Translator’s notes
These additional NOTES to Alias Caracalla are intended to provide some background for the benefit of English-speaking readers who are not necessarily familiar with the personalities mentioned and the context in which these events took place.
The notes follow the chapter headings and order in which they appear in the published version.
Also are included are some of the author’s notes that I consider shed useful light on the surrounding text.
I apologize if I have stated the obvious or included information readers might consider superfluous.
Prelude
5. Translator’s note: The French title under the Third and Fourth Republics was Président du conseil des ministres.
Pétain Betrays Hope
2. Translator’s note: A large forest of maritime pine in French Basque Country.
3. Translator’s note: A character in the multivolume novel by Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault, translated into English as The Thibaults (Viking Press). Set in pre–World War I France, Jacques and Jenny, the heroes, reveal their love on the day war is declared, August 3, 1914. After getting Jenny pregnant, Jacques dies while throwing pacifist leaflets in the direction of the enemy lines. The author won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature.
2. Translator’s note: A large forest of maritime pine in French Basque Country.
3. Translator’s note: A character in the multivolume novel by Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault, translated into English as The Thibaults (Viking Press). Set in pre–World War I France, Jacques and Jenny, the heroes, reveal their love on the day war is declared, August 3, 1914. After getting Jenny pregnant, Jacques dies while throwing pacifist leaflets in the direction of the enemy lines. The author won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature.
5. Translator’s note: Irregular military units deployed by the French army during the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. Later revived and used by partisan fighters in the French Resistance during the Second World War.
9. Translator’s note: An academic competition for the top sixth-form students from all over France.
10. Translator’s note: In February 1793, France decreed a levée en masse, calling up three hundred thousand young men to reinforce the army. The soldiers called up came to be known as the Soldiers of Year II, in reference to Year II of the revolutionary calendar.
11. Translator’s note: The date of an antiparliamentary demonstration organised by the French far right, which turned into a bloody riot.
12. Translator’s note: The École polytechnique, France’s elite school of engineering.
We Shall Never Be Slaves
2. Translator’s note: The Red Falcons, a left-leaning movement for the children of Socialist and General Confederation of Labour (Communist-led) militants.
3. Translator’s note: The Socialist-led Popular Front of 1936, under Prime Minister Léon Blum, had enacted several social reforms that the far-right movements blamed for the June 1940 defeat.
4. Translator’s note: Pierre Cot, French politician and minister for air under the Popular Front. Jean Moulin had been his chief of staff.
5. Translator’s note: Jean Borotra was known as the “bounding Basque,” a member of the successful French Davis Cup tennis team in the 1920s and 1930s, and later a minister under Pétain.
8. Translator’s note: Cordier had no idea of the concentration camps discovered at the end of the war, of course, and was referring more to the camps in southern France that had housed the Spanish Republicans after Franco’s victory in 1938–39.
9. Translator’s note: There is a Daily Mail front page from September 12, 1940, headlined “Premier: Invasion Ready.”
10. Henri Beaugé notes in Volontaires de la France libre, “In the evenings, after the last meal of the day, a singsong would be organised in the courtyard. Some impromptu but often distinctly talented artists, storytellers, or singers would put on a show. I could not repress a certain emotion when that tall reddish-fair-haired Dutch fisherman sang ‘Rose de Picardie’ [Roses of Picardy] so well, a song evoking the battles of the Great War in northern France.”
11. Recopying these scribblings today, I find that from this time on, and except when mentioning Domino, I had abandoned the “I” so cherished since Gide in favour of “us,” representing the group, then all of the volunteers, from whom even now I cannot think of myself separately.
Olympia Hall
1. I had no idea at the time what my comrades—and even more those greeting us—might have been feeling that evening. One can imagine how moved I was, on December 13, 1944, when I received the testimony of Pierre Soubigou, oneof those boys, describing in terms much like my own, what he had felt on seeing us arriving: “Olympia was an important step in the process of assembling the volunteers. I recall the arrival of a contingent of several hundred fellows, arriving one evening in the penumbra of the vast hall of the building. Gathered in the upper stories, we shouted at them. Where did they come from? Who were they? Amid the hubbub, one thing quickly became clear: they were less alone, less lost, and suddenly, spontaneously, we sang the ‘Marseillaise.’ It was a very powerful moment, no doubt the first manifestation of our community of Free French [in English in the original—Trans.] volunteers, which never faltered in the years that followed.”
2. Translator’s note: By Roland Dorgelès, winner of the Prix Femina in 1919.
3. Translator’s note: In English in the original.
4. Translator’s note: Later a Gaullist minister and president of the French Constitutional Court.
5. After the war, Lieutenant Saulnier told me that he had deliberately mislaid his notebook to give the volunteers a chance to modify their birth dates. Those deemed too young were enlisted in the Free France cadets.
6. Translator’s note: Extreme right-wing figure between the wars and leading collaborator with the Nazi occupation.
7. Translator’s note: Extreme right-wing journalist between the wars, notorious for his persecution of the Jews during the occupation.
10. Translator’s note: French biologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965.
12. Translator’s note: French military academy, equivalent to West Point or Sandhurst.
Delville Camp
1. Translator’s note: Delville Camp, near Aldershot, was an important training site for the Free French.
2. Translator’s note: While Cordier and some of the others were practising Catholics, France was by now a secular State, and at least some of those present might have been positively anticlerical.
3. Translator’s note: The original has “parad ground” (sic).
4. Translator’s note: This is almost certainly a reference to Whitehall, within walking distance of the theatre, where the main British ministries and central government agencies are located. However, London’s City Hall is not located there.
6. Translator’s note: Probably a Bergen backpack as issued to the British army.
10. Translator’s note: The French Section of the Workers’ International (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, SFIO) was a French political party founded in 1905 and succeeded in 1969 by the modern-day Socialist Party. At the 1920 Congress of Tours, the majority created the French Section of the Communist International, which joined the Communist International and became the French Communist Party (PCF), while the minority continued as the SFIO.
11. Translator’s note: Slang for people from northern France.
12. Translator’s note: Bécassine in the Basque Country. A celebrated comic strip portraying the adventures of Bécassine, a naive Breton peasant girl. The name became synonymous with female—and Breton—naivete, to the fury of Bretons in particular.
13. One morning, two comrades, Beaugé and Boiley, recognized on the parade
ground a sergeant they had met at Anerley School. When the Vichy consul had
come to visit us, he had requested to be repatriated immediately to Casablanca and had refused to join de Gaulle’s legion. Returning to London after the ship’s sinking, he had done as most of his comrades had and signed the join-up forms offered him. They arrived at Delville Camp in late July. The story did the rounds of the camp, and they were nicknamed Mecs-Nénés [a play on the words mecs (blokes) and nénés (sissies)—Trans.].
14. Translator’s note: Roland Dorgelès.
15. Translator’s note: Physical training, forerunner of all the modern variants.
16. [In English in the original—Trans.] Officially called the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), the British Home Guard was a defensive militia through the duration of the war, made up of a million and a half volunteers not fit for military service, for reasons of age mainly. It was supposed to back up the regular army in the event of invasion.
