The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  The better we are armed, the fewer lives will be lost. The military command of the SNCASE FFI group will not tolerate any mistakes. The factory is militarized: any mistakes in work will be considered as treason and will be judged by the Factory Committee. Everyone to work, with passion! Long live France and the IVth Republic!845

  In the heady excitement of the Liberation, workers’ liberation committees soon controlled all the major workplaces of the region – arsenals, engineering companies, banks and even prisons, but above all the whole of the aeronautical industry.846 The director of one aero factory complained that the committee in his company was ‘slowly transforming itself into a soviet. It asks for information on stocks, on the state of supplies, on what remains, etc. It also asks for the keys to all the offices.’847 Soon there were rumours of people being strung up from the lampposts around the Place du Capitole, of bodies being thrown in the river Garonne, and of the city having been taken over by a soviet. Because there were no Allied troops for hundreds of kilometres, Toulouse came to represent the nightmares of those who feared that liberation would turn into revolution.

  De Gaulle was determined that there would be no revolution, in Toulouse or anywhere else. To stop that happening, he had to get control of the men with the guns. Throughout the war, he fought to ensure that armed action in France remained under his command. He had largely failed, and the country was now teeming with hundreds of thousands of armed résistants, many of whom were not impressed by traditional military authority, especially given the poor record of the French army four years earlier.848 As one Free French senior officer reported gloomily:

  In many towns, French officers, appointed to military regions . . . have shown themselves to be not up to the task. Most of them have done nothing more than put on their uniforms, which they abandoned during the hard years of the German occupation, believing that the sight of their stripes would be enough to regain the respect which had sadly been lost . . . many FFI groups, and in particular the FTP, still refuse to recognize the authority of these officers, and in some cases insult them quite basely.849

  De Gaulle needed the government to have complete control over all the levers of power. He not only wanted to take the guns out of the hands of civilians and to restore order and discipline in society; he also had one eye on the post-war international balance of forces. In his plans for rebuilding France as a world power, a reorganized and strengthened French army would have to play a role in the destruction of the Nazi armed forces. That meant getting the Resistance fighters under his discipline and into the ranks of the armed forces. The long-running dispute between the Free French and the Resistance had reached its highest and most decisive level. There could be only one winner.

  De Gaulle acted with almost indecent haste – on 28 August, when the hangovers from the Liberation of Paris had barely faded and half the country had yet to be liberated, he ordered the dissolution of the national leadership of the FFI and of COMAC, the military leadership of the Resistance. After a brief stand-off, COMAC accepted the dissolution of the regional FFI leaderships in return for the fusion of FFI fighters with the Free French army. By the end of November over 200,000 FFI members had joined up and were fighting their way to Berlin – almost twice as many soldiers as in the regular Free French army.850 The Resistance called this ‘l’amalgame’, a reference to the fusion of batallions of revolutionary soldiers and the regular army during the French Revolution.851 But instead of the traditional army officers losing their influence, as in 1793, the opposite happened: the officers of 1940 were allowed to keep their rank, no matter what their behaviour during the Occupation, while FFI officers were strictly selected, and the rank-and-file FFI soldiers simply obeyed orders. The amalgame of 1944, unlike its predecessor, strengthened the forces of conservatism.852

  On 9 September de Gaulle created the first government of liberated France, and included CNR chief Georges Bidault and Communist FTP leader Charles Tillon as a gesture to the Resistance and a way of testing its intentions. He then immediately embarked on a tour of the main cities of the south to reinforce his personal authority and press for the disarmament of the Resistance. The result was a series of clashes between de Gaulle’s profound attachment to order, discipline and authority, and the disorganized and improvised nature of Resistance power in the regions. On 14 September, in Lyons, the Commissaire de la République dutifully outlined the programme of visits and dinners that had been worked out for the official visit, each involving different sections of the Resistance. De Gaulle looked doubtful and asked when he would meet the city authorities. ‘But they are all in prison, General,’ was the reply.853 The following day de Gaulle was in Marseilles, where he watched a victory parade of FFI fighters. Lucie Aubrac recalled his reaction:

  There was an amazing parade of maquisards wearing tattered clothes. Real sans-culottes! Most of them had their collars open. It was very hot. And they had flowers in the barrels of their rifles. They were pulling a German armoured car on which were perched some young women in skimpy dresses. They were shouting and waving flags. De Gaulle took all this very badly. He just sat there, muttering ‘What a farce!’854

