restraint and preparation for a future Allied landing. Despite the brutal repression such as mass executions of hostages and the use of torture that communist tactics undoubtedly unleashed, the communists’ involvement nevertheless strengthened the resistance in terms of organization, numbers and strategy.
Another way in which the clandestine war against the occupiers was made more potent was through the forging of links between indigenous underground movements within metropolitan France and external groups providing moral, material and financial support, such as the London-based Free French and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), both of which sent operatives to France to make contact with those who were resisting in whatever form. It took time for these connections to be made but by autumn 1941, messages to the resistance began to be broadcast on the BBC, which played a crucial role throughout the war in stimulating and sustaining opposition, and the first supplies were parachuted into the unoccupied zone a few weeks later. The number of trained agents infiltrated by the Free French and SOE, as well as the weapons and funds they provided increased dramatically from 1942 onwards. In total, SOE infiltrated over 600 male agents and 50 female operatives. During 1943 and 1944, 24,155 sorties (flights) were dispatched to France and 26,555 tons of supplies were delivered.17 That the French resistance was regarded as especially significant is evidenced by the fact that only 484 tons were delivered to Belgium, 554 to Holland and just 1 to Germany.18 Supplies included small arms such as pistols and Sten guns, as well as ammunition, high explosives, food, clothing, radio equipment, petrol, oil and specialized requests such as itching powder and poison capsules. After D-Day, the volume of supplies delivered to the resistance increased considerably and on 14 July 1944 the first daylight operation, codenamed Cadillac, in which 417 tons of supplies were dropped, was conducted by the Eighth USAAF (United States Army Air Force).19 Initially, there was reluctance to equip groups with communist sympathies, but this changed over the course of the war. This mirrored the situations in Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece wherein monarchist groups, which had received the bulk of the supplies to begin with, were superseded by the communists who appeared to be more active, directly engaging with the enemy.
Weapons and explosives were crucial in order to undertake sabotage operations which damaged the German war effort. An important item used in sabotage was the time pencil, which delayed the detonation of explosive charges from minutes to several hours; 12 million of these were manufactured. They were of particular use in destroying the Peugeot plant at Montbéliard which had been converted to making tank turrets for the Wehrmacht and Focke-Wulf engine parts for the Luftwaffe. An unsuccessful RAF raid in July 1943 not only missed the factory but resulted in 110 civilian dead and a further 154 seriously injured. To avert further casualties caused by aerial bombing, SOE agent Harry Reé, organizer of the STOCKBROKER circuit, approached Monsieur Peugeot and, promising that there would be no more aerial bombing, convinced him to permit his men to sabotage the plant. This ‘blackmail’ policy was later adopted by other resisters across France. On 5 November 1943, a small team of local saboteurs accessed the plant and, using British supplies parachuted into the region, destroyed 6,000 tyres and put out of action turbo compressors and boring machines. A report in Reé’s personal file held at The National Archives states that ‘(t)he workmen who carried out this operation understood the machine and put the explosive where they knew it would do most damage.’ As a result of this operation, the factory was ‘completely unproductive for five months’.20
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While the popular stereotype of the young beret-wearing saboteur wielding a Sten gun emphasizes and indeed glorifies military action, the majority of resisters did not participate in sabotage, assassination or guerrilla warfare. Resistance took many different forms. Escape lines were established throughout France to enable downed Allied airmen and soldiers to traverse the demarcation line dividing the occupied and free zones, cross the Pyrenees into neutral Spain and travel onwards to Britain. Over 33,000 Allied service personnel were returned to Britain with the aid of escape lines. Each return was of both military and economic significance given the difficulty of finding men with the requisite flying expertise and that training a single RAF pilot cost about £15,000,21 far more than the cost of a single Spitfire, which came to £10,000 in 1940.
