The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  Cordier was soon able to put some order into Moulin’s life, providing him with appropriate and efficient support. Cordier’s memories of their daily routine in Lyons are strikingly clear:

  Very early in the morning, I began running around, on foot and by tram. First I would meet Limonti, who would give me the letters that had been collected that morning. At 7 o’clock I would be in Moulin’s apartment – he lived in a small room on the Place Raspail . . . I would bring him the morning newspapers, bread for his breakfast that I had bought with his ration tickets in a boulangerie. When I got there, his landlady would have already made him a cup of the ersatz coffee that he would drink before looking at the papers I had given him – requests for meetings, various papers, notes produced by the services or the movements, underground leaflets or newspapers. Moulin began by reading the telegrams that I had decoded in the night, and the reports that would arrive periodically from London. Seated at his small table by the window, smoking his first cigarette, he read rapidly, took notes, then dictated or wrote his reply . . .

  I would see Jean Moulin in the evening and give him an account of the day. Sometimes, I had to see him during the day. For example, when he went to a meeting, I would carry the documents, which I would give to him immediately before he went into the meeting so that, as far as possible, there was no compromising material on him or in his room. At the end of the meeting he would give them back to me, to be destroyed or filed, if required, in a small archive that was kept in a friend’s apartment.375

  Every day Moulin would meet members of Combat, Libération and Le Franc-Tireur – the three main groups in the Non-Occupied Zone – to discuss everything from military actions to the latest political developments. These meetings would sometimes take place in a safe house. Lyons was ideal for this, as many of the apartments in the city centre are built on hillsides, with narrow passageways or traboules going between them, so it is possible to enter a traboule on the ground floor of one building and leave it on the top floor of another. Although there were rarely cinematic chases through this maze, the traboules gave a justifiable sense of security. When meetings were held outside – Moulin liked to talk while walking in Lyons’ public parks – Resistance tradecraft dictated that no one would wait at a rendezvous. The safest procedure was to arrange to meet on a particular street at a given time; one résistant would walk down the street in one direction, while the contact walked in the other. That way, no one drew attention by hanging around.376

  Elsewhere, the Resistance involved physical effort as well as the constant strains and worries of clandestinity. FTP leader Charles Tillon was based in Limours, south-west of Paris, in the rural area known as Hurepoix. He had to use a bicycle to get to the various underground meetings that took place in the region, and this was not a pleasure:

  Both physically and morally, 1942 was the hardest of my life. Riding around on a bike required just as much exhausting vigilance as a meeting on the Métro . . . As I criss-crossed the region, between Limours, Palaiseau and Arpajon in Hurepoix, I became a strong cyclist. When the weather was fine, I would ride about with a small box of paints on my carrier-rack, as a way of justifying to the neighbours that I was an artist and explaining why I was always out and about. After a while, Colette and I got a tandem and would ride as far as Versailles.377

  One of Moulin’s main achievements was creating joint services to aid the Resistance movements. The first service he set up, in April 1942, was the BIP (Bureau d’Information et de Presse – Press and Information Service), which acted as a clearing house for material from and for the Resistance, circulating articles to the underground press, or to the press abroad, in particular in the UK and the USA. This was not just a matter of providing raw material; it was also a way of ‘spinning’ the news from the Resistance, of presenting it in the best possible light in France and elsewhere. The BIP was particularly important because, for most of the time, the underground press was the most tangible sign of the Resistance. To produce their papers, each group had to organize a complex network of printers, all of whom ran terrible risks to carry out their work.378

  The creation of these common services (others included radio contact with London, and a pickup service for air and sea liaisons with Britain) was partly a reflection of Moulin’s professionalism. The existence of common, centralized services was also a way of unifying the disparate Resistance groups in practice, even if they maintained their separate existences. And because that unification took place under Moulin’s control, it was a way for him to put his personal stamp on the shape and outlook of the Resistance.

  Probably the most important service Moulin created was the Comité Général d’Études (CGE – General Study Committee), set up in July 1942. Made up of bureaucrats and administrators (mayors, prefects, engineers, railway staff and so on), the CGE was to ‘advise the government at the Liberation, proposing the first measures that need to be taken; it should, therefore, from today, begin studying projects concerning the future political, economic and social regime of the country’.379

  This was Resistance on a scale that Frenay and his like could never have imagined. Moulin was already thinking about the post-war world, even before the war was halfway over, while the initial vision of Frenay and most of the other Resistance leaders went no further than driving the Nazis out of the country and settling accounts with Vichy.380 Part of the reason for this lack of political ambition was that the fall of France had revealed the failure of the mainstream political parties, none of which were able to muster the political will to prevent the debacle, or even to oppose the installation of Pétain. Both the Free French and most of the Resistance movements were deeply suspicious of the political parties, and were downright hostile to the idea that they might re-emerge. The movements were concerned that their hard-won position would be usurped, while de Gaulle was wary of politicians and was tempted to see his role as that of a military saviour – a modern-day Bonaparte.

  Moulin was opposed to the idea of any political party simply waltzing in and taking over the Resistance, but he was politically astute enough to realize that the population would soon want more complex answers to their problems than simply getting rid of the Nazis. If the parties were the only forces that had such responses, then they would inevitably gain influence. The CGE solved this problem in two ways. First, it gave the Resistance a political programme that would be a benchmark for any party that wished to join the movement, and, second, it would bind the Resistance and the Free French to a common vision of the future. Given Moulin’s socialist past, and the general political evolution of the Western European population during the war, the eventual form that programme took was left-wing, although it stopped far short of threatening the existence of capitalism.

  During the course of the war, the CGE gradually became a kind of shadow state, a parallel structure that would be able to step in and take over when Nazi power collapsed. But a future state needed not only a government and policies, but also personnel. From the second half of 1942, the Resistance began to organize ordinary civil servants, employees of the main nationalized companies and members of the police force and the gendarmerie in a common service called NAP – Noyautage des Administrations Publiques (Infiltration of Public Administrations). This was a different form of Resistance: members of NAP passed information to the Resistance and the Free French, and sat in the wings, waiting to take over when Vichy collapsed. The Resistance recognized that NAP contained the danger that some high-ranking civil servants could continue to carry out Vichy’s reactionary and anti-Semitic policies at the same time as almost literally having a ‘Get Out of Jail’ card when the Resistance triumphed. Although there were some notorious cases of such cynicism, NAP played a vital role in the period around D-Day, disrupting Vichy’s control over the country, in particular in the Post Office and the railways, and ensuring that the state did not simply collapse with the disintegration of Vichy.

  *

  The most dangerous part of the work carried out by Mo
ulin and the other Resistance leaders involved crossing the demarcation line that separated the two zones. A few people, like Pineau, or the traitor Devillers, could sometimes use their jobs as a reason to travel across the zones. Others, like Moulin, had preserved their secret identity and could travel on their real ID, but they needed an official permit (an ‘Ausweiss’) to cross the line, and this grew increasingly difficult as the war went on. So most résistants, most of the time, had to take a risk. That involved either travelling by train on forged papers or using one of the many clandestine crossing points.381

  This could be relatively simple. At Chalon, in Burgundy, the demarcation line was marked by the river Saône, with the bridges controlled by sentries. Following Brossolette’s instructions, Christian Pineau crossed the line here in 1942, together with a group of other clandestine travellers:

  Around twenty people were gathered in a small café, like any provincial café, with its counter covered with bottles of apéritifs, its dark wooden tables covered in marks, its straw chairs. They were not the usual clients to be found in this kind of establishment. There were women, their faces twisted with worry, bored children, and a few men, their noses stuck into their newspaper, who looked alarmed when the door opened.382

  The actual crossing was almost romantic. The passengers embarked on a small flat-bottomed boat, which then floated out on to the river: ‘all that was missing was a lamp hung on the stern, a guitar and a mandolin,’ remembered Pineau.383

