by Matthew Cobb
Having a ration ticket was one thing, finding a shop with food was another. At the beginning of 1941 teacher Jean Guéhenno noted, ‘Life in Paris is very difficult. We have ration tickets, but we can’t buy anything with them. The shops are empty. At home, we have survived the last two weeks thanks to the gifts of friends,’95 while twenty-year-old Liliane Jameson complained in her diary: ‘It’s virtually impossible to find butter, cheese or meat. Don’t even mention fish. There are no fruit or vegetables.’96 A week later Jameson was indulging in a food fantasy: ‘Oh, to be able to eat an enormous plate of scrambled eggs with loads of butter, a pork chop and rind with lentils, and a chocolate mousse with bananas,’ she wailed.97 More seriously, the cumulative effects of malnutrition over the war years were devastating – mortality rates in the cities shot up, by twenty-four per cent in Paris, and fifty-seven per cent in Marseilles; children grew slowly, and puberty was delayed.98 People took it in good heart, though: ‘Let England win, we’ll eat later,’ wrote one correspondent to the BBC.99
By the beginning of November the politics of Pétain had a name, which the ageing Marshal proudly pronounced when he shook Hitler’s hand at a widely publicized meeting at Montoire, about eighty miles south-west of Paris, on 24 October. Designed to seal the agreement between the two men, the meeting helped seal the Marshal’s fate in history. ‘It is in the spirit of honour, and to maintain the unity of France,’ proclaimed Pétain, ‘. . . that I enter today upon the path of collaboration.’ Collaboration. A new, insidious and shameful meaning had been given to the word. France began to divide into those who collaborated with the Nazis and those who would not. The country’s future was being forged around two words: the one Pétain used – collaboration – and another, which was being spoken more and more often: resistance.
For many people on both sides of the demarcation line, the handshake at Montoire brought home the reality of Vichy’s role in the Occupation and division of France. Many of those who had nurtured the hope that Pétain was simply biding his time, preparing to turn the tables on the Nazis, began to admit what had been obvious to the most clear-sighted. Pétain was Hitler’s willing ally. With Pétain now openly siding with the Nazis, and all the political parties either hopelessly split or compromised by their support for him (or, in the case of the Communists, their support for the Stalin–Hitler pact), the implication was plain: if anything was to be done, then ordinary people were going to have to do it on their own.
The first indication of this profound mood change appeared in the run-up to Armistice Day – 11 November. Since 1919 this had been a public holiday marked by solemn commemorations of the terrible impact of the First World War. Nearly 1.7 million French people lost their lives in the 1914–18 conflict, including 300,000 civilians, while 3.5 million soldiers were wounded – over a million men lost a limb. In Paris the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Place de l’Étoile, underneath the Arc de Triomphe, was the traditional focus of the commemorations. In 1940, with Nazi troops goose-stepping in the streets of the capital, the event threatened to become a focus for anti-German feeling. Four days after the Pétain–Hitler handshake at Montoire, the head of the Paris police wrote a confidential report in which he warned of difficult times ahead: ‘There is talk of demonstrating on 11 November . . . Montoire has already had an effect: it has stimulated Gaullist propaganda amongst the students.’100
The military commander of Paris grew increasingly concerned, and on 9 November he decided to ban any commemoration. The 11th of November was to be an ordinary day, with work and school as usual. Predictably, this decision merely inflamed matters. In the week before 11 November school students in the Paris lycées (high schools) had circulated handwritten leaflets and stickers, calling on their comrades to boycott classes that day, and to go to the Place de l’Étoile at 5.30 p.m. On the evening of 10 November the BBC called on people to join the demonstration. Fourteen-year-old Micheline Bood heard about the plans, and, with the insouciance of youth, wrote in her diary: ‘That’ll be fun! If it all kicks off, we’ll go to jail! No more homework, no more teachers, no more detention! That’d be great.’101 As it turned out, the demonstration was even more important than Micheline’s girlish excitement suggested: it represented the first collective stirring of resistance to the Nazi Occupation.
In the day before 11 November meetings were held in the lycées to mobilize for the demonstration, and students were sent to neighbouring schools and to the university, calling on their comrades to join the movement. Already, students close to the Communist Party had been calling for a demonstration as part of their campaign to free Professor Paul Langevin, a world-renowned physicist at the Sorbonne, who had been arrested on 31 October. But when Armistice Day finally came around, it was the Paris lycées that provided most of the participants. This was a day for teenagers.
The events unfolded in three phases. First, throughout the day well-behaved mourners paid their respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier underneath the Arc de Triomphe, and at the statue of Clemenceau, halfway up the Champs-Elysées. Clemenceau had been Prime Minister at the end of the First World War, and for many was a symbol of France’s victory over Germany. According to the French police, around 20,000 people laid over 1,800 bouquets and around 60 wreaths during these ceremonies, which were tolerated by both the French and German authorities.
Then, in mid-afternoon, several hundred lycéens from schools near the Place de l’Étoile disobeyed their headmasters and simply walked out of their schools. An impromptu march towards the Arc de Triomphe was headed by a group of students from the Lycée Janson de Sailly, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ as they marched along the boulevard. Sensing the potential for trouble, shopkeepers hastily pulled down their shutters. These students were led by two lads carrying a floral Lorraine cross – the double-barred cross that was the symbol of de Gaulle’s Free French, and which the florist had gone to great pains to colour red, white and blue, the colours of the French tricolour. As they arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, the two young men were caught in a pincer movement with French police on one side and German troops on the other. Before dashing off, they managed to lay the floral cross on the Tomb, then skipped away from the truncheons of the French police. The Nazi troops removed the cross immediately.
As night fell and the November air thickened with damp before turning to rain, matters became more serious. Up to 3,000 youngsters, mainly school students, gradually gathered near the statue of Clemenceau. In a shambling, disorganized way, they drifted on to the Champs-Elysées and began marching towards the Arc de Triomphe. As they marched, they shouted ‘Vive la France’, ‘Vive l’Angleterre’, ‘Down with the Hun’. There was still a festive atmosphere – one joker carried two fishing rods, which he waved above his head, shouting ‘Vive!’ This was a schoolboy pun – a word for fishing rod is ‘gaule’, so the young lad was effectively saying, ‘Long live de Gaulle!’102
As they neared the Place de l’Étoile the crowd passed a brasserie called Le Tyrol, which acted as the headquarters for Jeune Front (‘Youth Front’), a fascist youth organization. There was shouting and about a hundred demonstrators surged into the bar, ripping down German posters and chasing after the young fascists. More yelling, whistling and gesticulating followed as scuffles broke out with the police, who piled in after the demonstrators. Then, shortly after 6 p.m., right next to the Place de l’Étoile, the German soldiers moved in. Troop cars and lorries were driven into the crowd, sending people running away, pinning some against the railings. Covered lorries parked in the surrounding streets suddenly spewed out grey-uniformed soldiers, who spread out across the boulevards, while the gates to the Métro station slammed shut. The protesters were trapped. Micheline Bood got her wish: it all ‘kicked off’.
The troops charged with fixed bayonets, and shots were fired into the air.103 The crowd shivered and squirmed away, like a shoal of fish escaping from a predator. Stun grenades were fired, dazing some students and wounding others as shrapnel flew through the rain. Pie
rre Lefranc was hit in the leg and bolted down the road like a rabbit, while his comrade, Jean Colson, was chased into a doorway and then coldly shot in the thigh by a German NCO. Édouard Martin was brought to the ground, beaten with rifle butts, and then stabbed. Eighteen-year-old Michel Tagrine, a student at the music conservatoire, had foolishly turned up with his violin; he was more concerned about keeping it safe than he was about protecting himself.