17. Translator’s note: The Lebel rifle was originally issued to the French army in 1886 and modified in 1893. It was known as the canne à pèche (fishing rod) because of its length. It had to be loaded one cartridge at a time, whereas the German soldier’s Mauser carried a magazine with a capacity of five cartridges. The French army still possessed three million Lebels in 1939.
19. Translator’s note: Maurice Schumann, journalist and future politician who acted as de Gaulle’s spokesman on Radio Londres throughout the war, and as such the voice of Free France. He held numerous governmental positions under Georges Pompidou, including minister of foreign affairs from 1969 to 1973.
20. Translator’s note: The nom de guerre of Michel Saint-Denis, an eminent journalist and man of the theatre.
21. Translator’s note: The French refer to this as the “Bataille d’Angleterre”—the Battle of England.
23. Translator’s note: “Maid” and “breakfast” are in English in the original.
24. Translator’s note: In English in the original. For French people “le five o’clock tea” is a defining feature of English life.
25. Translator’s note: French men traditionally thought English girls were a soft touch.
26. Translator’s note: Churchill’s speech on September 11, 1940, can be found online at http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1940/1940-09-11b.html, accessed February 21, 2024.
28. Translator’s note: A quotation from Alphonse Daudet’s Jack: Moeurs contemporaines, translated into English by Laura Ensor as Jack (Routledge, 1890).
31. Translator’s note: Jules Romains was a celebrated author; Geneviève Tabouis was a French historian and author; Pierre Cot was minister for air under Léon Blum’s Popular Front government; Jean Moulin was his chief of staff in 1936.
32. Translator’s note: “Torche-Zay” is a particularly vulgar and insulting reference to Jean Zay, minister of education from 1936 to 1939, who was imprisoned under Vichy and murdered in 1944.
33. Translator’s note: Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu (religious name Father Louis of the Trinity, OCD), a Discalced Carmelite friar and priest, was also a diplomat and French Navy officer and admiral.
34. In the days that followed, the expedition vanished from the newspapers and airwaves. Not until October 8 was a more comprehensive report provided, in a speech by Churchill to the Commons: “Our opinion of him [de Gaulle] has been enhanced by everything we have seen of his conduct in circumstances of peculiar and perplexing difficulty. His Majesty’s Government have no intention whatever of abandoning the cause of General de Gaulle until it is merged, as merged it will be, in the larger cause of France.” [Churchill’s speech to parliament is in 365 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th ser.) (1940) cols. 261–352, and can be found online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/oct/08/war-situation, accessed February 21, 2024—Trans.]
Camberley
- Translator’s note: The Pau area transport company; see p. 17 above.
Old Dean
3. Translator’s note: Future French ambassador to the United Kingdom.
4. Translator’s note: France’s elite postbaccalaureate educational institutions, most notably at the time the École polytechnique, École des mines, École royale des ponts et chaussées, and École d’Arts et Métiers.
5. Translator’s note: Cabaret singers known for their satirical texts.
6. Translator’s note: Major General Edward Spears had been a liaison officer between the British and French armies in World War I. It was he who “literally pulled” (according to Churchill) General de Gaulle into a plane taking off from Bordeaux for London on June 17, 1940. Initially a forceful advocate for de Gaulle in London, relations later broke down between the two over the Syrian campaign. Spears’s wife, May Borden-Turner (the novelist Mary Borden), had organised a field hospital for the French army in 1916 and established the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit in 1940. At the June 1945 victory parade in Paris, de Gaulle re- fused to allow any British participation. May Borden’s unit did manage to participate, nevertheless, and was enthusiastically greeted with cries of “Voilà Spears.” De Gaulle was furious, however, and ordered the unit to be shut down and its British members repatriated.
7. Translator’s note: René Avord was the pseudonym used by Raymond Aron.
8. Translator’s note: The literal translation of Vers l’armée de métier is “Towards a professional army.” De Gaulle’s text has been published in English as The Army of the Future. First published in France in 1934, de Gaulle’s vision of the army of the future preceded Heinz Guderian’s Achtung Panzer! by three years.
9. Translator’s note: One of the central characters of Les Thibault, by Roger Martin du Gard, widely read among French youth in the 1930s. Jacques is a pacifist in 1914 and finds his beliefs severely tested by the enthusiastic response of the French crowd to the outbreak of war.
10. Translator’s note: 1941, presumably.
11. Translator’s note: Member of the French Resistance and BCRA agent, concentration camp survivor, diplomat, ambassador, and writer.
12. Translator’s note: In translating this passage I have tried to stay as close as possible to the original in order to convey the flavour of the thinking of the French Pétainist Right at the time.
15. Translator’s note: The first general officer to join de Gaulle in London.xxx
16. Translator’s note: Winston Churchill’s speech can be listened to online, with a transcription, on the website of America’s National Churchill Museum, accessed February 21, 2024, https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/winston-churchills-broadcast-on-the-soviet-german-war.html.
17. Translator’s note: Pseudonym of the military affairs correspondent of the review La France libre and author of La Guerre des cinq continents (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943).
18. The Bureau central de renseignements et d’action, forerunner of postwar French intelligence service, created by the Free French chief of staff in 1940 and first commanded by Major André Dewavrin, who took the nom de guerre “Colonel Passy.”
19. Translator’s note: Henry (often written Henri) Hauck, a Socialist and labour unionist before the war, was head of the Labour Department of Free France during World War II and the French representative at the International Labour Office after the war.
20. Despite Hauck’s show of good humour that day, our encounter affected him more than I realized. After my visit, he wrote on August 7 to Professor René Cassin (future coauthor with Eleanor Roosevelt of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights), which I came across in the archives (382 AP 31): I have the honour to inform you that around four weeks ago I received a visit from Sergeant Cordier, of the Free French Forces (who has since, I am told, been promoted to the rank of officer candidate). Sergeant Cordier told me he felt impelled to convey to me the feelings of a large number of his comrades who are, apparently, deeply shocked by the articles published occasionally under my signature in France, and by the wireless chats that I broadcast on the radio in the morning intended for French workers. He added, while insisting that he did not share the views of his comrades in this respect, that many of them dreamed solely of “chucking me into the sea.” I pointed out to Sergeant Cordier that the articles I have published in France have never contained any ideas other than ones that ought to be shared by the entire Free French movement, and that my wireless chats were regularly vetted by the heads of the political department. Moreover, without taking too seriously the rather ridiculous threats of which he had made himself the messenger, I communicated to him a certain number of documents from France proving that the French people resisting the Germans and the Vichy government were motivated by the same democratic patriotism that the young volunteers at Camberley condemn with such violence. I warned him against the danger of the Free French, who are continuing the struggle on foreign soil, finding themselves morally and politically at odds with the millions of workers and farmworkers fighting the same enemy on French soil. I did not think it worthwhile, at the time, to inform you of what Sergeant Cordier said: I took an indulgent and amused view of the opinions of the Camberley volunteers, of whom Cordier appointed himself the spokesman. But I did learn last week, after an article on the assassination of Marx Dormoy by Cagoulards acting for the Gestapo [see below, Sunday, July 26, 1942, “Sunday in Montluçon”—Trans.], the newspaper France received a letter containing death threats from a Free French Forces (FFL) volunteer. It seems that the danger is greater than I thought: there is among the FFL a state of mind that I believe to be highly dangerous. Not only have some of the volunteers—not to mention some officers—yet to understand that, as General de Gaulle reminded us in his recent speech in Beirut, this is an ideological war, a war of liberty against tyranny, but they still stir up among our troops a Fascist mentality akin to that of Vichy, which cannot but serve the men of Vichy. I believe this propaganda to be too persistent and too methodical not to be systematically organised, and I am personally convinced that a fifth column is at work in our ranks, for the benefit of the people we are fighting. Which is why I have decided to inform you of Sergeant Cordier’s visit, requesting that you open an investigation into the facts brought to my attention.
