The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  I love France. I love this beautiful country. Yes, I know it can be small-minded, selfish, politically rotten and a victim of its old glory, but with all these faults it remains enormously human and will not sacrifice its stature and its human sentiment . . . For the true France to be reborn one day, sacrifices will be needed. Believe me, there are no useless sacrifices . . . We must know how to wear our destiny like a crown.142

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  In September 1944 Vildé’s comrade Claude Aveline returned to liberated Paris and wrote an article about the Musée de l’Homme group, entitled ‘Souvenirs des Ténèbres’ (‘Memories of Shadows’). It concluded:

  I write these notes by candle-light, deep in an immense silence, in the room where, nearly four years ago, by a wood fire . . . the three founding friends, helped by a faithful accomplice and her typewriter, produced Résistance . . . Here it is, once again, on my table, four duplicated pages that we saw born with such satisfaction and pleasure! Vildé came round in the early afternoon, bringing raw material – English, American and Swiss newspapers. We worked joyfully until evening. Then he would come back, or would send round gentle Lewitsky, his colleague from the Musée de l’Homme and his lieutenant. They took our manuscripts to unknown destinations and unknown duplicators. Some of these mysteries have since been revealed, but not all . . .

  But then the arrests began . . . I can’t bring myself to tell the rest of the story. Vildé’s unreal arrest, the endless run-up to the trial – a whole year – the ten death sentences, Fresnes prison, Mont Valerien, Vildé asking to die last. I can see him now, solid, sure of himself, sitting square in the plush-covered armchair he liked so much; X . . ., of whom we have had no news for so many months; Cassou, who has just been wounded in Toulouse; our secretary, our friend, whom the Gestapo sent to the depths of Germany – is she still alive? One man alone has returned to this first battlefield. Alone, with this duplicated sheet, this tiny candle-flame, and this heart – full of joy, broken by sadness.143

  3

  Lighting the Fuse

  In the middle of July 1940, in the heat of the Côte d’Azur, a man who looked like a cross between Clark Gable and Peter Cushing lounged on a bed in a Cannes hotel room, smoking opium. He was a gadfly socialist journalist and ex-naval lieutenant named Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. In the room with him were his brother and a friend. The two men listened intently as the drug-addled d’Astier outlined a plan to set up a group that would oppose the Nazi Occupation. His friend was embarrassed:

  I completely agreed with him; I desperately wanted to join an organization. But although his ideas were remarkably brilliant and logical, he was presenting them while lying down smoking opium! It seemed so absurd to throw my lot in with a résistant who had such a weakness that I refused.144

  About three weeks later, and not far away, Captain Henri Frenay was snug in his mother’s house at Sainte-Maxime near Saint-Tropez, having escaped from the Germans at the beginning of the month. Bitter at the scale of the defeat, but convinced that Pétain was preparing to attack the Germans, Frenay sat in his bedroom, listening to the cicadas chirping in the trees and writing a manifesto for the future of France. Before the war, Frenay’s views had appeared unusually radical for a career officer – due mainly to the influence of his lover, feminist socialite Berty Albrecht. But stunned by the incredible shock of the fall of France, the infantry captain reverted to type. His manifesto proclaimed that France’s enemies were Germans, Bolsheviks, Freemasons and Jewish capitalists, affirmed a ‘passionate attachment’ to the work of Marshal Pétain and closed by hoping that ‘Marshal Pétain lives long enough to support us with his great authority and his incomparable prestige’.145

  These inauspicious beginnings – the dreams of an opium addict and the far-right ravings of an elitist officer – led directly to the creation of the two main resistance groups in the south, Libération and Combat. Over the next four years, d’Astier and Frenay, so different in their origins and outlooks, repeatedly clashed over the orientation and actions of the Resistance. Their first task, however, was to face reality and actually start resisting.