Edwige de Saint-Wexel, seventeen years old at the time, recalled the fear that streaked through the crowd like an electric shock:
A fusillade of shots rang out, mostly, I think, over our heads. But someone off to the left of me fell down. We panicked and began to run in all directions, squirming through the army and police lines. I saw an opening into the Avenue Kléber and scurried through like a mouse into a hole in the wall. I ran down the avenue, dodged into the side streets as though demons were after me. I’ve never been so frightened.104
Some of the youngsters stood their ground and fought back. Micheline Bood described the scenes in her diary:
Some Huns had been wounded in the fighting and ambulances were called. The French were elated, the Huns were miserable. And then we bumped into a group of people who were playing with a German officer like he was a punching-ball. They were hitting him over and over again, swearing at him with each blow . . . Yvette and I were jubilant . . . tough on him, but he’s a Hun.105
Overall, however, the Nazis had the upper hand and were able to snuff out the first signs of a riot, smashing heads, breaking noses, clubbing necks. When Pierre-André Dufetel grabbed a soldier’s rifle and started tussling with him, or when René Chuzeville hurled himself at an officer who was slapping a young girl, overwhelming numbers of Nazi reinforcements soon put an abrupt and violent end to attempts to fight back.
By 7 p.m. the streets were clear. A hundred and forty-three people had been arrested, the vast majority of them school students. Taken to a military prison, they were beaten, slapped, dragged by their hair and made to stand in a courtyard all night in the pouring rain, with their hands on their heads. Some were lined up against a wall by a group of soldiers pretending to be a firing squad. This macabre piece of intimidation was halted by a German general, who stared, amazed, at the scene and exclaimed: ‘But they are just children!’
The youngest demonstrators were released that night, but around a third of those arrested had to wait until the beginning of December, while others were held until Christmas. Even after the demonstration, the arrests continued. The university was closed, and all the students in Paris had to report to the police each day. Edwige de Saint-Wexel was questioned as to her whereabouts on 11 November. She lied, saying she was at the library. The police discovered this was untrue, then searched her apartment, where they found leaflets and her diary, ‘filled with anti-German sentiments’. Two SS men beat her, stubbed out lighted cigarettes on her chest and temples, scarring her for life, then threw her into a cell:
They kept me there in that cellar from November through February 1941. It was three months, but I had no concept of time. I lived like an animal, unwashed, famished, lapping up my own soup, no one to talk to, no idea what was happening, nor orientation beyond my cell. It was like living in a cold, black hell. I was less than human.106
Inevitably, some who had nothing to do with the demonstration were caught up in the wave of repression. In evening of 10 November a twenty-eight-year-old engineer, Jacques Bonsergent, was on his way back from a wedding party, together with a group of friends. Leaving the Gare Saint-Lazare in the dark of the blackout, they bumped into a group of German soldiers. An accidental collision turned into a mini brawl, and a soldier was punched. In the confusion, Bonsergent’s friends managed to get away, but he was arrested, beaten and thrown in prison when he refused to give the Nazis the names of his friends. After being held incognito for nineteen days, he was taken to court, tried in a single day and sentenced to death ‘for an act of violence against a member of the German army’. Despite hopes that his sentence would be commuted, Bonsergent was executed on 23 December.107 Various explanations have been put forward to explain the severity of the sentence – a warning to the population after the events of 11 November, a squabble between the Gestapo and the German army over who was in charge of repression in Paris, or Nazi fury with Vichy, where Hitler’s favourite, Pierre Laval, was first kicked out of the government, then arrested before being released under pressure from Berlin. Whatever the case, the message was clear: the Nazis were determined to crush all opposition.