22. Translator’s note: School for future administrators of French overseas territories, one of the forerunners of the École nationale d’administration founded by de Gaulle and Michel Debré after the war.
23. Translator’s note: The original is dirigeants, which in French political life means something closer to “those who govern.”
24. Reading General de Gaulle’s war memoirs, I discovered the reason for my rapid promotion [prémonition in the French—Trans.]: when he learned how few of those in the training squad passed out, twenty out of eighty, de Gaulle sent a note to his staff saying he had not asked for graduates of Saint-Cyr, but for officers to command Black troops in Africa. The result was a fresh promotion.
25. Translator’s note: A well-known upscale clothes store in Paris and the provinces (now defunct), famous for its English-style clothes.
BCRA Volunteers
1. Translator’s note: One of the “seventeen” who left Pau with Cordier in June 1940. Later an NCO on the staff (2nd Bureau) of General Catroux in Lebanon in 1942. Cullier de Labadie refused promotion to officer rank.
3. Translator’s note: My thanks for this translation to the late Professor Samuel N. Rosenberg, formerly professor emeritus of French and Italian literature at the University of Indiana Bloomington.
4. Translator’s note: Sir William Seeds, UK ambassador to Moscow from 1939 to 1940. Replaced by Sir Stafford Cripps.
7. Translator’s note: Named after the Battle of Valmy in 1792, the first major military victory over foreign forces by the French Revolutionary Army.
8. Translator’s note: I have tried to translate these speeches fairly literally, so as to preserve some of the flavour of the General’s very individual oratory.
9. Translator’s note: Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques (My political thought). No English-language edition has been published.
10. Translator’s note: Maurice de Cheveigné, member of the Resistance and the wireless operator for Jean Moulin and Georges Bidault, was deported to Buchenwald but survived. He authored Radio Libre 1940–1945.
11. Rake recounted his mission in Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, a film in which he plays his own role. He was sent to Paris as a wireless operator and fell in love with a German officer. Unwilling to betray the latter by concealing his mission, he revealed the truth to Buckmaster, his SOE boss, who “understood” and brought him back to England.
12. Translator’s note: Eric Picquet-Wicks was the British officer who had brought Jean Moulin to England and introduced him to General de Gaulle not long before this episode. His book Four in the Shadows: A True Story of Espionage in Occupied France (London: Jarrolds, 1957) gives a classic account of his first encounter with Moulin, and of three other Free French agents and their fates. One of these, Pierre Brossolette, features prominently later in Daniel Cordier’s memoir.
13. Translator’s note: At the time, the title of Scott-Moncrieff ’s English translation of Proust’s masterpiece was Remembrance of Things Past. This has since been retranslated by D. J. Enright as In Search of Lost Time. However, temps perdu can also mean “time wasted,” hence Cordier’s allusion here.
Back to France?
1. Translator’s note: Not to be confused with the daily newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and others in 1973 and still in existence as of 2024.
2. I had no idea that day that this anniversary address was the testament of our saga. It was, indeed, with my comrades from 1940, our last meeting as Free French. Some days later, our movement changed its name to become La France combattante [Fighting France]. A year later, on June 1, 1943, it was dissolved, and de Gaulle became copresident, with General Giraud, of the government in Algiers. The solitary adventure of the volunteers of 1940 came to an end when the French army reentered the war. When I returned to London in May 1944, having completed my mission, I no longer knew anyone at the BCRA. There were barely a dozen of those from June 1940, [they had been] replaced by a few hundred officers from the Armistice Army, who held all the positions: we despised them for their cowardice.
3. We had frequent occasion to exclaim: “Ah! How reasonable we are!” in the days that followed, ringing out the “Ah!” like a cry of hope. This mocking familiarity with our chief may seem disrespectful. In reality, it was our secret bond with de Gaulle and a wellspring of our discipline. We admired him with an affection— why deny it?—that we would have blushed to admit. Although we were now men, we remained prisoners of a child’s touchy prudishness.
4. Translator’s note: 380 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th ser.) (1942) cols. 1347–54, available online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1942/jun/11/great-britain-and-soviet-russia-treaty, accessed February 21, 2024.
5. Translator’s note: French centre-left politician, 1899–1983. Joined the Liberté group of the French Resistance, then participated in the formation of the National Resistance Council and became its president after the arrest of Jean Moulinon July 21, 1943. Under the Fourth Republic, after the war, he served several times as foreign minister and also briefly as president of the Council of Ministers (prime minister).
6. Translator’s note: Cordier means the colleges.
7. Translator’s note: I have directly translated the words used by Cordier here to reflect his impressions of Cambridge. He probably refers to punting on the River Cam.
10. Translator’s note: “Modern” here refers to the 1920s and 1930s.
11. Translator’s note: Jean Marin, a journalist, joined the Resistance in June 1940 while acting as the London correspondent of Havas, a press agency. By 1943 he was a well-known broadcaster on the programme Les Français parlent aux Français (The French speak to the French), which was broadcast over the BBC. In August 1944 he was part of General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division, which liberated Paris. He was later head of the Agence France-Pressenews agency.
12. Translator’s note: A member of the Commando Kieffer, the French commando unit that took Pegasus Bridge at Ouistreham on June 6, 1944. Guy Hattu also took part in Operation Hardtack 23 on Bray-Dunes, December 27–28, 1943. Before the war, he had been a member of Colonel de La Roque’s far-right (but antifascist) Croix de Feu movement.
13. Translator’s note: A Catholic writer with monarchist leanings, Georges Bernanos was the successful author of Dialogues des Carmélites and Journal d’un curé de campagne, among others. He supported the Free French by writing many articles and employing his polemical talents to lambast Pétain and the Vichy régime.
14. Translator’s note: Battle of Bir Hakeim, May–June 1942, in which a Free French brigade under General Pierre Koenig halted Rommel’s advance, allowing the British to retreat and win the First Battle of El Alamein, July 1–27, 1942, under General Auchinleck.
15. Translator’s note: This is a somewhat approximate translation of the French démocrassouille, a composite of “democracy” and crassouille (filth), which is itself a compound of crasse (filth) and souillure (soiled). The term was widely current among the Third Republic’s most virulent right-wing critics in the 1930s.
16. Translator’s note: Battersea Power Station, now the Tate Modern art gallery.
17. On October 8, 1990, General Mairal-Bernard sent me the following note: You were parachuted onto the Coursage landing strip, near Montluçon (10 kilometres to the southwest), on July 26, 1942. The parachute team comprised: Tronche (head of the COPA), Kaan, Dr. Billaud, Favardin, and Ribière. All are dead except Ribière, whose brother founded Libé Nord [a Resistance group in the occupied zone]. Ribière remembers the parachute drop very well because an incident occurred. One of your friends ( Jean Ayral) apparently landed on his head and Dr. Billaud treated him. You were lodged with M. Vimal, an SNCF [national railroad company] worker who lived on avenue de Néris in Montluçon, between two railroad bridges, the one over the Montluçon to Lyon track and the one over the Montluçon to Clermont track, and close to the Montluçon-Eygurde track. M. Vimal is dead. For Pierre Kaan, who taught philosophy at the Montluçon Lycée, please find enclosed two articles written on June 18, 1982, celebrating his memory.
Rex, My Boss
2. Some seventy years later [Cordier was writing this in the early 2000s.—Trans.], readers may find this attitude incomprehensible. One needs to remember the exceptional physical and psychological condition of the BCRA agents: we were twenty years old and had undergone intensive training with all kinds of weapons: rifles, light machine guns, mortars. In the past year we had received daily specialized training in firing revolvers and submachine guns. To say we wanted to use them in real life barely does justice to our state of mind. We had but a single goal: “To kill the Boche.” The expression crops up like a litany in this book, but it is true, I would even say imperious. It was the most fervent of our prayers. Highly trained as we were, we would have seen a pitched battle with the police as a sport. What is more, it would have been proof we were making war at last.
5. Translator’s note: A wood-burning heating stove.
6. Translator’s note: An important French bank.
7. I had to choose between various solutions in referring to Resistance members: I could either use their true identity, add their pseudonym to that identity, or use just the pseudonym by which they were best known. I have opted for the latter, at the risk of confusing the reader. Despite this drawback, I have preferred to present names this way because clandestine life was a life of mystery, and pseudonyms were its shield. [. . .] I have decided not to use pseudonyms for people who were already well known before the war and who joined the Resistance, as well as for my comrades from England whom I ran into by chance in Lyon or Paris, Free French like myself. Lastly, when I knew the names of Resistance members for one reason or another, I opted to use these names in preference to their alias, which better reflects the reality we were living through, forcing us to juggle continuously with a host of names, real or fictitious. Two lists [in the front matter] are provided, linking pseudonyms to names and vice versa. I believe this approach accurately conveys the murky atmosphere of this tragic drama. [A W placed after some people’s noms de guerre stands for “wireless operator.” Cordier’s initial nom de guerre, Bip.W, indicated that he was to be the wireless operator of Bip, Georges Bidault.—Trans.].
9. Translator’s note: “Riffraff,” the term of abuse royalists used to refer to the Republic.
10. Jean Moulin is immortalized in the photo of him by Marcel Bernard. This was a snapshot taken on holiday in December–January 1940–41. He had gone for a walk with his friend Bernard in the public gardens in Montpellier, where his mother lived. He asked Bernard to take a few pictures to give one to his mother. As there is no other photo of Moulin in the Resistance, this one has become an icon and forged the myth of the clandestine hero. When I met Jean Moulin in the summer of 1942, he did indeed wear a hat, like all men at that time, or a cap, but neither overcoat nor scarf, obviously.
12. Only at the Liberation did I fully grasp the honour Jean Moulin had done me that evening. I must add that in the year during which I worked under his orders, never once did he allude to my convictions. Had he forgotten about them?
13. Still mired in the interminable twilight of my adolescence, I little thought that this encounter would change my life radically. It was one of those exceptional opportunities one chances upon without necessarily seizing them. Today, more than my puerile blindness, it was Jean Moulin’s choice that surprises me, especially in view of his political opinions, which I learned about when working on his biography. How could this ardent supporter of the Popular Front, conscious of the mortal dangers of the Occupation, which he had experienced firsthand as prefect at Chartres, have picked me after my provocative account of my political youth? I was not yet twenty-two and had never faced danger; I had spoken without thinking, Action Française having become a stronghold of anti-Gaullism. To be sure, the Free French and the Resistance were coalitions, where every conviction and belief was represented and worked together in harmony. But, with the post he was offering me, Moulin was putting me right at the heart of his existence, since I would become the only resister to know where he lived. In other words, he was putting his liberty in my hands. I wasn’t alone in my amazement. In 1989 Bernard Pivot [a celebrated French literary interviewer] asked me: “Why did Jean Moulin pick you as his secretary?” I answered, probably the most ridiculous reply of my life: “Because it was him, because it was me.” I ought to have told him the truth, which was that I had never wondered why, and Jean Moulin had never told me why. No doubt he chose me for want of someone better. Among possible explanations, I have read that Moulin might have been using my extreme right-wing opinions as a smoke screen: “Chance had presented Moulin with a young man of many qualities and who, in addition, might give a more right-wing slant to his image.” Ingenious, insofar as it addressed the controversies of the post-Liberation era, but anachronistic. It implied ascribing to Moulin, in 1942, an intention to modify a supposed political reputation within the Resistance. But that was not how the Resistance saw him at the time. This accusation, concocted in 1950, was sustained by only one of its leaders, Henri Frenay. The selection of resisters in 1942—even if there were more Communists at the Liberation than members of Combat or the OCM [Organisation civile et militaire—a broad home resistance front in the occupied zone]—was not based on one’s political past. After the honeymoon of 1942, the leaders of the two zones came out against Moulin in 1943 because of the latter’s loyalty to General de Gaulle and his strict enforcement of the General’s policy. That was the nub of the dispute. A different criterion, namely, the slender ranks of the BCRA in France, surely determined the job he gave me. From among the new arrivals, as they turned up—I was the third wireless operator parachuted into Free France since June 1940—he picked a volunteer who had joined the Free French in June 1940. At least that is what I later deduced. We were all very young, in our early twenties, with no ties in France, ignorant of Moulin’s identity and past. It provided him with a screen of security should we be arrested. Finally, and above all, we were soldiers mobilized round the clock in his service. This was not the case with resisters. So, like any political leader or official with authority surely would have done, he picked a young man he could fashion according to his habits and will.
15. Translator’s note: This roughly translates as “Pity the unwed mother / Of the child beside the road . . . / Should someone cast a stone / May that stone turn to bread.”
16. Translator’s note: The senior central government official in each department of France.
17. Translator’s note: École polytechnique and École centrale, two elite engineering schools.
18. Translator’s note: Georges Bidault (1899–1983), French centre-left politician. He joined the Liberté group of the French Resistance, then participated in the formation of the Resistance Council and became its president after the arrest of Jean Moulin on June 21, 1943. Under the Fourth Republic, after the war, he served several times as foreign minister and briefly as president of the Council of Ministers (prime minister).
19. I didn’t know then that this was Christian Pineau, a leader of the Communist-affiliated labour union and founder of the Libération-Nord resistance movement. [Pineau was the French foreign minister from 1956 to 1958, at the time of the Suez crisis of 1956, and he was a signatory to the Treaty of Rome in that year.—Trans.]
20. Each movement and its leaders had their own letterboxes, placed at their disposal by rank-and-file resisters and scattered across town. The liaison agent’s job was to empty these boxes.
21. A typist earned around eight hundred francs a month.
22. As time went on, I discovered how complex his life was. He had organised two parallel lives, the official one under his true identity, the other underground, with forged papers, changing them from time to time. While I knew the latter thanks to my role, I knew nothing of the former. Only after the war did I learn the details through his sister. Officially, he was domiciled in Saint-Andiol [in Provence], where he had retired as a prefect and was registered with the town hall for his food rationing coupons. He turned up there every fortnight, as well as in Montpellier, where his mother and sister lived. From autumn 1942 onwards, he would sometimes go to Nice, where he had opened the Romanin Art Gallery under his real name. Only one person knew about this official existence, Jean Choquet, who maintained contacts with the Resistance through me. This son of a former member of Moulin’s staff at the prefecture in Amiens, Choquet was his personal courier with the secretariat. He served as the circuit breaker between Moulin’s two lives. Choquet lived in Avignon, where he kept the bicycle that he used to ride the eighteen kilometres to Saint-Andiol. It allowed him to travel unnoticed day and night. I saw Choquet daily. When Moulin was in Lyon, Choquet brought news from his family or his gallery. Conversely, when Moulin was at home, Choquet delivered the mail prepared in Lyon. Above all, Jean Moulin had to maintain daily contact with his three liaison officers sent by London to deal with the resistance movements: Raymond Fassin for Combat, Hervé Monjaret for Franc-Tireur, and Paul Schmidt for Libération. Georges Bidault was, along with them, his closest associate. He was the first person he would see each time he came to Lyon to review the collaborationist press in the occupied zone and to discuss behind-the-scenes intelligence from Vichy and what the British and Swiss radios were saying. Bidault also kept him informed about the internal life of the three movements in the free zone, Combat especially, where he sat on the executive committee.
23. Translator’s note: Comte François de Menthon (1900–1984), French politician, professor of law, and a captain in the French army who was captured by the Germans in June 1940. He escaped and joined the French Resistance in Haute-Savoie. He received Moulin several times at his chateau. A leader of the Combat resistance movement with Henri Frenay, he joined de Gaulle in London in 1943, then went with the latter to Algiers, where he was named Commissioner of Justice in the French Committee of National Liberation. He was Minister of Justice in de Gaulle’s provisional government from September 1944 to May 1945 and France’s lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials and oversaw the trial of Marshal Pétain in France. He subsequently played a leading role in the creation of the early European institutions.
25. Translator’s note: Lucien Rebatet (1903–1972), French author and journalist who became notorious as an exponent of fascism and a virulent antisemite, especially during the Occupation. He was sentenced to death in 1946 for collaboration, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released in 1952. His novel Les deux étendards is regarded by some as one of the greatest novels of the postwar era.
26. Translator’s note: Literally “I am everywhere,” a periodical that took a virulently antisemitic line under the Occupation.
28. Translator’s note: The official dress of the Académie française is the habit vert (a gold-braided green costume) worn with a cocked hat and a sword.
29. Translator’s note: Thierry Maulnier (1909–1988), French journalist, essayist, dramatist, and literary critic. An active member of Action Française, Maulnier published articles in the periodical of the same name and continued to do so after the German occupation of France from 1940, as well as writing for Le Figaro. He ceased writing for L’Action françaiseafter the start of Operation Torch in 1942 and remained a journalist for Le Figaro from 1945 until his death.
30. Translator’s note: André Philip (1902–1970), Socialist and member of the SFIO who served as interior minister under the Free French government of de Gaulle in 1942. He also served as finance minister in 1946 and 1947 under Félix Gouin, Léon Blum, and Paul Ramadier.
31. Translator’s note: Paul Bastid (1892–1974), lawyer, academic, and Radical Party politician. He was a national deputy from 1924 to 1941 and minister of commerce from 1936 to 1937. Bastid joined the Resistance in 1941. Through him and his wife Suzanne, a highly respected professor of international law, the Faculty of Law at the University of Lyon became a centre of Resistance during the war.
32. Translator’s note: Moulin is referring here to the fact that a very large majority of the Chamber of Deputies voted “full powers” to Pétain on July 10, 1940. Ninety Socialist (SFIO) deputies voted this way. Many of those opposed to Vichy misleadingly claimed, during the war and after, that the Popular Front had not voted the “full powers.” As the later president of the Fourth Republic put it: “Where were the 175 Socialist parliamentarians?” The majority of Communists voted likewise, a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939.
33. Translator’s note: The name of the steamer that sailed from Bordeaux on June 24, 1940, with twenty-seven deputies onboard, including former prime minister Édouard Daladier, former minister of the interior Georges Mandel, future prime minister Pierre Mendès-France, and the Nobel physics laureate Jean Perrin. The ship docked in Casablanca, and most of the ministers and deputies went from there to Rabat and Algiers. Churchill reportedly sent Duff Cooper (Foreign Office) and Lord Gort (previously commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France) to bring some of the political figures to London. The failure of this mission contributed to Churchill’s decision to recognize de Gaulle as leader of the Free French.
34. Translator’s note: Jules Jeanneney (1864–1957). As president (Speaker) of the Senate he led the debate on July 10, 1940, that granted extraordinary powers to Pétain. With Daladier, he protested the way the Marshal used these powers. He was later minister of state with responsibility for reforming the French administration in de Gaulle’s provisional government from 1944 to 1945.
35. Translator’s note: After the meeting between Pétain and Hitler at Montoire on October, 24, 1940, General de Gaulle issued a manifesto from Brazzaville on October 27 to assert his authority and announce the formation of the Empire Defence Council.
36. Translator’s note: Alexandre Parodi (1901–1979), senior civil servant, member of the Resistance, and de Gaulle’s appointee in charge of the provision- al government. Later, as a politician, Parodi served as the permanent representative to the United Nations, then NATO, and the first French ambassador to Morocco.
37. Translator’s note: Jacques Doriot (1898–1945), French politician and hold- er of the Croix de Guerre for service in World War I. Doriot joined the French Communist Party in 1920 but was expelled in 1934. He then founded the ultra- nationalist French Popular Party (Parti populaire français, or PPF) in 1936. He adopted a pro-German stance and extreme fascist views under the Occupation. With Marcel Déat, he founded the Legion of French Volunteers (Légion des volontaires français, or LFV), a French unit of the Wehrmacht. Doriot was killed by Allied aircraft while travelling by road on February 22, 1945.
38. Translator’s note: Jacques Brunschwig-Bordier (1905–1977), senior civil servant prewar who joined the Libération-Sud movement in 1942. He was arrested May 1942, then released. He then joined the Libération-Nord movement in northern France and was appointed to represent the movement on the Consultative Assembly in Algiers. He was then rearrested in Paris, tortured, and sent first to Buchenwald, then to Dora. He escaped and made contact with the Americans near Mühlhausen on April 8, 1945. After the war, he served as chief inspector of the air ministry and chairman and chief executive of Les Houillères de Lorraine (Loraine coalfields).
39. Nowadays [Cordier was writing this in the 2000s.—Trans.], historians are keenly interested in these political discussions, but I found them intensely annoying at the time.
40. He never did explain. Perhaps he just wanted a witness to these conversations. The increasingly conflicted relations with the leaders [of the resistance movements] appear to bear this out. But perhaps this is to attribute to him a concern for posterity that none of us harboured in the heat of the moment. No doubt he needed to have the person in charge of all his contacts at his side. The effectiveness of his mission depended on this at a time when all telephone communication was prohibited: in a sense, I was Moulin’s “cell phone.”
41. This was brought home to us every time a courier or secretary was arrested: it took several days to reestablish links. Obviously, “backup” rendezvous were provided for, but to suppose the underground functioned smoothly would be to attribute to it a degree of efficacy it never had. In that sense, some of the documents and even more “recollections” could give the illusion of a well-oiled machine. That would overlook the precarious conditions in which we operated: we were trying to hold off the Vichy police and the Gestapo, both of which possessed effective means of investigation and repression. The hundred thousand resisters arrested out of the three hundred thousand recognized proves how fragile our organisation was.
42. Translator’s note: A nongovernmental national welfare organisation originally founded in 1914 to provide assistance to soldiers, their families, and civilian victims of the war. The organisation was reactivated by Daladier in October 1939. Under the Occupation it had the monopoly of appeals for donations and received government subsidies as well. It was also responsible for selling off the goods of persons stripped of their nationality, particularly Jews. It should be noted that most French people working for such organisations were not collaborators and indeed often worked for the Resistance.
45. Translator’s note: This is also a reference to the author’s old school, Saint-Elme.
The Chiefs and Their Resistance
1. Translator’s note: Pierre Pucheu (1899–1944), French industrialist and minister of the interior in the Vichy government from 1941 to 1942. Later, after leaving Vichy, he made his way to Algiers, where he was tried under the auspices of the French Committee of National Liberation and shot on March 20, 1944.
2. Translator’s note: General La Laurencie (1879–1958) distinguished himself in May–June 1940 at the head of the Third French Army Corps, for which he was knighted by the British. After the armistice he became the representative of Marshal Pétain in Paris and later went over to the Resistance.
4. Philippe Roques, former chief of staff to Georges Mandel. [Translator’s note: Georges Mandel (1885–1944), born Louis George Rothschild, served several times as a French minister in the 1930s and was minister of the interior at the fall of France in 1940. Winston Churchill, in The Second World War: Their Finest Hour, describes Mandel as a gallant public servant, under the heading “The Great Mandel”].
6. Translator’s note: The General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail, or CGT), founded in 1895, became affiliated with the French Communist Party in 1921. Léon Jouhaux was instrumental in the negotiation of major labour reforms in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.
7. Translator’s note: Claude Bourdet (1909–1996), Writer, journalist, polemicist, and militant French politician who was a major Resistance figure.
8. General La Laurencie had been appointed Vichy’s ambassador to Paris. After resigning at the end of 1940, he went over to the Resistance and received financial assistance from the Americans. In that capacity, he had sought to rally Frenay and d’Astier de La Vigerie to his plan to federate a Resistance not controlled by de Gaulle. They had rejected the idea in autumn 1941.
9. Translator’s note: De Gaulle was appointed acting or acting général de brigade, which is equivalent to the rank of brigadier, or sometimes brigadier general, in the US and British armies.
12. Which wasn’t untrue since no arrests occurred there. That also proves that we were often lucky. I met Jean-Guy Bernard, Claude Bourdet, Jacques Brun- schwig-Bordier, Paul Schmidt, and Raymond Fassin, etc., there. Everyone took advantage of the nearby Progrès de Lyon newspaper offices, where many leaders— Georges Altman, Pierre Corval, and Yves Farge—hung out, and of surrounding cafés. I’d noticed that the boys and girls, the assistants and secretaries to the different movements, like me lived in a state of constant improvisation. Everyone, including the Free France agents, ignored the British and BCRA security instructions. I must add that, given the derisory number of those involved, the Resistance would have ground to a halt had we applied them. Jean Moulin alone complied with them scrupulously, perhaps because he was the oldest among us.
14. Translator’s note: Primate of France.
18. Being preprinted, interzone cards obliged correspondents to be brief. [Translator’s note: Mail did not pass freely between the occupied and unoccupied zones, being censored. People therefore had to use a preprinted postcard, completing empty spaces and crossing out words that did not apply.]
19. Translator’s note: Form of address for lawyers.
20. Translator’s note: Robert Schuman (1886–1963), Luxembourg-born French statesman and Christian Democrat politician who served twice as prime minister of France as well as a reforming finance minister and foreign minister. A founder of the European Coal and Steel Community (forerunner of the European Union), the Council of Europe, and NATO. Declared “Venerable” by Pope Francis in 2021 as an exemplar of Christian virtues.
22. Incredible as it may seem, this situation stemmed from Rex’s compliance
with the British and BCRA security rules. The Resistance would have been paralyzed if everyone had applied these rules, as even urgent rendezvous would have required the green light from London. Consequently, they were blithely ignored most of the time. My encounter with Maurice de Cheveigné was an example of this.
23. Returning home the following evening, I was surprised to find my bed care fully made, the dishes washed, and a small square of paper on my table on which my unknown visitor had written “Thank you” in an elegant hand.
25. Translator’s note: Cordier seems to mean a short monastic cloak covering the shoulders. When bearing the image of the Virgin Mary, for example, this was believed to confer protection on the wearer.
26. Domino, Yves Carquoy, and Henri Blanquat are fictitious names. I have pre ferred not to reveal their true names out of respect for our childhood friendships.
27. Translator’s note: Jacques Copeau was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century French theatre and literary life. According to Albert Camus, “In the history of the French theatre, there are two periods: before Copeau and after Copeau.”
28. Translator’s note: Le Vieux-Colombier, a famous Parisian Left Bank theatre; NRF, La Nouvelle Revue française, a highly regarded literary magazine published by Gallimard with a glittering list of contributors.