  Most Resistance movements followed the same pattern – a handful of friends got together, decided they had to ‘do something’ and then eventually found a way of producing stickers, leaflets or a newspaper. The exact number of such groups is unknown and unknowable, but over 1,100 different publications have been recorded, the vast majority with tragically brief existences.146 Frenay’s group was different – after writing his ill-considered manifesto, he did not worry about publicizing it but instead drew up a structure for his organization, with all the precision of a military commander. According to this schema, the group would be divided into three sections: Recruitment, Propaganda and Action. Frenay’s first task was therefore to recruit fellow thinkers, which he did in the most guileless and melodramatic fashion:

  Whenever I met someone, I would start the same conversation. I would sound out his feelings about England and Hitler’s Germany. I would acquaint him with my personal conviction that Germany would lose the war . . . I would then pause to get my interlocutor’s reaction. If it seemed sympathetic, I would go still further. ‘Men are already gathering in the shadows. Will you join them?’147

  With this bold approach, Frenay was able to recruit a handful of comrades in both Zones. They first produced a typewritten Bulletin, containing news items from the BBC and the foreign press, then in spring 1941 they came into contact with a group in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais which produced a paper called Les Petites Ailes de France (‘The Little Wings of France’), in reference to an underground newspaper produced during the German occupation of 1914–18. Frenay took over this title in the first of a confusing series of name changes: in what remained of the year, he changed the paper’s title three more times – first to Vérité (‘Truth’), then to Vérités (‘Truths’) before eventually settling on its final title, Combat.

  During this period d’Astier, shocked by the brush-off from his friend after the meeting in Cannes, kicked his opium habit. By November he had convinced one other person to set up a group called La Dernière Colonne (The Last Column).148 At the beginning of December d’Astier was sitting in a café in Clermont-Ferrand, indiscreetly discussing how to fight the Nazis, when two philosophy teachers sitting at the next table chipped in. They were Lucie Samuel (later known as Lucie Aubrac) and Jean Cavaillès, and they soon joined d’Astier’s group. By the end of the year, d’Astier had assembled a strange collection that included his niece, a journalist, a wealthy businessman who was allegedly in contact with British Intelligence, a film actor and a physician.

  Despite this range of talents, the group had little idea about what it should actually do beyond scrawling slogans on walls and in public urinals. At one point they carried out a minor sabotage action that would have cost them dear had they been discovered. As Lucie Aubrac recalled:

  . . . we learned that a sugar train was coming in from Spain, headed for Germany. We found out from friends in the marshalling yards where the Spanish freight was being parked. Then, at night, armed with oilcans, we crawled up like Indians and surrounded the sugar train, broke open the freight doors, and began injecting oil into the sacks of sugar. I suppose it was infantile, but it made us feel good to be taking direct action and it showed us what we were capable eventually of doing.149

  The height of La Dernière Colonne’s activity came at the end of February 1941, when they decided to put up 10,000 anti-collaboration stickers in six towns on the same night. All went well, except in Nîmes, where the police arrested four glue-covered students. Within a couple of days d’Astier’s niece, Bertrande, was arrested and eventually sentenced to thirteen months in jail. As a result, d’Astier arrived at the same conclusion as Frenay, and decided that a more security-conscious internal structure was needed, with cells of three or four members and little contact between them. The group also realized that they needed a public face – Cavaillès, who by this time had moved to Paris, had come into co
ntact with a newspaper called Libération and was very impressed. D’Astier and his comrades decided to adopt the same name for their publication, which first appeared in July 1941.

  The northern Libération was created by Christian Pineau and a group of trade unionists. The first issue, which appeared on 1 December 1940, was typed up using carbon paper and had a print-run of seven (one of which was carefully stored in a bottle, for the sake of posterity). Through a great deal of effort and discipline, Pineau’s group was able to produce the paper every week until the end of the Occupation. They eventually got access to a duplicator, and by the end of 1941 the circulation of Libération had increased to a hundred, with small groups distributing the paper in Paris, Normandy and Brittany.150 The newspaper was sent anonymously to potential contacts, and Pineau was delighted when he eventually received a copy himself.

