French Resistance

• 1. Introduction

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  The French Resistance was a collection of different groups that fought the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during the Second World War. On the 6th of June 1944, when Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, they did not fight alone. Hidden in forests, crammed into apartments, huddled over clandestine radio sets, tens of thousands of ordinary French people had spent years making that invasion possible. They were farmers and factory workers, professors and priests, immigrants and aristocrats. They published forbidden newspapers, blew up power lines, smuggled shot-down airmen across the Pyrenees, and fed the Allies precise details of German defenses. The proportion who participated in organized resistance is estimated at between one and three percent of the total French population, yet their contribution reshaped the war. How did a movement that began with severing phone lines and slashing German tyres grow into a force of 400,000 fighters by October 1944? What drove so many to risk torture, deportation, and execution? And what does it tell us that the first man executed for resistance was a Polish Jewish immigrant named Israel Carp, shot in Bordeaux on the 28th of August 1940 for jeering at a German military parade?

• 2. Life Under Occupation

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  Swastika flags hung over the Hotel de Ville and from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Across the facade of the Palais-Bourbon, where the National Assembly had once sat, a banner in capital letters read: "DEUTSCHLAND SIEGT AN ALLEN FRONTEN!" (Germany is victorious on all fronts!). The historian Ian Ousby wrote that even photographs from that period carry "a slight shock of disbelief", describing the scenes as looking "not just unreal, but almost deliberately surreal, as if the unexpected conjunction of German and French, French and German, was the result of a Dada prank and not the sober record of history." The resistant Henri Frenay wrote that seeing the tricolour replaced by the swastika gave him un sentiment de viol, a feeling of rape.

  Beyond the psychological wound came material catastrophe. One condition of the armistice required France to pay for its own occupation, which amounted to roughly 20 million German Reichsmarks per day, equivalent in May 1940 to around four hundred million French francs. The exchange rate had been artificially fixed at one mark to twenty francs, allowing German soldiers to make seemingly fair purchases while systematically draining the country. Prices soared. Food shortages hit hardest among children, the elderly, and physical laborers. The population was divided into ration categories A, B, C, E, J, T and V; rationed items ranged from meat and bread to soap, tobacco, and clothing.

  Hundreds of thousands of French workers were sent to Germany under the compulsory Service du Travail Obligatoire. Labour shortages deepened further because large numbers of French prisoners of war remained in German captivity. The black market flourished, with gangsters from the Parisian and Marseille underworld growing rich supplying rationed goods and smuggling people across the Pyrenees, though for the right counter-offer from the Germans they would just as readily betray those they had agreed to help.

  By December 1940, when Hitler shipped back the remains of the Duc de Reichstadt for a solemn burial at Les Invalides, Parisians said they would have preferred coal to ashes.

• 3. The Beginnings of Defiance

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  In July 1940, two professors named Paul Rivet and Boris Vilde, a Russian emigre, established one of the first underground newspapers, called the Musee de l'Homme. That same month, the writer Jean Cassou organized a resistance group in Paris, and the law professor Francois de Menthon founded a group called Liberte in Lyon. These were not soldiers. They were people acting on what the writer Jean Cassou called refus absurde, the absurd refusal to accept that the Reich had won.

  Many resistants described a single moment that had broken their passivity. The resistant Joseph Barthelet told a British SOE agent that he made up his mind when he saw German military police march a group of Frenchmen, including a friend, into the Feldgendarmerie in Metz. He recalled: "I recognized him only by his hat... I saw his face all right, but there was no skin on it, and he could not see me. Both his poor eyes had been closed into two purple and yellow bruises." Henri Frenay, initially sympathetic to Vichy's Revelation nationale, recalled that the look of contempt on German soldiers' faces when they viewed French people in the summer of 1940 told him he had to act.

  Early acts were modest: severing phone lines, vandalizing propaganda posters, slashing tyres. The first Frenchman shot for resistance was 19-year-old Pierre Roche, executed on the 7th of September 1940 after being caught cutting the phone lines between Royan and La Rochelle. Louis Lallier, a farmer, was shot for sabotage on the 11th of September in Epinal; Marcel Rossier, a mechanic, was shot in Rennes the following day.

  The execution on the 23rd of December 1940 of Jacques Bonsergent, a man who appeared to have been only a bystander to a trivial jostle on the Rue de Havre, crystallized what the occupation truly meant. On Christmas Day, Parisians woke to find his execution posters had been turned into shrines, surrounded in the writer Jean Bruller's words by "real flowers and artificial ones, paper pansies, celluloid roses, small French and British flags." The writer Simone de Beauvoir said that people mourned not just Bonsergent, but the end of the illusion that the Germans were "correct" occupiers.

