Nor was it clear that the resistance movements spoke for the majority of the city’s population. In mid-1943, less than 10 percent of France could even loosely be classified as pro-Resistance, and an even smaller number was active in any of the various Resistance groups. It is, of course, extremely difficult to assess with any accuracy what was in the hearts and minds of Parisians, but it is clear, understandably enough, that absent any realistic hope of help from the outside world, few Parisians were willing to challenge the German Army and its well-armed allies in the Vichy French administration.5
Thus Moulin’s appearance at de Gaulle’s London headquarters promised to solve a number of problems. Moulin could bring the various arms of the French Resistance together under de Gaulle’s nominal authority and, in doing so, could help to build a power base for de Gaulle inside France. Given new code names, Moulin soon became the most important asset de Gaulle had in France itself. In exchange for their cooperation, Moulin could promise the French Resistance money, arms, and links to the British.
Moulin parachuted into France twice to organize and build a cohesive French Resistance. He spent months living a clandestine life and meeting with Resistance leaders across the country. In January 1943, he presided over the fusing of three provincial Resistance groups that together pledged their loyalty to de Gaulle. In March, de Gaulle sent him to Paris despite the danger and the enormous challenges he faced in fusing a movement together in the much more difficult political environment of the capital. Moulin knew that if he was betrayed or captured, he would face torture and a painful death.
In March, Moulin and two of the most important Parisian Resistance leaders met in the Bois de Boulogne, the sprawling park on the western edge of the city, for a tense and confrontational discussion. Moulin insisted that the Resistance could only function effectively if it operated under central command and control, an idea that rankled the two résistants. Constantly walking through the park in order not to be too closely observed, the independent-minded leaders of the mostly left-leaning Resistance movements refused to submit to the authority of de Gaulle or anyone else based outside the city.
Moulin stayed in Paris to break the logjam despite the increasing risks he knew he was running; the longer he remained in the city, the greater the likelihood that his activities would be noticed by the Germans. But, using his own powers of persuasion and promises of money and weapons from London, he managed to bring the various parties together. At a tense and often acrimonious meeting in a small apartment in the St. Sulpice neighborhood of Paris, Moulin finally achieved his aim through the formation of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), to which all of the major groups pledged their allegiance. The CNR stated as its three main purposes the reestablishment of a republican form of government guaranteeing the rights of the people of France; full support of the Allies in their war against Germany; and the complete repudiation of Vichy. The CNR also agreed to recognize de Gaulle as the head of the Free French government-in-exile and Giraud as commander in chief of its army. In return, the leaders of the CNR insisted that de Gaulle accept the return of a republican form of government after the war and that he provide them with weapons and other supplies.
Moulin had achieved the impossible, creating a political structure that mutually suspicious groups would accept and that would allow them to work together toward their common goals. He had even persuaded the communists, who held much of the real power in Paris, to accept de Gaulle as their nominal political leader in exchange for a promise of their participation in a postwar government. These decisions had enormous implications for the development of the Resistance movement and for events in Paris in the months that followed. Working in extraordinarily dangerous conditions, Moulin had made a critical contribution to the liberation of Paris. Tragically, though, Moulin never saw the fruits of his labors. A victim of the jealousy of his own comrades and an intensive Gestapo manhunt, he was living on borrowed time. Less than a month after the meeting in Paris, the Germans caught him near Lyon and tortured him in a railroad car bound for Germany until he succumbed to their brutality. He maintained his silence until his violent end, taking all his many secrets about the members of the French Resistance with him to his grave.6
The French Resistance thus had a hero and a martyr in Moulin. But without his leadership and skillful diplomacy, the various elements of the Resistance had a difficult time staying together. In reality, they were only connected through mutual hatred of their common foes, the Germans and Vichy. The constant presence of German and Vichy surveillance also made working together difficult, especially given the widespread fears that rival Resistance organizations contained informers. Moulin’s own death served as a warning: Most members of the Resistance believed, with good reason, that the Gestapo and the “Butcher of Lyon,” the dreaded Klaus Barbie, had only been able to find Moulin because of critical intelligence provided by an informer inside their ranks.7
As 1944 began, the Resistance was becoming a more important force within France, but the Germans still held most of the cards. There had been no Allied invasion of France in 1943; nor had the Allies changed their minds on either the bombing of French industry or the policy of not dropping arms to the French Resistance, which they still did not fully trust despite the promises of the CNR. Both de Gaulle and Allied headquarters remained ambivalent about supporting any kind of uprising inside France until it could be coordinated with, and subordinated to, a major Allied military operation. Nevertheless, anger at the Germans and Vichy was clearly on the rise inside France. The numbers of men escaping to the forests to join the rural maquis continued to increase, providing the Resistance with a pool of potential manpower, although most of it was dispersed throughout the countryside.
