by Matthew Cobb
They wore the dark green uniforms that had recently been looted from government stocks, badly cut and badly fitting, a little reminiscent of Robin Hood with their big hoods as protection from the rain. The young men’s thin, set, badly shaven faces were marked by the strain of constant danger, lack of sleep and underfeeding; but they all had the same look of having an inner purpose to sustain them.535
The most celebrated of these maquis public appearances took place on 11 November 1943 in Oyonnax, a small industrial town in one of the valleys of the Jura, near the Swiss border. The local maquis was founded by Henri Petit, known at the time by his pseudonym, Romans. His SOE comrade, Richard Heslop, described him as ‘of medium height, stocky, with a chin that jutted out, and a pronounced nose. His hair was slightly touched with grey, he looked you straight in the eyes, and possessed the sort of personal magnetism peculiar to natural leaders of men.’536 A reserve officer in the French Air Force, Romans-Petit initially intended simply to protect réfractaires who were fleeing STO. By the middle of 1943 there were a series of maquis camps in the Ain, led by Romans-Petit and set up completely independently of the MUR, FTP or SOE. These woodland camps had to be at least sixty-strong to be viable but were deliberately dispersed – they were at least two hours’ march apart to reduce the risk of discovery. Realizing that the young men he was recruiting desperately needed military training, Romans-Petit set up a leadership school in the hills above Montgriffon, south-east of Oyonnax. Despite genuine hardship – the maquisards ate lots of carrots and got meat only twice a week – there was a real enthusiasm to learn both theoretical and practical skills even though, at this stage, weapons were scarce. Romans-Petit recalled:
At the beginning of July we got our first Sten machine gun, which made us extremely happy. We took it apart and assembled it over and over again, night and day. We even organized competitions between the students to see who was the fastest.537
From mid-July the Ain maquis began to get food and money via the MUR Secret Army and in August received the first parachute drops of arms. But even with money and weapons, the maquis needed to be able to move about: safely isolated from the enemy, they were also far from the targets they wanted to attack. For Romans-Petit, it was essential that his men should get in and out of an operation as quickly as possible, and the steep slopes of the Jura meant that it was not feasible to copy Guingouin and simply ride bicycles. The Ain maquis initially used gas-driven lorries, but they were severely underpowered and could barely make it up the steep mountain roads when loaded with men and stolen equipment. The maquis eventually managed to steal two petrol-driven lorries and on 28 September, with the aid of the MUR and the complicity of the local gendarmes, they raided an army depot close to Bourg-en-Bresse, the largest town in the département. Without a single shot being fired, they stole several tons of food – enough to keep them going for nine months.538
Those same vehicles were used for the meticulously planned 11 November stunt, when the maquis paraded in military formation through the streets of Oyonnax. They chose the town because there was no German garrison, and the heads of both the police and the gendarmerie were working with the Resistance. The maquis threw the Nazis off the scent by declaring they would organize demonstrations throughout the sprawling département, in defiance of Vichy’s ban on all commemorations. In Oyonnax, the maquis first took control of the roads leading into the town and then occupied the post office and the fire station as well as the gendarmerie and the police station. To the amazement and joy of the local population, over 200 maquisards, wearing a uniform of leather jackets, berets and white scarves, walking boots and pale socks, marched smartly through the town, their weapons over their shoulders – they had practised the drill repeatedly in the mountains and were now near perfect.
At their head was Romans-Petit, in full Air Force dress uniform, accompanied by a colour guard of seven men surrounding the tricolour, all wearing impeccable white gloves (these had proved incredibly difficult to find). The procession arrived at the War Memorial, where Romans-Petit laid a wreath in the shape of the Gaullist double-barred cross of Lorraine, bearing the inscription ‘To the victors of 1914–18, from the victors of tomorrow’. There was a minute’s silence, the ‘Marseillaise’ was sung and a joyous crowd surrounded the maquisards. Then, as suddenly as they arrived, they disappeared back into the mountains.