Resistance might also take the form of intelligence-gathering by monitoring troop movements and reporting on the production of machinery. The MI6-run Alliance network, for example, provided reports on the location of the Luftwaffe’s decoy airfields, on the German navy’s submarine bases and on the site of the V1 and V2 rockets at Peenemünde, as well as on the size and range of the weapons. Moreover, the clandestine press, which began at the very start of the occupation, developed into a potent weapon despite the problems of printing, paper supply and distribution and was until 1944 the most tangible sign of the resistance, with about 2 million copies distributed every month.22 Unique to France was the sheer number of pamphlets produced which targeted women specifically. Of the 1,100 resistance newspapers in circulation during the occupation,23 76 were for women.24 As rationing, price increases and food shortages brought about by German requisitioning took hold, women’s private domestic task of feeding their families became increasingly difficult and took on political significance. The communist newspaper La voix des femmes (Women’s Voice) mobilized 30,000 housewives in July 1944 who marched alongside men protesting against food requisitioning and demanding more bread.25 Indeed, hundreds of thousands of French nationals, many of whom did not belong to a formal network, marched in demonstrations: on 14 July 1942, Bastille Day, for example, thousands participated in simultaneous protests in Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Montpellier, Limoges, Grenoble and Toulon singing the Marseillaise after being called to demonstrate by the Free French service on the BBC. There was, then, no single way of resisting.
There was also no archetypal resister. Although the vast majority were from the poorer sections of society, not least because there were more of them and because they were more susceptible to the anti-conservative message implied in the call to resistance, resisters came from varied backgrounds (immigrants, Jews, intelligentsia, military, rural peasantry, urban working class, professional classes, petite bourgeoisie and, to a lesser extent, the aristocracy), different political persuasions (left-wing, right-wing and apolitical), all ages and both men and women. Participation was often irregular and intermittent and few resisters lived a fully clandestine life; most continued with their ordinary lives as, for example, teachers and farmers. Initially, resistance was more likely to occur in towns as this was where journalists and intellectuals, as well as printing presses, were to be found. Urban dwellers, who bore the brunt of material hardships as they could not supplement their rations, were far more likely up to 1943 to join the resistance than rural workers who were valued by Vichy.
What transformed the resistance into a mass movement with the mobilization of thousands of rural peasant men was the Service de travail obligatoire (STO; compulsory work service). This was an enforced two-year labour draft instituted in February 1943 to supply Germany with French workers and resulted in just under 800,000 Frenchmen, mainly townsfolk who could not avoid it, being deported to Germany.26 As it became increasingly more demanding, requiring more and more workers, rural peasant men took refuge in the hills and mountains. By early September 1943, over 13,000 men had formed into small groups collectively called the maquis, a Corsican word meaning scrubland. These groups developed into guerrilla bands offering an alternative lifestyle wherein class boundaries dissipated. This was very much a male preserve, a band of brothers. While women played important roles as liaison agents, couriering messages by bike and, as marraines (godmothers), providing food and clothing, it was extremely rare for a woman to belong to a maquis unit; unlike women in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, French women were very seldom armed.
Some women were involved in establishing the first groups including Musée de l’homme, Défense de la France, Libération-Sud and Combat. However, they only accounted for between 7 and 12 per cent of resisters according to the dossiers of the Combattant volontaire de la Résistance (Voluntary Resistance Fighters), which listed those who were proposed for official recognition after the war and who had participated actively for at least three months.27 Women were thus less likely to be in the resistance than men, possibly because of the constraints imposed by elderly parents, husbands, children and the home, because of the responsibilities of running a household in the absence of their husbands who were POWs, because they were less politically aware, or possibly because they were excluded by men who had reservations about women’s involvement. However, the real figure was undoubtedly much higher, as women were less likely to belong to formal organizations and often undertook (invisible) roles that were an extension of their domestic lives: providing a room for a resistance meeting, supplying maquisards with food and clothing, acting as a ‘letterbox’ where messages could be left, and bestowing food and shelter to downed Allied airmen, STO evaders and Jews. Few women traversed gender barriers by undertaking sabotage, occupying positions of leadership or engaging in combat, and yet they were essential to the day-to-day running of the resistance, as SOE agent Francis Cammaerts, leader of the JOCKEY network in southern France, recognized:
The women were more important than the men because the women looked after us, fed us, clothed us, kept our morale up by running a household where the atmosphere is right . . . The whole resistance was based on that, couldn’t have happened without it. And that’s something which unfortunately is very rarely spoken about . . . That is a fact: it was the housewife who made resistance possible.28
While there are a few celebrated heroines in France such as Lucie Aubrac, the nature of women’s contributions, which were highly gendered, have rarely been defined as ‘resistance’ and have been overshadowed by the popular image of resisters as ‘Soldiers of the Night’.