• 4. Networks, Codes, and Infiltration

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  On the 19th of July 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the newly established Special Operations Executive to "set Europe ablaze." The F Section, headed by Maurice Buckmaster, became a vital lifeline for French resistance groups, supplying weapons, bombs, false papers, money, and radios. On the 5th of May 1941, the first SOE agent, Georges Begue, landed in France to make contact with resistance cells. Virginia Hall, the first female SOE agent, arrived in August 1941 and established the Heckler network in Lyon.

  Begue suggested that the BBC's Radio Londres broadcast personal coded messages to the resistance. Each night at 9:15 pm, the French language service opened with the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which in Morse code signified V for victory, followed by cryptic phrases that were instructions to cells across France. By June 1941, two SOE radio stations were operating in the country.

  Maintaining those radio links was extraordinarily dangerous. German detection stations in Paris, Brittany, Augsburg, and Nuremberg could triangulate an unauthorized transmission to within 10 miles. A van would then move in with finer equipment. Operators were instructed never to broadcast from the same location twice, to encrypt messages with polyalphabetic ciphers, and to use a security key at the start of each transmission; if captured and forced to transmit under duress, omitting the key told London the operator had been compromised.

  The Deuxième Bureau, France's intelligence service, stayed loyal to the Allied cause despite nominally operating under Vichy. It maintained links with British and Polish intelligence and protected a decisive secret: before the war, Polish intelligence had used a mechanical computer called the Bombe to break the Enigma machine. Polish code-breakers from that project continued working for the Deuxième Bureau as the Cadix team.

  The greatest threat to networks came not from German competence but from French informers. The Gestapo was not omnipotent. According to the Abwehr officer Hermann Tickler, the Germans needed 32,000 informers to crush all resistance in France, and by the autumn of 1940 had already exceeded that number. The poet Robert Desnos published an appeal in the underground newspaper Aujourd'hui in September 1940 asking people to stop denouncing their neighbors to the Germans. By 1942, the Paris Kommandantur was receiving an average of 1,500 poison pen letters from corbeaux per day. The Interallie network was destroyed when Abwehr Captain Hugo Bleicher captured and turned the agent Mathilde Carre, codenamed La Chatte, on the 17th of November 1941, and she betrayed everyone she knew.

• 5. Unification and Jean Moulin

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  By 1941, dozens of separate resistance groups had formed across France, many unaware of each other and operating at cross-purposes. The chief architect of their unification was a former prefet of Chartres named Jean Moulin. After identifying the three largest resistance groups in the south of France, Moulin left for Britain, stopping in Lisbon on the 12th of September 1941 before reaching London to meet General de Gaulle on the 25th of October 1941. De Gaulle named him his representative in France and ordered him to bring all resistance groups under the authority of the Free French National Committee.

  To support that mission, de Gaulle in October 1941 founded the BCRA, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action, under Andre Dewavrin, known by his codename Colonel Passy. The BCRA was based in offices on Duke Street in London. Its relationship with the SOE was strained from the start: de Gaulle openly resented British support for non-Gaullist resistance groups, seeing it as interference in France's internal affairs. The SOE responded by splitting its F Section in two, with the RF section handling Gaullist groups and the F section dealing with all others.

  On the night of the 2nd of January 1942, Moulin parachuted back into France from a British plane to begin the work of unification. By the 26th of January 1943 he had persuaded the three main southern groups, Franc-Tireur, Liberation, and Combat, to unite as the MUR, the Mouvements Unis de Resistance, with General Charles Delestraint, codename Vidal, as commander of its armed wing, the Armee Secrete. Moulin then reached north, contacting groups including Ceux de la Resistance, Ceux de la Liberation, and Liberation Nord. France's resistance movement was acquiring a spine. The question of who would command it, de Gaulle in London or Giraud backed by Washington, would remain a source of deep friction through 1943.

• 6. The Maquis

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  On the 16th of February 1943, the Service du Travail Obligatoire law required able-bodied French men aged 20-22 to report for two years of compulsory labour in Germany. The scale of what this meant became clear quickly: at the Dora works near the Buchenwald concentration camp, roughly 10,000 slave workers, mostly French and Russian, built V2 rockets in a subterranean factory designed for 2,500. They were allowed only four and a half hours of sleep each night and were routinely brutalized by guards.

  Rather than report to the STO, at least 40,000 Frenchmen, who made up 80 percent of the resistance members under thirty, fled into the countryside. They rejected the pejorative label refractaire and called themselves the maquis, a word borrowed from the Corsican dialect of Italian, the term for the dense scrubland of Corsica where bandits traditionally hid. By June 1943, the word had entered common usage across France.