While the Boss Was Away
2. Translator’s note: Joseph Caillaux (1863–1944), Third Republic politician, president of the Council of Ministers from 1911 to 1912, and minister of finance. He campaigned for the introduction of an income tax and was leader of the “peace party” in Parliament during the World War I.
3. Jean Moulin used the following days to set up the modern art gallery he wanted to open in Nice. While prospecting in September 1942, he had found a shop called La Boîte à Bouquins. He had written to Madame Louis on October 5, the day after the botched boarding, “I think it would be a good idea to open the gallery around the fifteenth or in the last fortnight of the month. I’m counting on you to ensure all goes smoothly and discreetly.” He was being optimistic. Back in Nice on October 9, on the twelfth he made a down payment of ten thousand francs on the leasehold. I have chosen to recount in minute detail the vagaries of this departure to illustrate the day-to-day difficulties encountered in the Resistance. The same was true for all communication with London or with the occupied zone and between the resistance movements’ leaders, circulating instructions, preparing meetings, and quite simply daily life itself. Today’s readers are led astray by the legend, which focuses on the romantic aspect of our work. I’m continually struck by modern presentations that overlook the difficulties of daily life in the Resistance, which was dull and filled with fear, or that fail to attach their true im- portance to that aspect. They are transfigured by the romantic atmosphere of spy novels, a far cry from the dreary reality.
4. A diode set to a predetermined wavelength.
6. Translator’s note: The Battle of Valmy on September 29, 1792, was the first major victory by the French revolutionary forces, who defeated the Prussian forces, paving the way for a quarter-century of French military dominance of Europe.
7. Translator’s note: This is ironic in light of the incident that took place during a debate on French television, when Henri Frenay (nom de guerre Charvet or Nef ) stated, “Everyone knew Moulin was a crypto-communist,” with Cordier vehemently demurring (see “Aftermath: Who’s Jean?”).
10. In less than a week, unfortunately, it was stolen after I had left it for a few seconds to pick up mail from a letterbox. The incident was a shock. It confirmed repeated warnings by the English: “Don’t trust the sense of security in your daily life: you are in danger from the moment you arrive in France.” When I came to pick up Moulin at the station on Monday morning, I confessed my misadventure. Plainly annoyed at my negligence, he simply said, “Buy another one.” Which I did.
11. The brother of Emmanuel, général de corps aérien [equivalent to UK air marshal or US lieutenant general] in command of air forces on the northern front. He finally went to London in November 1942 and became deputy commander of the Free French Forces, then commander of French troops in Great Britain.
12. Translator’s note: The CGT (Confédération générale du travail or General Confederation of Labour) was affiliated with the French Communist Party from its inception in 1921. The CGTU (Confédération générale du travail unitaire, or United General Confederation of Labour) split from the CGT in 1922 in protest at Moscow’s control. It merged back into the CGT under the Popular Front in 1936 but split again at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.
De Gaulle, the End?
2. Marie-René Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, known as Alexis Leger, diplomat; even better-known by his pen name Saint-John Perse, one of the leading twentieth- century French poets.
3. Translator’s note: It is customary in France to refer to former presidents of the Council of Ministers, or indeed of any less exalted body, as Monsieur le Président. Herriot had served three times as prime minister (président of the Council of Ministers) as well as Chairman (Speaker) of the Chamber of Deputies.
4. Translator’s note: Pétain had replaced the Third Republic with l’État français (the French State), a legal concept immediately abolished at the Liberation in 1944.
5. Translator’s note: Louis Marin, one of the founding members of the Republican Federation (Fédération républicaine), the largest conservative party during the Third Republic.
6. Translator’s note: Joseph Laniel (1889–1975), conservative Third and Fourth Republic politician and prime minister from 1953 to 1954.
8. Translator’s note: Compagnon de la Libération was a distinction conferred on eminent associates of General de Gaulle during World War II. Cordier himself later received this distinction and was chancellor of the Order when he died in 2020.
9. General de Gaulle did not arrive in Algiers until June 1, 1943, after seven months of stalling by the Allies.
10. I forgot that I had already betrayed him twice, when I’d first taken in a pilot and then a Jew.
11. I was unaware that the “intelligence” section had circuits in the occupied zone.
12. I quote this letter in full because, more than sixty years later, it still bears the imperishable vibrancy of that friendship. What is more, it is a living testimony to how BCRA agents in the field thought. For readers today, it is an irreplaceable snapshot of our feelings, opinions, and concerns. I have related above the conditions in which we separated at the end of July, after two years of life together. It was to him that I owed my entry to the BCRA and my discovery of the hazards of clandestine life. First, because BCRA agents in the field very rarely wrote letters to each other; next, because it testifies to the life we led, to our judgments regarding the French and the nature of the bonds uniting the Free French. After having seen some of them again since the start of my historical research, I can vouch that time has in no way eroded the affectionate fellow feeling and the long-standing ties that bind us. This document has the immense virtue of being true in its words, in its vision, in the feelings experienced at the time, without the—alas distorting—prism of memory or of language, which evolves over the course of one’s life and which reflects more than imperfectly the nuances of lived experience.
15. Translator’s note: Lifra: armed wing of Combat; Liber: Libération; Tirf: Franc-Tireur.
16. Jean Moulin’s remark shows how watertight communications were among Free French agents, since he made it at a time when the Communists were negotiating with de Gaulle over sending one of their representatives to London. True, the talks were being held in Paris, through an intelligence department officer called Gilbert Renault (Colonel Rémy).
22. Yvon Morandat left for London on the plane that brought these instructions, the final draft of which was dated November 16. Translator’s note: Despite Jean Moulin’s difficulties with him, Morandat features prominently and is regarded as an effective agent in M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France ([Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968], 168): “OUTCLASS was more fortunate; perhaps because he worked alone. He was the young Yvon Morandat, one of the least conspicuous and most effective Frenchmen engaged in resistance work.” This may be an instance of the SOE and BCRA not seeing eye to eye on some issues.
23. Translator’s note: Mobile armed sabotage crews. They organised operations at their own initiative but within the framework of broad guidelines laid down by Combat, their resistance movement.
24. The “nonmilitary” section of the BCRA had been set up in summer 1942 to handle political questions inherently forbidden to the BCRA. This section dealt with the Resistance’s political issues in permanent liaison with the Internal Affairs Commission, under André Philip. It was headed by Louis Vallon, a Socialist recently arrived from France.
28. I hope I will be believed if I confess that I had greater confidence in the others than in myself.
32. Translator’s note: The celebrated French farce by Georges Feydeau (1908) has been performed in English as Take Care of Amelia and Keep an Eye on Amélie.
33. This shopping list can still be consulted on the copy kept in the French National Archives.
The Battle for the Resistance Council
1. Only after the Liberation did I learn from Pierre Meunier that Jean Moulin had been a friend of Pierre Cot. Moulin had been Cot’s chef de cabinet [chief of staff ] at the air ministry in Léon Blum’s government.