  The publication that most reflected the material difficulties faced by the Resistance was Valmy,151 a little newspaper that was produced using a toy printing set. The small group of friends who published Valmy had assembled around 2,000 tiny rubber characters, which they had to set painstakingly in a small block. Each night, ‘Paul Simon’ (real name Paulin Bertrand) would compose four lines and print them on to each sheet, in an infuriatingly slow process that will be familiar to anyone who played with one of these toys as a child. In 1942 Simon complained: ‘You try looking on a dark floor for a thin piece of rubber that has sprung out of your tweezers and has bounced some distance from where it fell.’152 The first issue – really more of a leaflet than a newspaper – had a print-run of fifty copies and took a month to produce. Although Valmy was extremely amateurish, with corrections handwritten on each copy,153 in some ways this only made its hostility to the Nazi Occupation more moving. In December 1941 Simon left for London as the police closed in; Valmy continued to appear without him until the beginning of 1943.

  On both sides of the demarcation line, one figure dominated the outlook of the early Resistance: Pétain. Initially, most people shared Frenay’s view that the Marshal was carrying out some kind of ruse and was preparing to turn on Hitler. The most graphic, but secret, expression of these illusions occurred within what remained of the French army in Vichy France. A handful of army officers stashed arms in the hills, ready for the day when Pétain would turn against the Germans. For these people, de Gaulle was a criminal and Pétain was their true leader. Because of this widely held belief in the Marshal, Resistance publications went to great pains not to alienate their readers by attacks on him. But by spring 1941 the growing evidence of the meaning of collaboration led to a slow change in public opinion, and Libération felt able to write:

  Until recently, the people of France could still be favourably inclined to believe in the value and good will of the Marshal; now there can be no hesitation: the head of state supports his Prime Minister’s treason . . . Through greed or senility, Marshal Pétain is betraying France.154

  These illusions in Pétain, now so difficult to understand, were shared by British and American diplomats. Well into 1941, the Foreign Office continued to try to come to a secret agreement with Pétain, while Washington was certain that Pétain was fundamentally hostile to Hitler. In April 1941 US Secretary of State Cordell Hull claimed it was ‘entirely necessary to hold the hands of the Pétain branch of the French Government at Vichy; . . . we have been struggling almost daily since the French Government left Paris to uphold that element in the French Government which opposed Hitlerism and Hitler’.155

  The Americans were right to argue that the Vichy government was not at first a solid pro-Nazi block. Important sections of Pétain’s first government – such as General Weygand – were anti-German and would not embrace the more extreme collaborationist positions. But the Americans were profoundly mistaken when they expected there would be a split in the Vichy regime, and were simply foolish when they imagined that Pétain would lead that split over to the Allied camp. Most of the French military leaders were Anglophobic – this had been demonstrated in the weeks running up to the fall of France, and had been reinforced by the Royal Navy’s attack at Mers-el-Kebir. Further evidence was provided in summer 1941, when General Groussard of the French army left Vichy to try to convince Churchill to come to an agreement with Pétain. When he returned from London, empty-handed, he was promptly arrested.156 Vichy would have no truck with the British. Furthermore, from June 1940 onwards events repeatedly demonstrated that the real power within the ‘French State’ lay with the collaborationists, and that Pétain was at best a semi-senile dupe and at worst a willing figurehead. One of the most obvious signs was Vichy’s attitude towards the Jews, which fused a specifically French anti-Semitic tradition with the ferocious anti-Semitism of the Nazis. In August 1940 Pétain abolished legislation against anti-Semitism, and in October the first Jewish Statute was adopted, which excluded Jews from most public offices, including teaching and running a newspaper. Nine months later a series of other forbidden professions was added to the list, including banking.157 The implications of the handshake at Montoire were as clear as daylight, and even if they were not, Pétain’s own declarations and actions should have sufficed.