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As a military man, de Gaulle was highly sceptical of armed civilians, male or female, and did not want the resistance to become a people’s army. Rather, he wanted military action to be directed from London and saw the Free French forces as the French resistance. It was imperative, then, for de Gaulle to unify the various forces of the internal resistance in order to cement his position as the true representative of French interests with both Churchill and Roosevelt, who was especially reluctant to recognize de Gaulle, perceiving him to be a potential dictator.29 The man credited with spearheading and unifying the disparate strands of the resistance is Jean Moulin, the prefect of Chartres (the State’s representative), who, having been dismissed by Vichy, travelled to Britain in October 1941 and provided the first comprehensive account of the resistance, conveying to London the need for moral support, regular communications, funds and weapons.30 Following meetings with de Gaulle, Moulin returned to France on 2 January 1942 as his personal representative, despite misgivings about de Gaulle’s commitment to democracy, something which Roosevelt and Churchill also questioned. Moulin’s objectives were to unite the main groups in the southern unoccupied zone under the Gaullist banner and to get them to separate their military and political branches in order that their military activity could be controlled.31
Moulin’s first attempts at uniting the resistance involved the setting up of joint services. In April 1942, he established the Bureau d’information et de presse (Press and Information Service) which functioned as a central repository for articles about the resistance to be sent to the international press, as well as information to be circulated to resistance groups for publication in their newspapers. He also formed a Comité général d’études (General Study Committee) in July 1942, thereby laying the basis for the future Gaullist state. It comprised highranking civil servants from a wide range of fields who at the liberation would advise the government on political, economic and social issues so that, following the collapse of Vichy, a smooth transition would ensue.
It took Moulin fifteen months to surmount the internal squabbles engendered by distrust, fear and very real political differences between resistance leaders and to bring together the three main networks in the southern zone—Combat, Libération-Sud and Franc-Tireur. This was achieved on 26 January 1943 when an umbrella organization called Mouvements unis de la Résistance (United Resistance Movements, MUR) was created.32 Each group’s newspaper included as a sub-heading the names of the other two organizations ‘in order to impress upon the public the extent to which unity had been reached’.33 The military sections of these networks formed a nascent armed branch of the resistance called Armée Secrète (Secret Army) under the authority of General Delestraint. Moulin thus achieved his objectives, getting the main southern groups to work together, recognize de Gaulle as their leader and detach their military sections, and was instrumental in the consolidation of the resistance in the southern zone.
The largest northern groups came to a similar agreement, establishing a coordinating committee on 26 March 1943. They, as well as those in the MUR, were deeply hostile towards the inclusion in a resistance council of political parties that had deserted the country in 1940. Despite this bitter opposition, Moulin succeeded in establishing a Conseil national de la Résistance (National Resistance Council) which included the political parties and brought together communists and Gaullists. Initially, the PCF had ignored de Gaulle, but it became increasingly clear by late 1942 that he would be influential in post-war politics, and that the communists would therefore have to work with the Free French if they wanted to be involved. Moreover, the PCF was under pressure from Moscow to help precipitate an Allied landing in Western Europe which would alleviate the situation on the Eastern Front. Thus, a rapprochement led gradually to increased collaboration between Free French and communist groups that culminated in the creation of the CNR, which to a certain extent unified internal resistance. It had its inaugural meeting on the Left Bank in Paris on 27 May 1943.34 In addition to Moulin in the chair, sixteen men were present including two trade unionists, six representatives of political parties considered résistante in spirit, five spokesmen from the major resistance movements from what had previously been the northern zone (Front national, Organisation civile et militaire, Ceux de la Libération, Ceux de la Résistance and Libération-Nord) and three representatives from the largest southern movements which had formed Mouvements unis de la Résistance (Combat, Libération-Sud and Franc-Tireur). Communists were particularly well represented with delegates from their party (the PCF), their resistance organization (Front national), as well as their trade union (Confédération générale du travail). The CNR, which was essentially a resistance parliament comprising forty members, called for the establishment of a provisional government under de Gaulle, who was recognized as the leader and sole representative of French interests. By involving the communists, the illusion of unity was projected, thereby considerably strengthening de Gaulle’s legitimacy and alleviating some of Roosevelt’s reservations about his propensity for being undemocratic. It also neutralized the PCF threat to de Gaulle’s post-war ambitions.
Moulin was betrayed, arrested at a resistance meeting in Caluire on 21 June 1943 and died under torture on about 8 July. De Gaulle did not replace him and without his guiding hand resistance movements began to reaffirm their autonomy. Those who had been bitterly opposed to Moulin’s plans to establish a national resistance leadership that incorporated representatives of the political parties merged MUR and some of the smaller resistance groups to form a Central Committee on 23 July 1943 which deliberately excluded political parties. Meanwhile, a CNR Bureau was established in opposition, comprising Front national, Parti communiste français, Ceux de la Résistance, Organisation civile et militaire and Libération-Nord. Despite the undoing of some of Moulin’s efforts, the resistance was stronger and more effective as a result of increased coordination.
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On 1 June 1944, the BBC broadcast the warning signal informing the resistance that the invasion was imminent. On 5 June, in contrast to the usual 5 to 10 minutes of coded messages broadcast on the French service of the BBC, over 200 messages were read out in a 20-minute transmission galvanizing individual resistance groups. The cryptic statement ‘la giraffe a un long cou’ (‘the giraffe has a long neck’), for example, was meaningless to all those listening except for the one group for whom it was intended and who interpreted it as their call to action.35 SOE agent Roger Landes, head of the ACTOR circuit in the Bordeaux region, recalled:
We had two messages you see coming through the BBC, Message A and B . . . If you hear Message A coming through, you have to get ready to do your sabotage . . . We heard on the 1 June Message A, and Message B on . . . 5 June. When I heard Message A, that’s when I got in touch with all my leaders you see, and told them what they had to do, and gave them Message B . . . I said ‘well when you hear that, you go into action.’ When Message B . . . was transmitted on the news, all the men heard it, and on the same night they started to sabotage.36
Over the next 24 hours, hundreds of sabotage operations were undertaken throughout France—railway lines were cut, bridges were blown up and communication lines were disabled—and this significantly delayed divisions moving north to reinforce German troops in Normandy. It also hindered the transport of essential military supplies. A two-day journey from the south of France could take as long as a fortnight, as German troops were forced to abandon trains and main roads and use minor country roads, where they were frequently ambushed. This necessitated Germans being deployed in security roles which further tied down personnel. This undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of Allied troops who were gaining a foothold in northern France. A SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) memorandum written in July 1945 reflecting on the military value of clandestine operations concluded: ‘There can be no doubt that at a time when the Germans were exerting every effort to obtain more manpower, the dispersion of troops in protective and internal security duties had an effect on the land battle.’37 Between 6 and 27 June, the railway network was brought to a standstill with over 3,000 separate attacks confirmed.38 The actions of the resistance in the wake of 6 June led to brutal reprisals taken disproportionately against the local population. On 10 June, a battalion of the SS Panzer division Das Reich, comprising many soldiers who had served on the Eastern Front and who were experienced in a very different kind of warfare, massacred 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane near Limoges. Just five men and one woman from the village survived. This was the single worst atrocity committed on the Western Front.
After the Allied landings, the ranks of the resistance swelled to incorporate latecomers: many who had sat on the fence or even been active collaborators throughout the occupation flocked to join the ranks of the resistance. These ‘Septembrisards’, ‘resisters of the thirteenth hour’, of the ‘32nd of August’, were joined by ‘napthalinés’ (mothballers), soldiers who, having drawn half-pay for the duration of the occupation, removed their musty uniforms from cupboards. Consequently, maquis units expanded ten-fold. Roger Landes recalled: ‘In March ’44 we started with about 200 people. By D-Day we have 2,000 people and by September when the Germans left about 5,000 . . . It just snowballed. It got bigger and bigger.’39 American troops landing in the south of France in August 1944 during Operation Dragoon were aided by the maquis and the Free French of the Interior (FFI).40 Yet despite their numbers, the maquis were no match for the Germans in conventional open battles. This was evidenced by the annihilation of hundreds of maquisards at Glières in the Alps in March 1944, at Mont Mouchet in the Auvergne in June 1944 and at Vercors near Grenoble in July 1944. The Vercors plateau, for example, was strafed by the Luftwaffe and attacked by over 10,000 German soldiers, resulting in 326 resistance casualties and 130 civilian dead.41 The brutality was something rarely seen outside the war in the East: eyewitness evidence, for example, provides shocking tales of a woman being disembowelled and gang rapes.42 These skirmishes between inadequately trained, poorly equipped and significantly outnumbered maquisards and an army of battle-experienced soldiers were doomed to failure.
Though the resistance might not have liberated the country by itself or even played a crucial supporting military role, there were isolated examples where a town or village was liberated by resistance forces.43 On 15 August, Brive-la-Gaillarde, which witnessed one of the first acts of defiance with the distribution of Edmond Michelet’s June 1940 pamphlet decrying the armistice, became the first French town to be liberated by resisters (as opposed to Allied forces). There were twenty-eight major cities including Nice, Toulouse and Le Havre that witnessed partial insurrectionary events and Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Limoges staged uprisings and were liberated with the help of the resistance. Paris, which had fallen in 1940 without a shot being fired, witnessed an uprising that held out for a week against the occupiers, with over 2,000 Parisians, FFI and police losing their lives.44 Paris was liberated on 25 August. The uprising was not condoned by de Gaulle and is further evidence that his authority was by no means monolithic. Nevertheless, he triumphantly entered Paris in a symbolic liberation which exaggerated the role of the French troops and enabled him to rewrite history: ‘Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But now Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France.’45
From September 1944 onwards, de Gaulle toured France in an attempt to establish his authority and quash the independence of the local resistance. He frequently appeared dismissive of the efforts of the resistance and displayed coolness when meeting regional leaders. SOE agent Roger Landes, for example, recalled being invited to a reception to meet de Gaulle when he visited Bordeaux on 17 September and being told by him: ‘You are a British officer and you have been ordered to go back to England straight away.’46 Landes was by no means an exceptional case.
If in military terms the resistance was not decisive, the social and political significance of the role it played at the liberation was unparalleled. In short, France would have been liberated without the resistance but the political consequences would have been huge. Unlike Greece or Yugoslavia, France did not descend into civil war. A post-war report records the ‘orderly transfer of power’ and the ‘remarkable ease with which France passed from Vichy to Gaullist control’ and concluded that ‘the fact that no disturbance occurred in France behind the liberating armies was a most valuable contribution to the war effort’.47 Nevertheless, atrocities perpetrated by resisters against suspected collaborators did take place. The most iconic visual symbol of the purges is the photographic and filmic footage of the femmes tondues (shaved women) who were punished for allegedly ‘sleeping with the enemy’ by having their hair roughly shorn off with scissors and clippers, and being stripped of their outer clothing, daubed with swastikas and paraded around town squares. Huguette Robert recorded her observations of an incident in her diary:
A cortège of four shaven women . . . is moving towards the rue du Bac, more and more people are joining the crowd. One of the women tries to escape. She is caught, people hit her, hurl insults at her, the crowd is inhuman. The poor woman is stripped . . . on her knees . . . A member of the resistance points his machine gun at her, to kill her. People force her to say she is sorry, she is kneeling there, half-naked, on her knees . . . Are they going to kill her? No—a French officer arrives and says that she must be taken to prison and tried.48
About 20,000 women experienced this humiliating form of summary justice, conducted by men who had been in the resistance as well as those who had done little during the occupation and were keen to prove their loyalty to France.49 The first recorded instance pre-dated the liberation, taking place in May 1943; the last in March 1946. There were also other forms of unofficial retribution: about 9,000 collaborators were executed without trial, over half of which occurred before the liberation took place. Men who had joined the milice were especially targeted.
Atrocities perpetrated by resisters against suspected collaborators certainly took place. Yet the generally restrained nature of the épuration (purges) in comparison to the horrors of the occupation owed much to the resistance, given the total collapse of the judicial and police system which was virtually entirely corrupt and collaborationist. Order was soon restored through the resistance’s armed police force, the milices patriotiques, and committees led by resisters organized food, water and electricity supplies. Furthermore, following the collapse of Vichy, the resistance stepped into the political vacuum. A government-in-waiting, called the Comité française de la Libération nationale (French Committee of National Liberation), had been established in Algiers in mid-1943, and in June 1944 it formed the Gouvernement provisoire de la République française (Provisional Government of the Republic of France). The Allies intended to impose Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT) so that France was not under the control of the French. However, it abolished these plans for an interim administration due to the Allies’ recognition of de Gaulle’s Provisional Government created on 9 September. Despite not being elected, there were no challenges to his audacious seizure of power by either the communists, who lacked support from Moscow for a coup, or by the public, who simply desired a rapid return to normality. Significantly, the vote was finally extended to French women in 1944 and they exercised their newly acquired political rights for the first time in a referendum in October 1945. The assemblies of the Fourth Republic thereby included a few women as well as some ordinary men who had served their apprenticeships in the resistance—their war records bestowing on them moral legitimacy.
* * *
Despite the war being over, the experiences of the occupation were all-pervading. Henry Rousso, a leading French historian writing in the late 1980s, noted the presence of a ‘Vichy syndrome’; an omnipresent shadow cast over the French psyche.50 In the decade after liberation when memories were still raw, few authors confronted the occupation. This time of ‘unfinished mourning’ however was, according to Rousso, followed by a period of ‘repressions’ in which ‘the truth’ was suppressed and a potent and all-embracing myth of la France résistante (Resister France) developed. This propounded that the resistance had erupted immediately after the Germans occupied France, that it had expanded both exponentially and smoothly, and not only that it had been supported by the wider population but also that France had in fact been a ‘nation of resisters’. In his War Memoirs published in the 1950s, de Gaulle barely acknowledged the various networks, thereby succeeding in projecting the view that the ‘real’ resistance had been the Free French based in London and later in Algiers, and effectively wrote out of history the internal resistance and in particular the communists. According to the Gaullist myth, de Gaulle was resistance; resistance was de Gaulle. Following his election victory in 1958, the myth greatly intensified. But it was not only the Gaullists who projected a somewhat distorted view. The PCF also played a key, albeit independent, part in cultivating this myth of widespread opposition. It depicted itself as ‘le partie des 75,000 fusillés’ (the party of the 75,000 martyrs who had been shot), exaggerating not only the number of communists executed but also the number of all French killed in that way. Thus, the resistance evolved in popular memory to become synonymous with, on the one hand, the Free French in London, and on the other the communists in France. The diversity, richness and complexity of the resistance were forgotten. This image was simplified even further when Jean Moulin’s ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in December 1964 and subsequently his name, which had not been known to the French public, came to represent the resistance. As Julian Jackson notes, the resistance myth ‘imposed a unitary vision on what had been a highly fragmented experience’.51
Thus, in the twenty-five years following liberation, the darker tales of both popular and official collaboration were downplayed and purged from the collective memory of the occupation by this unifying myth. This collective amnesia was bolstered by novels and films glorifying the heroic actions of the clandestine war. While not the first film depicting the resistance, René Clement’s La Bataille du rail (Battle of the Railways), released in January 1946 and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, was a classic example of the genre, in which railway workers’ sabotage of the German war effort was celebrated. Memorials and commemorative plaques were erected, museums opened in numerous towns, metro stations, streets and squares were named after celebrated individuals and postage stamps depicting ‘heroes of the resistance’ were produced. Thus, both local and national narratives of the resistance were constructed which served to solidify a cult of the Resistance.
This unbalanced view was challenged in the early 1970s during a period known as the Mode Rétro. De Gaulle’s resignation as President in April 1969 and his death in September 1970, coupled with the student demonstrations in May 1968, the decline of the PCF and wider European events such as the Prague Spring, opened up a space in which to begin to scratch away the patina. The release in April 1971 of Marcel Ophuls’ 4-hour documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) which recorded daily life in Clermont-Ferrand ‘cracked the mirror’, according to Rousso, of resistance mythology. Using archive footage, newsreel clips and interviews with resistance veterans, SOE personnel, members of collaborationist groups, German officers and a Frenchman who had joined the Waffen-SS, the documentary destroyed some of the myths that had developed about the occupation, making evident that some civilians had actively chosen to collaborate. De Gaulle was barely mentioned. It was considered so controversial that only a few small art house cinemas in Paris’ Latin Quarter showed it; French television did not broadcast it until 1981.
Ophuls’ documentary was followed in 1972 by American historian Robert Paxton’s study Vichy France, which refuted the widely-held claim that Vichy had sought to shield France from the worst excesses of the occupation, asserted that collaboration was a French initiative rather than a German one and estimated that possibly only 10 per cent of Frenchmen and women had actively resisted.52 This book, which further dented the orthodox view of widespread opposition, was poorly received in France when it was published there a year later: Paxton was vilified in the newspaper Le Monde, which asserted that his age and nationality precluded him from casting judgement on France’s past. Paxton’s book and Ophuls’ film helped to supplant the myth of a ‘nation of resisters’ with that of a ‘nation of collaborators’. The reality of course was somewhere in between; a minority actively resisted or collaborated, a few even did both and the vast majority tried to get on with their lives, despite the strictures of occupation, waiting for the liberation. Recent publications provide a more measured analysis of the diverse responses to German occupation and Vichy rule.53
The collective memory of the occupation continued to resonate; Rousso terms the period 1974 until the late 1980s, when he published his study, an era of ‘obsessions’ during which time the spectre of the occupation was ever-present. This obsession, which continued into the 1990s, included the arrest in 1983 and the subsequent trial in 1987 of Klaus Barbie, the head of the Lyon Gestapo who was directly responsible for the torture and death of Jean Moulin and thousands of others; the 1998 trial of Maurice Papon, a senior police official in Bordeaux and supervisor of its Commissariat général aux questions juives (Service for Jewish Questions), in which capacity he was actively involved in the deportation of over 1,500 Jews; the accusation in 1994 levelled against René Bousquet, the General Secretary to the Police, of playing a key role in orchestrating the July 1942 Vel d’Hiv operation, which rounded up over 13,000 Jews into a Parisian velodrome before their deportation to Auschwitz; the 1994 trial of milice chief Paul Touvier; the 1997 publication of Gérard Chauvy’s book that alleged Raymond Aubrac, who was arrested along with Jean Moulin and later rescued by his wife Lucie in an audacious ruse, was working for Klaus Barbie; and the subsequent roundtable discussion involving the Aubracs and eight historians arranged by the newspaper Libération, which quickly descended into an interrogation and left lingering suspicions about the Aubracs despite the fact that the historians rejected the accusation.54 The war thus lived long in the French memory.
* * *
It should be noted that while de Gaulle was crucial as a symbol, a spur to action and a link with the Allies, we should not overestimate his significance: the resistance was created inside France, not outside, and was undertaken by ordinary men and women who risked everything to help bring about the liberation of their country. Resisting was indeed a highly dangerous activity which could result in betrayal, arrest, torture, captivity and either execution or deportation to a concentration camp. In unpicking the myths that abound concerning a ‘nation of resisters’ and by emphasizing the occurrence of collaboration, the sacrifice made by those individuals who were resisting becomes ever more admirable. It should also be recorded that while the internal resistance was faction-ridden, it did achieve a measure of unity. And while in military terms the effectiveness of the resistance was marginal, it did play a role, not least in maintaining morale, in preparing the ground for the Allied invasion and crucially, at the liberation, in ensuring a degree of restraint and a relatively smooth transition of power.
Notes
1. Peter Lieb, ‘Repercussions of Eastern Front Experiences on Anti-Partisan Warfare in France 1943/44’, in Journal of Strategic Studies, 31:5 (2008).
2. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh (eds), Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture During the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1944 (Oxford, 1989).
3. Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003).
4. Raymond Aubrac, The French Resistance, 1940–44 (Paris, 1997), p. 8.
5. Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945 (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
6. Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford, 2007).
7. Herbert Lottman, The Fall of Paris: June 1940 (London, 1992).
8. Nicholas Atkin, Pétain (London, 1997).
9. Paul Webster, Pétain’s Crime: The Full Story of French Collaboration in the Holocaust (London, 1990).
10. Julian Jackson, Charles de Gaulle (London, 2003).
11. François Kersaudy, Churchill and De Gaulle (London, 1990), p. 80.
12. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2001), p. 386.
13. The National Archives (TNA, formerly the Public Record Office, Kew), HS 7/123.
14. Shelley Saywell, Women in War: First-Hand Accounts from World War II to El Salvador (Ontario, 1985), p. 48.
15. TNA, HS 7/123.
16. Lynne Taylor, ‘The Parti Communiste Français and the French Resistance in the Second World War’, in Tony Judt (ed.), Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe 1939–1948 (London, 1989).
17. These figures have been compiled from TNA, HS 7/123 and HS 8/434.
18. TNA, HS 8/434.
19. Jacques Poirier, The Giraffe Has a Long Neck (London, 1995), p. 157.
20. TNA, HS 9/1240/3.
21. M.R.D. Foot, Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism, 1940–1945 (London, 1976), p. 311.
22. Aubrac, The French Resistance, p. 32.
23. La Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris holds 1,106 clandestine press titles.
24. Joan Tumblety, ‘Obedient Daughters of Marianne: Discourses of Patriotism and Maternity in the French Women’s Resistance Press during the Second World War’, Women’s History Notebooks, 4:2 (Summer 1997).
25. Ibid., p. 3.
26. Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944 (London, 1999), p. 252.
27. Hannah Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints (London, 1999), p. 99.
28. Personal interview with Francis Cammaerts, 2 July 1999.
29. Robert Dallek, ‘Roosevelt and de Gaulle’, in Robert O. Paxton and Nicholas Wahl (eds), De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal (Oxford, 1994).
30. TNA, HS 7/123.
31. Alan Clinton, Jean Moulin, 1899–1943: The French Resistance and the Republic (New York, 2002).
32. John F. Sweets, The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940–1944: A History of the Mouvements unis de la Résistance (DeKalb, 1976).
33. TNA, HS 7/124.
34. Ibid.
35. This was the message for Jacques Poirier’s DIGGER circuit in the Corrèze; Poirier, The Giraffe Has a Long Neck, p. 137.
36. Personal interview with Roger Landes, 25 August 1999.
37. TNA, HS 8/434.
38. Ibid.
39. Personal interview with Roger Landes, 25 August 1999.
40. See A.L. Funk, Hidden Ally: The French Resistance, Special Operations and the Landings in Southern France (New York, 1992).
41. Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London, 2009), pp. 252–3.
42. Report by Andre Edward Pecquet, held by TNA, HS 9/1160/1 but closed because of its sensitive contents. Seen by M.R.D. Foot in preparation for his official history, SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944 (London, 1966), p. 393.
43. Rod Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France: Image and Event (Oxford, 1995).
44. Cobb, The Resistance, pp. 270, 382 n. 97.
45. Jackson, France, p. 565.
46. Personal interview with Roger Landes, 25 August 1999.
47. TNA, HS 7/124.
48. Robert quoted in Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, De la chute à la libération de Paris (Paris, 1965).
49. Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford, 2002), p. 1.
50. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
51. Jackson, France, p. 605.
52. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York, 1972).
53. Philippe Burrin, Living With Defeat: France under the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (London, 1996); Ousby, Occupation; Peter Davies, France and the Second World War: Occupation, Collaboration and Resistance (London, 2001); Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (London, 2002).
54. Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara, ‘The Aubrac Controversy’, History Today, 41:3 (2001).
Cobb, Matthew, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London, 2009).
Collins, Margaret Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940–1945 (New York, 1995).
Davies, Peter, France and the Second World War: Occupation, Collaboration and Resistance (London, 2001).
Diamond, Hanna, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints (London, 1999).
Gildea, Robert, Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (London, 2002).
Jackson, Julian, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2001).
Kedward, Rod, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France (Oxford, 1993).
Pattinson, Juliette, Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War (Manchester, 2007).
Rossiter, Margaret, Women in the Resistance (New York, 1996).
Vinen, Richard, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (London, 2007).
Wieviorka, Olivier, ‘France’, in Bob Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford, 2000).