Although there was no immediate response from the Nazis, a month later, in nearby Nantua, over a hundred men were arrested and deported, while the local Secret Army leader was shot dead. Reprisals continued in neighbouring Haute-Savoie – in winter 1943–4, German troops burned down around 500 farms.539 Nazi policy was to respond to displays by the Resistance with crushing force, both to smash its organizations and demoralize its supporters.
The demonstration had an impact far outside the region, partly because Romans-Petit had a distinctly modern eye for propaganda: the whole event was filmed by André Jacquelin (Romans-Petit worked as a publicist before the war). The cine film was long thought to have been lost, but it has recently reappeared. The grainy black and white images show the maquisards marching through the town to the beat of a drum, with the crowd applauding them. Jacquelin’s stunning photos were printed in his swankily produced underground paper, Bir-Hakeim, and were soon reproduced in both the UK and the USA.540 In one of the most audacious stunts carried out by the Resistance, a spoof edition of the Lyons daily newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, was printed and sold in news kiosks, with a full description of the demonstration on the front page.541 The Oyonnax parade was important because of its symbolism – it looked just like any Armistice Day commemoration from before the war. The message was that the Resistance, not Vichy, represented the continuity of the French state, which they were reclaiming on the streets of Oyonnax. The Occupied became the Occupiers, and even if the magic lasted only a few minutes, there was the promise that it would happen again, throughout the country, this time permanently.
Georges Guingouin’s maquis went even further in asserting its power. By the targeted destruction of machines involved in the Nazi exploitation of the French countryside, Guingouin had shown that he sided with the farmers against the Vichy collaborators. He continued along the same line in September, when Vichy tried to requisition twenty-four cows for exportation to Germany; the maquis intervened and returned the cattle to their owners. Three weeks after the Oyonnax demonstration, members of Guingouin’s maquis turned up when the Vichy food requisition board attempted to seize a crop of potatoes. The price set by Vichy – 1.25 francs per kilo – was simply too low for the farmers to survive. The maquisards demanded that Vichy pay 4 francs per kilo; when the officials refused, the maquisards simply stopped the requisition from taking place. In response to food scarcities and rising food prices in the shops, Guingouin published a series of official-looking declarations, fixing retail prices ‘by order of the Prefect of the Maquis’, and insisting that children and invalids be given priority access to the dwindling milk supplies. Thanks to the work of a sympathetic printer, the Vichy-loyalist regional daily newspaper, Le Courrier du Centre, unwittingly carried an article publicizing Guingouin’s order. Vichy was furious and closed the newspaper down for a month as a punishment.542
Not surprisingly, Guingouin’s measures were hugely popular with the population, if not with some traders. When M. Trochet, a shopkeeper from the village of Domps, refused to abide by the new prices, Guingouin sent him a very official-looking letter from the ‘Prefect of the Maquis’ (‘Sir, I have been informed that my officials have received complaints about your behaviour . . . I hope that you will not make it necessary for me to take further steps against you . . .’) and fined him the difference (2,000 francs). A declaration to this effect was also posted on Trochet’s door with the warning ‘Anyone who removes this declaration within the space of eight days will leave themselves open to the most severe penalties’. Trochet, desperate not to have anything more to do with ‘them’, pleaded with the gendarmes to leave the declaration in place
.543
What Vichy presented as extortion by ‘bandits’ was in fact the embryo of an alternative state in the Limousin. This was intuitively recognized by the local population, and, as the Occupation wore on, public acceptance of the Vichy gendarmes dwindled away. Even Vichy police Intelligence (‘Renseignements Généraux’) admitted as much:
Overall, the population is favourable to ‘the maquis’. The peasants will not or do not want to speak, either out of support for the réfractaires, or through fear of reprisals. Their reticence makes investigations much more difficult.544