  However, although Vichy collaborated with the Nazis, it was formally an independent government. It even prosecuted Nazi spies – between January 1941 and June 1942, 698 suspected Nazi agents were arrested, and 30 were sentenced to death through the work of Vichy counter-intelligence.158 This strange ambiguity was also reflected in the fact that sections of Vichy Intelligence (the ‘Deuxième Bureau’) and counter-Intelligence hedged their bets by maintaining contact with British Intelligence and even aided parts of the Resistance. Frenay worked for the Vichy Deuxième Bureau for about three months, before resigning in January 1941 when his position became intolerable. His contacts there gave him information, as well as access to a duplicator and even forged documents that enabled him to cross the demarcation line. But when they suggested they should control his group, he refused. Frenay rightly felt there should be a distinction between the untrustworthy shadow world of intelligence and the activities of a Resistance group.

  None of the early Resistance movements had any particular confidence in de Gaulle. The attitude of Libération-Nord was typical. In February 1941 Pineau wrote:

  General de Gaulle is currently one of the men who is fighting the Germans and we can only approve without hesitation his military action . . . Does that mean that we have a definite opinion about the political role General de Gaulle should or should not play after the British victory? Not in the slightest! . . . Let us not create any confusion in the minds of many French people by speaking of Gaullism or anti-Gaullism. We have only one party: France. We have only one enemy: Nazism. For the moment, everything else is secondary.159

  At this stage, virtually the only Resistance publication to claim allegiance to de Gaulle was Pantagruel, which called on its readers to ‘rally to General de Gaulle, who alone is maintaining the French traditions of heroism and of keeping your word’.160 Like most early Resistance newspapers, Pantagruel merely wanted to inform its readers, not act as any kind of leadership. That was probably just as well, as the people behind Pantagruel seemed to have a slender grasp on reality. Pineau met them in 1941 and asked how many supporters they had. ‘A million!’ was their reply. As Pineau wearily recalled: ‘in their enthusiasm, they expected the final moment, the great struggle, the general insurrection, for the summer. They wanted to act immediately, to get the equipment they needed, to draw up a battle plan.’161

  Being a résistant was a risky business and required a huge amount of courage. But for those in the Occupied Zone, where the French police were aided by the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht, things were particularly difficult. Frenay, d’Astier and their comrades in the Non-Occupied Zone were subject only to the relatively less effective attentions of the Vichy police and counter-intelligence services. When Pineau made a journey south to Lyons, he was amazed at the conditions: ‘The leaders of the Resistance walked around unhindered, had meetin
gs in cafés or fine restaurants, not hiding in the slightest. It was almost as though they had visiting cards printed with their underground title.’162 As a result, the résistants in the Occupied Zone were deeply suspicious of the potentially lethal amateurism of those from the south: for Pineau ‘the most dangerous groups were those from the Free Zone – they ran fewer risks than us, and did not follow the prudent rules that we had adopted’.163 This view was reinforced when Pineau eventually met Frenay in the middle of 1941:

  However attractive and brave he might be, he scared me because he wanted to know all about our activities – his approach was not appropriate to the situation in the Occupied Zone. His aide Robert had serious problems in Normandy, where a series of arrests had decimated the group he had built, all in a few days. By giving out arms too early, he had his comrades pointlessly shot.164

  The lesson was clear: taking immediate action against the Nazis could have lethal consequences. Planning and disciplined organization would be the keys to success.

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  On both sides of the demarcation line, the French population was faced with the harsh effects of the Occupation. The responses of ordinary people to this reality – the way in which they struggled to survive despite the food and fuel shortages, their moral support for the Jews, or the help for single mothers whose husbands were held in Nazi prisoner of war camps – were all forms of Resistance. However, this is a recent view. At the time, ‘Resistance’ was generally seen in terms of action, either overt or clandestine. Inevitably, only a minority was involved in this classic form of Resistance: most ordinary people did not participate either because they did not know how to, or if they did know, their lives did not permit it.165 However, protesting against the Occupation did not necessarily mean being involved in an underground organization. Towards the end of March 1941 Micheline Bood – still not fifteen years old – told her diary about a walk in Paris with her friend Yvette: