the German occupation of France is polarised as a period when the French people united against its alien occupiers and a handful of traitors working for them. The truth is that about 1 per cent of the population was actively pro-German and about the same proportion was committed to resistance before 1944. Finding work, food and heating, tilling one’s fields or running a business, or simply trying to keep a family together, were so time-consuming in that era of shortages, fear and repression that most French people could do little about the occupation except take François Mauriac’s advice: ‘Have eyes that see nothing.’
The largest single organised faction of the essentially urban resistance was the French Communist Party (PCF). Yet, controlled from Moscow by the Comintern, it hampered the French war effort for the first twenty months of the war in line with the non-aggression pact signed between USSR and Germany in August 1939 as a prelude to the two signatories carving up Poland. Similarly, in Britain the communist Daily Worker was banned for its defeatist stance.
When Hitler ignored the pact and invaded USSR in June 1941, the PCF leadership was instructed by Moscow to launch a campaign of assassination of German personnel and thereby provoke retaliation by the execution of hostages. On 13 August, two communist activists hacked a German soldier to death with bayonet and chopper. Eight days later, 22-year-old Pierre Georges, who styled himself ‘Colonel Fabien’, gunned down an inoffensive Kriegsmarine sub-lieutenant in a Metro station on his way to work at a naval clothing store.
A deadly cycle of assassination and reprisal was launched. This had nothing to do with French interests. Moscow’s aim was to tie down in a restive France many thousands of German troops who could otherwise have been sent to the eastern front. The Comintern always played a long game, and the second aim of its strategy was to divide and confuse the French people, leading to a power vacuum at the end of the war, in which the tightly-disciplined PCF could take over the government by political means or armed uprising.
The Maquis was altogether different, being initially composed of autonomous bands of young Frenchmen who took to the hills and forests to escape conscription for labour service in Germany. As a neighbour of mine recalled, ‘What could we do when young men with guns knocked on the door at night, demanding clothes and food against handwritten receipts they said would be redeemed by General de Gaulle after the Liberation?’
Despite lengthy negotiations and extensive bribery by de Gaulle’s emissary Jean Moulin, charged with uniting the mutually hostile factions of the Resistance into one integrated command structure, internecine conflict between the various political groups continued. Only after the Liberation were the myths of concerted heroic resistance to the invader invented to unify a divided nation.
Charles de Gaulle has rightly become the symbol of resistance to the German occupation of his country, but when it began he was just a substantive colonel, stranded with a handful of companions in a country whose language he did not speak very well and whose policies he often rightly mistrusted. To most of his compatriots, he was a runaway correctly condemned in absentia by a court martial to a traitor’s death.
Thousands of French servicemen in Britain after Dunkirk rejected de Gaulle’s appeal and chose to return home even when this lay in the Occupied Zone. Their legitimate head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was a First World War hero and a popular and respected political figure of the inter-war years. Many of his original policies were laudable, if naïve – and yet the cruelty of his regime has become legendary. ‘I hate lies,’ he said just after the Armistice to a population disillusioned with its leaders. ‘I think of those who are suffering, of those who do not know where tomorrow’s food is to come
The largest single organised faction of the essentially urban resistance was the French Communist Party (PCF). Yet, controlled from Moscow by the Comintern, it hampered the French war effort for the first twenty months of the war in line with the non-aggression pact signed between USSR and Germany in August 1939 as a prelude to the two signatories carving up Poland. Similarly, in Britain the communist Daily Worker was banned for its defeatist stance.
When Hitler ignored the pact and invaded USSR in June 1941, the PCF leadership was instructed by Moscow to launch a campaign of assassination of German personnel and thereby provoke retaliation by the execution of hostages. On 13 August, two communist activists hacked a German soldier to death with bayonet and chopper. Eight days later, 22-year-old Pierre Georges, who styled himself ‘Colonel Fabien’, gunned down an inoffensive Kriegsmarine sub-lieutenant in a Metro station on his way to work at a naval clothing store.
A deadly cycle of assassination and reprisal was launched. This had nothing to do with French interests. Moscow’s aim was to tie down in a restive France many thousands of German troops who could otherwise have been sent to the eastern front. The Comintern always played a long game, and the second aim of its strategy was to divide and confuse the French people, leading to a power vacuum at the end of the war, in which the tightly-disciplined PCF could take over the government by political means or armed uprising.
The Maquis was altogether different, being initially composed of autonomous bands of young Frenchmen who took to the hills and forests to escape conscription for labour service in Germany. As a neighbour of mine recalled, ‘What could we do when young men with guns knocked on the door at night, demanding clothes and food against handwritten receipts they said would be redeemed by General de Gaulle after the Liberation?’
Despite lengthy negotiations and extensive bribery by de Gaulle’s emissary Jean Moulin, charged with uniting the mutually hostile factions of the Resistance into one integrated command structure, internecine conflict between the various political groups continued. Only after the Liberation were the myths of concerted heroic resistance to the invader invented to unify a divided nation.
Charles de Gaulle has rightly become the symbol of resistance to the German occupation of his country, but when it began he was just a substantive colonel, stranded with a handful of companions in a country whose language he did not speak very well and whose policies he often rightly mistrusted. To most of his compatriots, he was a runaway correctly condemned in absentia by a court martial to a traitor’s death.
Thousands of French servicemen in Britain after Dunkirk rejected de Gaulle’s appeal and chose to return home even when this lay in the Occupied Zone. Their legitimate head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was a First World War hero and a popular and respected political figure of the inter-war years. Many of his original policies were laudable, if naïve – and yet the cruelty of his regime has become legendary. ‘I hate lies,’ he said just after the Armistice to a population disillusioned with its leaders. ‘I think of those who are suffering, of those who do not know where tomorrow’s food is to come
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