For example, over a hundred people witnessed a maquis ration ticket raid at Terrasson, but no one would speak to the gendarmes, while during a similar raid at La Coquille the population actually applauded the maquisards.545 As a result of all this activity, on 24 March 1944 the prefect declared Guingouin’s region of the Haute-Vienne département to be a ‘no-go area’, implicitly accepting the maquis’ control.546 Outside this area, Nazi reprisals were vicious – on 2 April, 145 of the 148 houses in Rouffignac were burned down. During the four years of the Occupation, the Nazis killed 822 people in the Haute-Vienne and deported 1,200.547
Guingouin’s attitude was shared by most of the Resistance, which saw how its activities could shape the future of the country. De Gaulle had said that national liberation would be inseparable from national insurrection: for the Resistance, including the Communist Party, ‘insurrection’ meant that the population as a whole would take direct action to free themselves and at the same time to create a new government, rather than relying on the Allies. De Gaulle was well aware that any such insurrection could pose a threat to the France he wanted to create. Hence the importance of controlling the men with the guns. In June 1944 Michel Brualt, the head of the Service National Maquis, summed up the potential of the maquis, which he had no intention of simply handing over to de Gaulle:
There will be no Liberation without insurrection . . . National insurrection is the only way of ensuring independence and giving the French population the political representation it desires. It would be particularly dangerous if we had complete confidence in foreign military commanders, in foreign political envoys and in officers from a French colonial army, expecting them to put in place a Republic and to enable the French people to express themselves . . . The immediate action we demand and which we are daily intensifying is a form of training for the insurrection . . . It is less a question of the immediate strategic value of these actions than of training the fighters of the insurrection.548
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Guingouin was extremely popular with the ordinary people of his region, but not with his Communist Party comrades. The Party recognized his abilities and his influence – a PCF apparatchik declared: ‘Guingouin is very popular and loved by the masses . . . All his men and his subordinates listen to him and have a great confidence in him . . . He has the stuff of a great leader.’549 But for the PCF leaders, his independence and his influence made him deeply suspect – he had opposed the Party’s equivocal line faced with the Occupation in 1940, and there was nothing more threatening for the leadership than someone who had proved the Party wrong. So in spring 1942 Guingouin was removed from his Party positions and dismissed as ‘the madman who lives in the woods’. Then, in 1943, they took far more drastic steps.
Guingouin was warned that a regional FTP leader was trying to convince Limousin maquis members to leave, saying, ‘if Guingouin continues his activities, we will be obliged to kill him’.550 FTP leader Émile Planteligne recalled:
Between the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, difficulties developed between Georges Guingouin and the ‘inter-regional commander’, who was a delegate of the Central Committee. Relations got worse during the sabotage of the binder and Guingouin’s actions against requisitions . . . Sanctions were envisaged, up to the physical destruction of Guingouin.551
They were not only envisaged; they were acted on. Pierre Lerouge, a veteran of the International Brigades, was sent into the maquis to kill Guingouin. Eventually, Lerouge told his new comrades why he was there and was summarily kicked out. Despite the failure of this attempt, the Party was still intent on ridding themselves of this troublesome maquisard. In September 1943 PCF leader Gabriel Faure told a meeting of regional Communist leaders: ‘You should also know that we have received an order from the Party to liquidate Guingouin’ because he was an ‘enemy of the Party’, an agent of British Intelligence who received weapons from London.552 Thanks to the local support for Guingouin, these threats came to nothing.
Other PCF militants unjustly accused of treason were not so lucky. In October 1942 the naked body of a young woman was found in the Rambouillet forest, south of Paris. She had been shot through the head. Sixty-five years after her death, two French historians finally identified her as Mathilde Dardant, a liaison agent for clandestine PCF leader Jacques Duclos.553 She was murdered by the détachement Valmy, the group of ultra-loyal PCF members who in 1942 and 1943 assassinated various ‘traitors’ – real and imagined. Their superiors suspected Dardant, with no justification, of being a security risk.