Despite the viciousness of the Nazi reprisals, the demonstration of 11 November was a watershed. It showed everyone – the Nazis, Vichy, the British, the Americans, de Gaulle and, most important, the French themselves – that resistance was possible, and that the French would not simply accept the Occupation and division of their country. Micheline Bood, high on rebellion, sensed the importance of the event when she scribbled euphorically in her diary as soon as she got home:
Right now, it’s seven o’clock. They are fighting on the Avenue d’Alma, with grenades and rifles. Ah, my friends! There will be some terrible reprisals! But I can say ‘I WAS THERE!’108
*
As the first mourners turned up at Clemenceau’s statue on the morning of 11 November, they were amazed to see, propped up against the base, a metre-long visiting card, in the name of General de Gaulle. It was quickly whisked away by the French police, although not soon enough to stop word of its magical presence spreading through the city. That stunt was the work of far-left lawyer André Weil-Curiel and of Léon-Maurice Nordmann, who was a member of an underground group called Avocats Socialistes (Socialist Lawyers). But Weil-Curiel was not simply a pro-Gaullist socialist prankster; he had been sent to France as a Gaullist agent – a spy.
When de Gaulle arrived in London in June 1940, he was virtually alone. With few exceptions, the generals, admirals and ministers stayed firmly at Pétain’s side while the company directors and the heads of the banks knew there was money to be made in France, not London. As a result, de Gaulle was the undisputed military and political figurehead of what was first called ‘La France Libre’ (‘The Free French’) and then, from 1942, ‘La France Combattante’ (‘The Fighting French’ – for simplicity’s sake, the term ‘Free French’ will be used throughout this book). These official English terms reveal the gulf that separated de Gaulle’s conception of what he was doing from that of his British allies. In each case the accurate translation should have been ‘France’, not ‘French’ (‘Free France’ and ‘Fighting France’). De Gaulle considered, quite simply, that he and his supporters were France, and he did not have the slightest complex about saying so in public: ‘We are France!’ he would declare, leaving the listener to decide whether he was a visionary or merely delusional, and whether the ‘we’ was the royal plural or not.109
When de Gaulle began to set up his headquarters in London, he had so little in the way of material support that when the first French man asked to join, on June 19, de Gaulle had to ask him for a piece of paper to write down his name.110 Even more than office space and paper, de Gaulle needed people. One of the first to join him was André Dewavrin, the twenty-nine-year-old naval officer who had returned to Brest at the moment of the fall of France. Dewavrin made his way to England and, at the end of June, met de Gaulle. He later recalled that at the end of their brief interview de Gaulle said:
‘You will be head of military intelligence-gathering and operations. Goodbye. We will meet again soon.’ The conversation was over. I saluted and left. The encounter was glacial and the only contact I felt with the General was his grey, piercing gaze.111
As Dewavrin freely admitted, he had not the slightest idea what being in charge of intelligence actually involved. He was a teacher at the military training school at Saint-Cyr, not a spy. But Dewavrin was a quick learner – his steely mind, his taste for manipulation and his absolute self-confidence all helped. He adopted a pseudonym, Passy (after a Paris Métro station) and, befor
e the summer was out, enlisted the help of MI6 to send his first agents into France, on simple intelligence-gathering missions. Within a few months both men were able to return with valuable information about German coastal fortifications in the north-west, and with contacts that laid the basis for future intelligence operations.
Passy was on the far right of French politics – not a fascist, but not far off. His robust views, coupled with his taste for the shadow-play and deceit that were part and parcel of the world of espionage, meant that he was subsequently viewed with great suspicion by many in the Resistance. This distrust (which Passy positively revelled in) was reinforced by the clique conflicts and jealousies that split the small group of French exiles in London. As a result of this infighting and squabbling, one section of the Free French often did not know what another was doing. Weil-Curiel’s mission was an example of this kind of secret within a secret.
Weil-Curiel’s orders came from de Gaulle’s chief assistant, Claude Hettier de Boislambert. He was to gauge the public mood, and to persuade writers, intellectuals and trade unionists – the kind of people he knew from before the war – to come to London.112 For reasons that remain obscure, this mission was kept hidden from both Passy and British Intelligence. Weil-Curiel adopted the cover of a repatriated soldier and joined the thousands of French troops in Britain who eventually returned home. By the middle of August he was back in Paris, and within a few weeks he had come into contact with some of the first Resistance organizations.113