  Fritz Sauckel, the German General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, called the maquis bandits and terrorists and demanded they be wiped out. He had been ordered by Hitler to produce half a million workers from France by March 1943, and when Laval told him his approach would radicalize the refractaires, Sauckel dismissed the warning. As Laval predicted, the hardline approach drove essentially apolitical young men straight into organized resistance. The German ambassador Otto Abetz joked that the maquis should erect a statue to Sauckel inscribed "To our number one recruitment agent."

  Joining the STO evaders in the hills were Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, and Allied airmen shot down over France. One maquis band in the Cevennes consisted of German communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and fled to France in 1939. The maquis bands took apolitical names: animals (Ours, Loup, Tigre, Lion, Puma, Rhinoceros, and Elephant) or personal names such as Maquis Bernard or Maquis Socrate. Their central rule was the so-called 24-hour rule: a captured maquisard had to hold out under torture for 24 hours to give his comrades time to escape. An underground pamphlet written for young men considering joining stated plainly: "Men who come to the Maquis to fight live badly, in precarious fashion, with food hard to find."

• 7. Jews, Rafles, and Rescue

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  On the 3rd of October 1940, Vichy introduced the law on the status of Jews, banning them from law, medicine, public service, and a wide range of public spaces including cinemas, parks, restaurants, libraries, and swimming pools. Jews could not own radios or bicycles, could not move without notifying police, were denied phone service, and on the Paris Metro were permitted only the last carriage. By the 29th of May 1942, all Jews in the occupied zone were required to wear a yellow star of David marked Juif or Juive at all times from the 7th of June onward. On the 14th of June 1942, a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Paris committed suicide as his classmates shunned him.

  In the spring of 1942, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Theodor Dannecker, the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, and the secretary-general of police Rene Bousquet began planning the grande rafle, the great round-up. On the morning of the 16th of July 1942, 9,000 French policemen arrested approximately 12,762 Jewish men, women, and children across Paris, bringing them to the Vel d'Hiv sports stadium before transferring them to the camp at Drancy and then to Auschwitz. The operation was overwhelmingly carried out by French police, not Germans. Among the arrested was a woman named Madame Rado, taken with her four children. She recalled the watching bystanders: "Their expressions were empty, apparently indifferent." She survived Auschwitz. Her four children were killed in the gas chambers.

  Not everyone was indifferent. Archbishop Jules-Gerard Salieges of Toulouse, in a pastoral letter of the 23rd of August 1942, declared: "You cannot do whatever you wish against these men, against these women, against these fathers and mothers. They are part of mankind. They are our brothers." Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the National Protestant Federation, called on Calvinists to hide Jews. The Calvinist couple Andre and Magda Trocme brought together the entire commune of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon to shelter between 800 and 1,000 Jews. The Jesuit Pierre Chaillet ran l'Amitie Chretienne, which hid Jewish children by passing them off as Christian. After the summer of 1942, the Catholic Church, which had broadly supported Vichy's antisemitic laws, began to reverse course.

• 8. From Underground to Army

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  By the end of 1942, French resistance groups had carried out 278 sabotage actions, compared with 168 Anglo-American bombing raids in France that year. Two SOE agents, Raymond Basset (codename Mary) and Andre Jarrot (codename Goujean), were parachuted in to sabotage the Schneider-Creusot arms works at Lyon, which the RAF had tried and failed to destroy, killing roughly 1,000 French civilians instead. The engineer Henri Garnier, recruited by Frenay, taught French factory workers how to shorten the lifespan of Wehrmacht weapons by introducing deviations of a few millimetres, a form of sabotage that was almost impossible to detect and thus triggered no reprisals.

  After the Allied landings at Normandy on the 6th of June 1944 and Provence on the 15th of August, the paramilitary components of the Resistance merged into a formal hierarchy called the French Forces of the Interior, the FFI. At the time of the Normandy landings, the FFI counted around 100,000 fighters. By October 1944 that number had grown to 400,000. Members provided the Allies with detailed intelligence on the Atlantic Wall defenses and on Wehrmacht deployments for the Provence invasion.

  The amalgamation was sometimes politically difficult, given the long-running tensions between Gaullist and non-Gaullist factions, and between the communists of the FTP and the groups aligned with de Gaulle. Despite those frictions, the merger succeeded. By VE Day in May 1945, France had rebuilt the fourth-largest army in the European theatre, numbering 1.2 million men. Among those who never saw that day were roughly 75,000 French citizens deported to Germany under the Nacht und Nebel decree, signed by Hitler on the 7th of December 1941, which allowed the regime to make resistants disappear into the night and fog. Half of them did not survive.