The ‘case’ against Pietro Tresso, a fifty-year-old founder of the Italian Communist Party, was clearer: he was a Trotskyist.554 Tresso was arrested in 1942 after a police swoop on the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseilles founded by Varian Fry, which Vichy claimed was a ‘Trotskyist conspiracy’.555 In September 1943 Tresso and four comrades – Albert Demazière, Pierre-Georges Salini, Jean-Noël Reboul and Abraham Sadek – were transferred to Le Puy-en-Velay prison, where many inmates were hard-line Stalinists. Shortly after they arrived, a breakout was organized by a young guard, Albert Chapelle, who was in contact with SOE.556 At 11 p.m. on 1 October Chapelle cut the telephone wires and then plied the guards with drink. After freeing all seventy-nine political prisoners, he pressed the guards to join the maquis (none of them accepted the invitation). In the biggest prison escape of the Occupation, the inmates fled with two light-machine guns, a Sten gun, eight automatic pistols and a substantial amount of ammunition, and over 32 million francs from the prison safe, for which Chapelle duly signed a receipt in the name of the Resistance.
After they escaped, there was a gruelling two-day march into the hills to join the hard-line PCF ‘Wodli’ maquis. At the maquis camp, the five Trotskyists were threatened and, when one of them escaped on a trip to find wood, the remaining four men were imprisoned in an abandoned farmhouse. Then, after a few days, they were simply taken out, shot and buried on the hillside. Absurdly, the maquisards were told that the men had been planning to shoot their guards and poison the water supply. The order to kill them had in fact come from the PCF leadership, via Léon Mauvais, who was also involved in the attempt to eliminate Guingouin.557
The full truth, deliberately hidden by the PCF for decades, came to light only in the 1990s.558 The Party denied that there had been any cover-up and explained there was no question of criticizing ‘men who were prepared to die for the anti-Nazi cause’. For the PCF, the fact that the maquisards were determined anti-fascists would always provide them with an alibi for having killed fellow résistants because of their political opinions.559
Communist members of the Resistance did indeed show remarkable bravery, and many of them paid a terrible price for their courage and convictions. After the war, the PCF described itself as ‘le parti des 75,000 fusillés’, suggesting that 75,000 of its members had been executed during the Occupation. This was a rather tasteless exaggeration – there were not even 75,000 executions for the whole of the Resistance – but it underlined the sacrifice made by the Party and its members.560 One of the episodes that sums up the courage of the Communist resistance was the Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée (MOI – Immigrant Workforce). By 1942 and 1943 the FTP groups in Paris, Lyons, Toulouse, Marseilles and Grenoble were entirely composed of MOI members, many of them young Jews from Eastern Europe.561
The most important FTP-MOI group was based in Paris; its military leader was a Ukrainian Communist, Boris Holban.562 Al
though there were never more than a few dozen active FTP-MOI members in Paris at any one time, in the first half of 1943 they carried out ninety-two armed actions. Forty-three of these were attacks against Nazi troops, as against sixteen in the second half of 1942.563 Not all of these actions were successful, and many involved at most killing an individual soldier, but they were nonetheless a powerful irritation for the Nazis. At the end of 1942 the Gestapo smashed one of the four MOI detachments in Paris, and as the number of attacks increased in 1943 they began systematically to harass what remained of the Jewish community in Paris. By July only eight members of the second MOI detachment remained.564
In response, the MOI raised the stakes and focused their attention on leading Nazis. On 28 July they bombed the car of General Schaumburg, the Nazi commander of Paris. But the MOI’s information was out of date – Schaumburg was not in the car. Indeed, he was no longer in charge of the capital and was not even in the country.565 Two months later the MOI was more successful in its attack on SS General Julius Ritter. Although Ritter was in charge of the hated STO, Holban, who planned the attack, later declared the MOI had not realized who their target was – they discovered his name in the press after the assassination, which was a bloody affair.