  At around the same time, Rémy had to cross into the southern zone, in the pitch dark of a February night. No boat for him; he had to strip naked, wrap his belongings in an oilcloth and wade across a freezing stream which was deeper, broader and stronger than he expected. Halfway across, he stumbled and the bundle fell into the water, drenching everything. When he finally scrambled on to the other bank, he did not have the energy to dress in his soaking clothes, and simply pulled out his coat from the sodden bundle and wrapped it around his exhausted and shivering body. As he walked across the frozen, boggy field towards a farmhouse where he would be welcomed, the ice repeatedly gave way beneath him, plunging his legs into freezing mud. At the farmhouse he had to stop the old lady of the house from immediately taking his soaking coat from his shoulders, for fear of embarrassing her by his nudity. Eventually, his modesty protected by a clean pair of warm corduroys, he sat down to some welcome hot soup.384

  Crossing the demarcation line could also go horribly wrong. In May 1942 Henry Labit, a twenty-one-year-old BCRA agent, was parachuted into France for his second tour of duty. Before he left he was interviewed by SOE and BCRA officers who were so concerned about his youth and his ‘latent foolhardiness’ they emphasized that ‘his venture was no historic encounter between cowboys and Indians – action from which he could shoot his way to freedom was not asked of him; what was required was that he should renew his Calvados contacts, that he should lay the groundwork for military intelligence concerning enemy troop and transport movements in the area, and that the basis for small sabotage groups should be laid’.385

  Early in the morning of Sunday 3 May, Labit parachuted blind into the countryside south of Bordeaux. He was on his own and carried a radio transmitter in a suitcase. Unfortunately, the bus service he expected to get to Bordeaux did not run on a Sunday, so he took the rash decision to get a train, even though this meant crossing the demarcation line at Langon. At the crossing point, Labit was searched. As he held out his papers, a spare, blank set fell to the ground – they should have been stashed somewhere safe, but they were there in his pocket. Their suspicions aroused, the Germans took him into the Customs shed, where they asked him to open his suitcase. Realizing the game was up, Labit took out his revolver, killed the two guards and fled. Chased by the Nazis, he soon found himself surrounded and decided to swallow his cyanide pill to protect his contacts. He died on the spot, but he unwittingly endangered the life of his fiancée and her family: he was carrying a letter from his girlfriend, Ginette, and she and her mother were interrogated by the Abwehr for several days before being released without charge.386

  Sometimes – often? – survival hinged on chance. In February 1942 Jacques Baumel, only twenty-three years old and one of Frenay’s closest assistants, travelled from Lyons to Paris on a night train. Following the best Resistance tradecraft, he sat huddled in a damp, smelly and overcrowded third-class carriage, where the police checks were less rigorous. Hidden in his suitcase was too much money to be easily explained and, mixed in with sheaves of innocuous papers, precious coded lists of names and addresses. Not the kind of thing you wanted to be caught with, especially when all you had to prove your identity was a set of badly forged papers.

  Some time after 2 a.m., his body swaying to the rattle of the train, his face pressed against the freezing cold window, Baumel heard the French ticket inspector say to another passenger, in an unusually loud voice: ‘I don’t know what’s got into the Jerries tonight, but they’re checking papers like I’ve never seen before.’ Baumel went rigid with fear and found it hard to breathe. He felt the ticket inspector looking at him and slowly turned around. The inspector stared at him hard, said in a flat voice, ‘Just as well they don’t check the toilets’, and then moved down the carriage. Baumel’s heart started pounding. Should he trust the inspector or not?

  Finally, Baumel got up, went to the toilet – passing the inspector as he did so – and locked the door behind him. He sat there above the simple hole in the floor, the railway track flicking past below, holding his papers in his hand, ready to rip them up and throw them into the dark. He heard voices, German mixed with French, then footsteps, stopping outside the locked toilet door. The handle was suddenly and violently wrenched up and down repeatedly. Hypnotized, Baumel stared at the handle like it was a snake. Then he heard the ticket inspector’s voice: ‘It’s out of order.’ The handle was wrenched up and down again, and then came the sound of feet moving away. The seconds slurred by as Baumel’s head reeled. There was a soft knock at the door and the inspector whispered: ‘He’s gone.’ Baumel opened the door and slipped out. The inspector gave Baumel a nod, locked the door from the outside and moved down the carriage. They never saw each other again. Baumel went back to his seat, his heart frozen, vomit surging at the back of his throat, and tried to sleep. He could not.387

  *

  Ordinary people also found the Nazi Occupation a dangerous and terrifying time. RAF bombing raids on industrial sites posed a permanent threat to the surrounding populations, although the French seem to have taken this in good heart, at least at the beginning. On 4 March Jean Guéhenno wrote in his diary:

  Yesterday evening, in the moonlight, the British bombed the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt. A massive, continuous bombardment, the first that we have really experienced. To get a better view I went with Vaillant to the Place des Fêtes, but even there we couldn’t see much. Only rockets, the gleam of fires from the other side of Paris and twice, above the Place, two aeroplanes like shadows against the clouds. We talked with people. No one was angry. Most of them could not hide their jubilation. The Occupying Authority did not even sound a warning. There were 500 dead, and another 500 injured. At 2.00 this afternoon the sirens went off; for no reason, of course. The Occupying Authority was having a bit of fun. Tomorrow morning, 20 hostages will be shot.388

  Even the people directly under the bombs seemed resigned to their fate. Six weeks after the Renault raid, Liliane Jameson went to Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris, and talked to families who were preparing to leave their homes:

  Without hatred, without acrimony, the families who live in the small houses around the Fiat and Simca factories are preparing to leave, saying they’ll come back when it’s all over. Leaflets are dropped during the raids to explain the importance of destroying the factories that work for ‘them’, thanking people who are transmitting information, encouraging the population to resist but to be prudent, and presenting the excuses and regrets of His Majesty’s government to the affected famil
ies.389

  As Resistance activity grew, so did Nazi reprisals. For example, in April 1942 in the Paris region, as well as the execution of hostages, curfews were imposed, bars and cinemas were shut and wine was banned in restaurants.390 At the same time, restrictions on the food supply made life increasingly difficult, especially for women as they trailed around the shops trying to find food. This Parisienne’s fruitless experience from a morning in 1942 was typical:

  7h30 – To the baker’s. Buy bread. There will be biscuits at 11h00.

  9h00 – It is a meat day today, but the butcher says there won’t be any until Saturday.

  9h30 – To the dairy shop. No cheese before 5 p.m.

  10h00 – To the tripe shop. My ticket is number 32, I will be served at 4 p.m.

  10h30 – To the grocer’s. There will be vegetables at 5 p.m.

  11h00 – Back to the baker’s. There are no biscuits left.391

  The most dramatic and murderous expression of the Occupation was what happened to the Jews.392 In January 1942, at the Wannsee conference in Berlin, the Nazis launched their chilling plan to exterminate the Jews, and throughout Occupied Europe their collaborators put this into operation. France was no exception. In August 1941 the activities of the Bataillon de la Jeunesse had been used as a pretext to arrest over 4,000 Jews in Paris. They were taken to what was effectively a prison camp – a half-finished housing estate in Drancy, to the north of the capital. In March 1942 the first railway convoy left Drancy for Auschwitz, although no one at the time realized what would be the fate of their passengers.393 Elsewhere in France, foreign Jews were interned in appalling conditions that had lethal effects. The camp at Gurs in the south-west was notorious. In July 1942 Julius Koppel, an internee in the camp, described his surroundings – 51 men slept on the floor of his draughty, windowless hut; there were often over 20 deaths a day, and of the 6,000 Jews who were imprisoned with him, 1,000 were already dead. A total of 3,000 Jews died in the camp during the war.394