To those inside Paris, Allied and Gaullist indifference to the Resistance only fueled a growing sense that those in London had forgotten about them and did not care about their suffering. Those on the Left, especially the communists, saw a more nefarious scheme at work. Many believed that de Gaulle and the Allies were intentionally exposing them to grave danger in order to weaken them numerically—and thus politically—in the postwar years. These fears reflected the left vs. right tensions inside France still left over from the 1930s. Most on the Left respected de Gaulle for accepting Frenchmen of all political viewpoints into his movement. They understood how important his links to the Americans and British were for the future of France. Nevertheless, they often remained suspicious of his motives, seeing him as a representative of the same rotten system that had collapsed in 1940. Some, like the writer Marguerite Duras, noted de Gaulle’s conservative politics and saw little real difference between a France led by de Gaulle or one led by Pétain.8
The communists, who held most of the real power in the Paris Resistance movement, had the worst relationship with de Gaulle. One French underground newspaper, Le Franc-Tireur, summed up the relationship in terms similar to those used by Duras: “We have previously stated, and we repeat it here, that we are entirely with General de Gaulle in his struggle to liberate the country; but we will be against him once liberation has occurred if, against all his previous declarations, he considers setting up a dictatorship[,] which we would not be any better able to accept from a General than we have been from a Marshal [Pétain].”9
The communists thus revealed the great tension in their own thinking about the liberation. They knew that they needed to work with de Gaulle and, through him, with the Americans and the British. But at the same time they saw the risks of fighting and dying for France only to see de Gaulle impose a postliberation government that would shut them out of power. As future events were to reveal, they had reason to worry.
Members of all Resistance groups saw their activities against the Germans and Vichy as the first stage in a larger struggle to remake France in the postwar years. Even before the Allied landing in Normandy, the Russians had broken the back of the German Army in the east at the Battle of Kursk, and Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy had surrendered fol
lowing an Allied invasion there. Both events augured a new future for Europe, one that Resistance members hoped to help shape. In Paris, the unquestioned political heart of France, Resistance leaders began to think more concretely about their own visions for France’s future in the spring and summer of 1944. Almost all Resistance members agreed on the need to reform or dismantle the Third Republic that had governed France since the 1870s. French political parties blamed its inherent weaknesses for the tensions of the 1930s and the collapse of 1940. Furthermore, they were in general agreement that France needed a republican form of government in which all French citizens could participate equally.
The liberation of France, therefore, was about more than the present; it was also about the future. In contrast to the analogy of the FFI member who likened France’s suffering to that of a woman in labor, Resistance leaders were in fact beginning to think about the kind of child they wanted to raise. They knew, however, that they would need to prove to their countrymen that they deserved a voice in that future. Resistance leaders therefore pledged that their activities would not end with the liberation. The end of the occupation would be only the first stage in a new political future for France— one in which economic and social structures would be radically reformed. A new Fourth Republic would correct the mistakes of the past, including, in their eyes, an inequitable prewar concentration of wealth and power.10
Resistance leaders of all political stripes also insisted that France, an occupied nation, not be treated like Italy, a conquered nation. France, they contended, should have the right to determine its own leaders through immediate and free elections, a right denied to Italy after Mussolini’s collapse. The prospect of fighting and dying to liberate France, only to be shut out afterward by an imposed government led by de Gaulle or some other anointed choice of the Americans, was for them a nightmarish scenario.11
For his own reasons, de Gaulle agreed that the Allies had no right to treat France as a conquered nation. He threatened not to come to France in mid-June 1944, following the Allied landings, after hearing that the Americans had retained a mayor who had Vichy connections in one of the liberated towns in Normandy and had begun to assemble 5.5 billion francs in U.S. military scrip for use in occupied France. He argued that both the selection of local officials and the printing of currency were prerogatives of Free French officials and therefore the American actions were an infringement of French sovereignty. Moreover, he argued, with some justification, that the Americans could not issue money for which they were unwilling to assume responsibility after the war because of the risk to France’s future financial stability.
This kind of behavior struck the Americans as ungrateful and arrogant in the extreme, but de Gaulle held firmly to his own vision of postwar France. At the cost of increased acrimony with Eisenhower’s headquarters, he succeeded in getting the Americans to recall most of the scrip, which had the blue, white, and red colors of France, but was in the shape of the U.S. dollar and prominently featured the words “US Army.” Still furious with de Gaulle, Churchill warned him not to expect “the title deeds to France” as soon as the Normandy landings were over. Roosevelt, who disliked de Gaulle even more than Churchill did, told him that the United States was not bound to recognize any government not chosen by the French people. De Gaulle would need to win enough support inside France to make clear that he did indeed have a mandate to represent the wishes of his countrymen. On June 3, 1944, the Americans agreed to treat de Gaulle as head of the provisional French government, but, for these reasons, they stopped short of making a formal announcement to that effect. They also refused to recognize this provisional government as the legitimate government of France.12
De Gaulle and the Americans may have disagreed about the extent of French sovereignty, but they agreed on the potential threat the French Left might pose to postwar stability. The Americans and British, in fact, presumed that the Resistance was full of communist elements anxious to start a civil war as soon as the Germans left France. De Gaulle and many of his followers blamed the French Communist Party’s foolish support of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 for allowing the Germans to focus the full weight of their military might in the west. Now, they feared that the communists were plotting to turn France over to a regime led by the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez, who had spent the war years in Moscow after deserting from the French Army in 1939 and subsequently having his citizenship revoked.13
De Gaulle thus warned the Allies against supporting the Resistance for fear of helping them grow too powerful at the end of the war. In doing so he was walking a fine line between courting the support of the Resistance and ensuring that its communist elements did not grow powerful enough to challenge him. In other words, he wanted the Resistance to serve as an extension of his own power. On this point the Americans and de Gaulle were in full agreement. Although the Americans had their doubts about de Gaulle, they surely preferred him to the revolution that they feared was the goal of the members of the French Resistance, especially those of the working class inside Paris. Memories of the dreadful Paris Commune in 1871 still hung over the heads of decision makers in 1944, laying before all of them the specter of a French civil war once the Germans left. As the FFI had surmised, fear of communist power was indeed the main reason for the Allied policy of not air-dropping weapons into Paris.14
The Allies had agreed to recognize de Gaulle as head of a provisional French government in part to head off the possibility of such a revolution. Roosevelt also went out of his way to tell Eisenhower that he was not bound by the agreement to recognize de Gaulle’s authority inside France if doing so conflicted with military operations. De Gaulle had worn out his welcome in both Eisenhower’s headquarters and at No. 10 Downing Street because of his repeated insistence on Allied recognition of his authority, but he was at long last the recognized head of a provisional French state, even if he did not yet control any of its territory. De Gaulle, never shy about reaching for whatever he could, saw the creation of the provisional government as recognition not only of his coequal status with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, but also as recognition of his authority over the French Resistance. The move certainly helped to solidify de Gaulle’s nominal standing as the leader of a future French government, although it remained to be seen if the French themselves would respect him as such.
The Allies also looked the other way as de Gaulle began to set up the structure of a permanent government. He carefully and quietly selected men whose politics he shared and whose loyalty he valued to join a nascent state that could take power in Paris as soon as the Germans left, but before the Allies could establish a government of occupation. Most of those officials were based in Algiers, not London, giving them room to operate away from the peering eyes of Allied political and military leadership. Whether the communists would accept the new government or fight to prevent its implementation no one knew, nor did de Gaulle know if the Americans would endorse his plan. He did, however, know that he needed to be in a position to control France, even against the wishes of some of his Allies and some of his countrymen, even at the risk of civil war.15
De Gaulle did have some tangible assets, including approximately 100,000 men in the Free French Army. Armed, trained, and clothed by the Americans, most of the men were the descendants of Europeans who had migrated to North Africa or African subjects of the French Empire; very few of them had come directly from France itself. These men formed the heart of the French Expeditionary Corps under General Alphonse Juin that had helped to open the Allied route into Rome just days before the landings in Normandy. Another French unit, the Deuxième Division Blindée (Second Armored Division) under General Philippe Leclerc, had been fighting its way across Africa in the name of Free France since 1940; in June and July 1944, it was in England training for operations on the continent. These highly esteemed units had made important contributions on the battlefield and helped to give de Gaulle and Free France respect within Allied military circles. Exactly who
commanded them remained an issue of some ambiguity. They were formally a part of the Allied command structure that reached back to Eisenhower, and they were fully dependent on the Americans for their arms and equipment, but de Gaulle was, after the creation of the provisional government, their head of state.
While the military value of these French units was considerable, their symbolic importance was even greater, as Allied commanders were well aware. As early as May 1943, Eisenhower and his staff had concluded that it would be of paramount importance to the postwar political picture to have regular French forces commanded by a French officer liberate Paris. Eisenhower had no interest in governing France after the Liberation, but he had even less interest in seeing civil disorder break out along his lines of supply as he pursued the German Army to the Rhine. He therefore saw the value of a restoration of order, although he did not necessarily believe that only de Gaulle could provide that order, as his retention of several Vichy officials in Normandy suggests.16
To those in Paris, however, the formation of the provisional government changed nothing but the heading on de Gaulle’s London stationery. Mutual suspicions between de Gaulle’s supporters and the communist heart of the Resistance in Paris remained deep, almost tearing the Resistance apart before it could have any impact on the liberation of France. De Gaulle and his supporters had no intention of liberating France only to see a communist uprising assume power thereafter. For its part, the Left had no intention of fighting to rid France of Vichy only to see another unrepresentative and authoritarian government, led by a soldier, replace it. As Albert Camus put it in the pages of the clandestine left-wing newspaper Combat, the liberation of France would mean nothing if it did not also liberate the nation from the moneyed interests that had so badly failed “in all its duties” in the prewar years. “We want without delay,” Camus wrote, “to institute a true peoples’ and workers’ democracy. . . . We believe that any politics that cuts itself off from the working class is futile. The France of tomorrow will be what its working class becomes.”17
The Blood of Free Men Page 7