  The most significant clash came in Toulouse. Shortly before de Gaulle arrived, the movement in the factories was nipped in the bud following the appointment of the new Aviation Minister, the Communist Charles Tillon. The workplace liberation committees were dissolved in return for the creation of toothless ‘mixed production committees’ that would supposedly improve production ‘in the interest of the whole nation’ but would have no executive role.855 As the Toulouse militants took a step back, de Gaulle pressed home his advantage and told the Resistance leaders that he would not tolerate the ramshackle nature of the forces in control of the city. During the parade to celebrate his visit, he was appalled to see a group of conscript Russian soldiers who had come over from the German army, followed by an armed contingent of Spanish Republicans, while the undrilled FFI troops made him appreciate the virtues of traditional military discipline.856 To ensure that the Toulouse FFI followed his ultimatum – join up or disarm – he put a military governor in command of the city and ordered a loyal regiment of Algerian fighters to be stationed there.857 Finally, de Gaulle took action against what he perceived to be Allied interference in the city. Conspicuous on the parade was a 1,500-strong maquis group commanded by a British SOE agent, George Starr (‘Hilaire’), who had run the WHEELWRIGHT circuit in the region for nearly two years. According to the philosopher A. J. Ayer, an SOE officer in Toulouse at the time, Starr was as influential as any of the local FFI leaders.858 This apparently irked de Gaulle profoundly, for he attacked Starr as a ‘mercenary’ and ordered him to leave the country. Within a week, Starr was back in London.859

  A month later US OSS agent Crane Brinton toured southern France to test the Parisian rumours ‘that those parts of France in which there are no Allied forces were prey to disorders of all kinds’.860 With communication lines still severely disrupted – the railways in particular took months to be reconstructed – there was plenty of room for rumour to grow. Having heard that Toulouse was in the grip of a workers’ council, he found the truth to be somewhat different:

  I need hardly add that when we got to Toulouse we found the town as quiet as a southern French city ever is, the civilian authorities duly installed and the FFI under the command of a French general.861

  In many ways de Gaulle’s trip to the apparently rebellious southern cities was a turning point. Although his evident scorn for the Resistance disappointed and dismayed those who had made such sacrifices – indeed, it was partly intended to have such an effect – he received an ecstatic response from the public wherever he went. This was not only a popular vindication of his personal position; it also indicated that the Resistance was still very much a minority affair, just as it had been throughout the war. De Gaulle wanted order, the population wanted peace and quiet, while what exactly the Resistance wanted was not at all clear. It was not even certain that there was su
ch a thing as ‘the Resistance’ any more. Although the war in Europe had nine months to run, and hundreds of thousands of people would die before it was over, the tide of battle had turned, and by mid-September the Germans were pushed back to the eastern corner of the country, behind a line from Metz to Mulhouse. With the job of driving out the Nazis done or about to be done, the Resistance began to fall apart. It appeared that nothing could hold back de Gaulle.

  The French leader was faced with two remaining problems. Aero-industry plants in the Paris region were now affected by the movement for workers’ control – at the Caudron factory, for example, a committee ensured not only that the workers had enough food to eat but also that the factory had enough supplies to continue making military aircraft.862 This embryonic class conflict was easily extinguished when the government enacted some of the demands of the CNR Action Programme, nationalizing sectors of the economy and creating workers’ committees in every company.863 The final challenge was to consolidate government power in the regions. The Free French had always opposed Resistance plans to create local liberation committees, fearing they would lead to a breakdown of central authority. In the tumultuous events after D-Day, de Gaulle lost that struggle and there were now Resistance-led committees all over the country organizing food, water and electricity supplies, and keeping order through their armed police force, the Milices Patriotiques.864 Furthermore, many of these local committees wanted to retain their power in the face of central authority.865 With the support of the old Resistance leaders like Emmanuel d’Astier, who were suspicious of the Communist-inspired Milices and wanted to see central authority restored, the government declared that the Milices Patriotiques were ‘private structures’ and banned them from carrying arms.866 There was opposition from sections of the Resistance – Franc-Tireur newspaper asked, ‘Why disarm the people?’ – but although the Communist Party organized a series of protests, they significantly did not withdraw Charles Tillon from the government. All this went over the heads of most people, who were simply not interested in who controlled the weapons. They wanted to know where the food, heat and light were coming from, and could not see a connection between the two issues.

  The death knell of the Resistance came when the government announced that the newly appointed parliament, the Consultative Assembly, would include seats for the Resistance, in particular for all the members of the CNR.867 With its leadership incorporated into national politics, the Resistance saw its local power disappear as elections were announced for municipal councils, while the Communist Party accepted the dissolution of the Milices Patriotiques. In return for this concession, de Gaulle amnestied Communist leader Maurice Thorez, who had spent the war in Moscow. In January 1945 the Communist Party’s acceptance of the new situation in the country was made explicit when Thorez thundered the Communists’ commitment to ‘one army, one police, one administration’.868 De Gaulle had won.

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  Popular images of the Liberation are dominated by the events that occurred in many towns in the immediate wake of Liberation, known in France as l’épuration – the cleansing. A mixture of shameful score-settling and a desire to see justice done after years of oppression, the épuration is often reduced to its most macabre spectacle – the shaven heads of women who were deemed to have ‘collaborated’ with the enemy, often in a sexual sense. Although this punishment was first meted out under the Occupation, it was mainly inflicted during a few weeks in August and September 1944. Exactly how many victims there were is unknown; all over the country there were examples of women being systematically humiliated in public: their heads were shaved and often they were tarred and feathered or painted with swastikas. The baying crowds – frequently composed of people who had played no part whatsoever in the Resistance – expressed an atavistic desire for revenge that, in a spasm that was almost Freudian, focused on women. On the scale of the horrors committed during the Occupation, the tondues (shaven women) were small beer, but they revealed the complex mixture of joy, relief, guilt and self-loathing that characterized many people’s attitude to the Liberation.869

  More serious was the summary justice that was doled out to collaborators and miliciens – the épuration sauvage (wild cleansing). This period of the épuration has given rise to some truly fantastic claims. In 1961 the right-wing anti-Gaullist historian Robert Aron stated that between 40,000 and 100,000 summary executions were carried out in the name of the Resistance. Research by French and American historians has substantially reduced the figure – it is now accepted that there were around 9,000 ‘extra-judicial’ executions by the Resistance, of which eighty per cent took place during the Occupation. Many of those executed before the Nazis fled were collaborationist gendarmes and policemen who were acting against the Resistance.870

  Even these figures seem terribly high, viewed from a time of peace when many countries – including France – have abolished the death sentence. But it needs to be put into context. Around 100,000 résistants were killed during the Occupation: they were the true martyrs of the period. This was a time of war: those collaborators who faced the firing squad might have been carrying out terrible deeds only a few hours before. The justice system was in tatters – all the French judges except one had sworn allegiance to Pétain. Miliciens or Gestapo spies could not be handed over to the police with any degree of confidence that they would not escape. In these tragic circumstances, the Resistance did what it could – it set up its own system of makeshift courts. De Gaulle had done essentially the same thing when he oversaw the trial and execution of Pierre Pucheu in Algiers at the beginning of the year. It was a question of rough justice, or running the risk of no justice at all.

  The dangers were evident enough – conviction on the basis of denunciations, with no supporting evidence, allowing for unscrupulous and mal-intentioned individuals to lethally pervert the process. Strictly speaking, this was nothing new. Throughout the Occupation, the Resistance had published the names of traitors – real or imagined – and had threatened them with death. Many local groups sent known collaborators paper coffins, describing their imminent fate. In some cases this was put into practice. The most spectacular example was the execution of Vichy’s Minister of Propaganda, Philippe Henriot, who had crowed over the dead of the Glières maquis at the beginning of 1944. On 28 June a group of résistants, dressed as miliciens, marched into his ministry office in Vichy and shot him.871

  However, there was a difference between what was acceptable – or even necessary – in times of war and Occupation, and what was appropriate when trying to replace the hated Vichy regime with something better. Many résistants were acutely aware of this, as SOE agent Francis Cammaerts recalled:

  It was astonishing that the Liberation happened as it did. All you hear about is shaving women’s heads, personal vendettas, and so on. But I had a lieutenant who came up to me and said, ‘I’ve got 300 German prisoners. What do the international conventions say about how much food and exercise they are entitled to every day?’ And those were Germans who had strung up Resisters and their families. There was something extraordinarily civilized about the Liberation.872

  Writing at the end of August 1944, OSS agent Crane Brinton was equally positive about the situation, and put matters into a telling contemporary context:

  Popular feeling toward the collaborators: . . . What strikes me most is the evidence of all sorts of hatreds and antagonisms – the atmosphere is full of gossip and accusations. And yet nothing is done, certainly nothing violent in the good-old American lynching tradition. Certainly there have been isolated instances of violence . . . but even the violence has been mostly haircutting.873

  Five weeks later, having toured most of the north of the country, Brinton seemed almost disappointed by what he found:

  I have seen no domestic violence at all; in fact, I haven’t even seen a cropped collaboratrice. From Utah Beach to Paris the people, that great beast, has looked a very domesticated beast indeed . . . Obviously there were incidents in the Liberatio
n, and obviously the FFI cut loose here and there. But the abiding impression of orderliness remains.874

  The post-war period saw the épuration taken on to a higher level as there were purges and prosecutions of those responsible for the worst crimes of collaboration. Around 160,000 cases were opened against alleged collaborators, of which nearly 120,000 eventually went to court. Of these, nearly one quarter were found not guilty, while most of the remaining 90,000 were either deprived of their civic rights (around 50,000) or were imprisoned (24,000). Among those sentenced to life imprisonment was Gaveau, the traitor who had betrayed the Musée de l’Homme group in 1941.875 There were also death sentences, of which 800 were carried out. Another 800 executions apparently took place under military justice.876 Prominent among those sentenced to death were the chief architects of collaboration and the vicious repression it meted out: Laval and Darnand were executed in October 1945; Pétain escaped the firing squad by virtue of de Gaulle’s clemency and died in prison in 1951.

  Although many lower-ranking Vichy administrators were prosecuted or at the very least sacked, some leading collaborators managed to slip through the net. One of the most notorious examples was Maurice Papon, who had been in charge of the police in Bordeaux, overseeing the deportation of thousands of Jews. Papon wormed his way into the offices of the Commissaire de la République and carried on doing his job after the Liberation. He later went on to serve as Prefect of Paris, during which time the police massacred scores of protesting Algerians (1961) and charged a pro-Algerian independence demonstration at Charonne Métro, killing nine people (1962). Papon ended his career as Minister of the Budget under President Giscard d’Estaing.