2. Translator’s note: Jan Schreiber translates the poem in the Hudson Review29, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 9–17, as:
Sun, sun . . . bedazzling fault
And mask of death-ah, Sun
Beneath a blue-gold vault
Where waves of flowers run:
Proudest conspirator
And highest of my snares,
You by opaque delights
See that men shall not see
That all creation blights
Non-being’s purity
3. Wireless Transmission: It was Maurice de Cheveigné who invented the expression in October–November 1942.
9. Translator’s note: Boris Souvarine (1895–1984), Marxist writer and activist, born in 1895 to a Jewish family in Kyiv who moved to France. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 but later broke with it and became a prominent critic of the Bolsheviks and Stalinism.
10. Translator’s note: “Free French” is in English in the French original.
12. A note found in the police archives in Nice records his presence in that city on January 9, 1943: “The person concerned is now in Nice, at the Hotel Franck.” The prefect noted in the margin: “No special objection M. Moulin; has been retired and is engaged in farming.”
14. Translator’s note: Moulin says “le jour J,” D-day, but he is referring to a mooted Allied landing, not specifically to June 6, 1944.
15. Translator’s note: François de La Rocque (1885–1946), leader of the Croix-de-Feu (fiery cross), a prewar paramilitary right-wing movement. In 1936 he formed the more moderate French Social Party, which some French historians have described as a precursor of Gaullism.
16. Pierre Brossolette, member of the BCRA with the rank of major.
17. Translator’s note: Leading Third Republic politicians.
18. Translator’s note: QSF: “Is my automatic transmission good?” A standard wireless transmission abbreviation.
19. Translator’s note: The newspaper Je suis partout took a pro-German, ultra-collaborationist, antisemitic tone during the Occupation. Its editor in chief from 1937 to 1943 was the writer Robert Brasillach, who was executed for treason in 1945.
21. Translator’s note: Slang for the Italians.
23. Translator’s note: Leclerc joined the Free French in 1940 with the rank of captain but had risen to the rank of général de brigade (brigadier) by 1942, leading an initially tiny unit from Central Africa to join Montgomery’s Eighth Army in North Africa; his Second Armoured Division led the Allied entry into Paris on August 25, 1944. He was named Marshal of France after his early death in an aircraft accident in 1947. Marie-Pierre Koenig, too, began World War II with the rank of captain with French troops in the Norway campaign. He joined the Free French and de Gaulle in London and was promoted to colonel. In 1941 he was promoted to general, commanding the Free French brigade in North Africa. With 3,700 men, he held five Axis divisions (37,000 men) for sixteen days at Bir Hakeim. Koenig was minister of defence in the government of Pierre Mendès-France in 1954.
24. Pierre Brossolette (Brumaire) arrived in the southern zone on February 6. He wrote a report on February 8 stating that he had met Jean Moulin. The meeting must therefore have taken place between these two dates. [The body of the text says Brossolette arrived on January 27; the author probably meant to say that he had arrived in Lyon on February 6.—Trans.].
25. Translator’s note: Bidault, Brossolette, and Louis Joxe, another front-rank Gaullist, all passed this prestigious postgraduate examination in 1925.
26. The conference held at the Anfa Hotel, on the hill of the same name above Casablanca, on January 14–24, 1943, attended by de Gaulle, Giraud, Roosevelt, and Churchill.
27. The date of this meeting is an example of how memory can lead people astray with misleading consequences, reversing cause and effect. Henri Frenay gives the date as February 26, 1943: as a result the main item was now the maquis, this having become a key issue after the creation of the STO [the compulsory German labour scheme] on February 16. The same goes for Jean Moulin’s budget cuts before leaving for London on February 13, 1943. The shortfall in funds received from London for that month meant that the budget was the same as for the previous month, whereas it ought to have been larger.
29. I found this list, in his handwriting, in the French National Archives, in the papers of Jacques Bingen. It was kept with the handwritten reconstitution of his February 1, 1943, plan advocating the National Resistance Council (CNR). I had never forgotten the list of pseudonyms, of which I remembered four: Richelieu, Talleyrand, Navet, and Chou-Fleur, believing the last two referred personally to Henri Frenay and Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie.
Bip.W All Alone
1. As luck would have it, I had saved them with other records. If I quote them here in full—in the chronological order in which they were sent—it is because they are snapshots of the tasks I carried out under his orders, and they reveal the tone of our relations. Despite my best efforts, the accounts I reconstruct here are more or less embellished by imagination and forgetting. These notes are Moulin’s authentic voice, not distorted by time. They are all the more precious in that, among the thousands of notes exchanged by Resistance members during the Occupation, few survived destruction.
2. Phrase read on the BBC meaning he had arrived in London. [The French “Côté cour, côté jardin” refers to “Stage left, stage right” in the theatre.—Trans.]
3. Translator’s note: Témoignage chrétien, a Catholic newspaper founded in Lyon in 1941 by the Internal French Resistance movement.
4. Translator’s note: Mobile armed sabotage crews; see above, p. 411.5. The STO (Compulsory Labour Scheme) Law of February 16, 1943, drafting young men born between January 1, 1920, and December 31, 1922, to go and work in Germany.
6. In reality the daily accounts I kept indicated 1,167,000 francs paid to the Vercors that day. The difference was probably due to the 267,000 francs already provided for them.
7. Stuck in Lyon, I couldn’t share the fortunes of these young people, who, people said, were occupying the Savoy, Isère, and Puy-de-Dôme mountain regions. I’d like to have been on the front with them. Running through the streets of Lyon from one meeting to another, hearing all day long from men complaining that I wasn’t helping them, I was revolted by my impotence.
8. In fact, from 625,000 to 700,000 forced labourers left to work in Germany, where 35,000 of them died; the STO certainly sparked the birth of the maquis, but only 10 percent of the objectors to the STO joined up.
9. An escape line set up by Lieutenant d’aviation Christian Montet (Martell), who had left for England in December 1941.
11. I found the telegram when researching for this book: “Can immediately set up with deportation deserters redoubts for guerillas—Need several million per month for arms and provisions—Make known urgently if we can firmly count on airdrops at places we will indicate.”
13. Translator’s note: Service des opérations aériennes et maritime (Air and Sea Operations Department), a section of the Secret Army brought within the Resistance by de Gaulle in November 1942.
15. Translator’s note: Thirty-four years later, in 1977, there was an angry ex- change between Frenay and Cordier during a French TV show: Frenay had lost none of his aggression and arrogance towards Cordier.
16. Translator’s note: Citroën front-wheel-drive saloon or executive car, usually with a four- or six-cylinder engine, used by the French police during this period.
18. Translator’s note: According to the author, Mechin was the nom de guerre of François Morin (later Morin-Forestier). However, Morin’s usual nom de guerre was Forestier, and as such he was the first chief of staff to General Delestraint, commander of the Secret Army. And it was as Forestier that he was arrested on March 15, in company with Serge Asher and Raymond Aubrac, then helped to escape on May 24 by Lucie Aubrac. He was flown out of France to London, where he was invited to join the BCRA, which he declined at the urging of Henri Frenay. Instead, he became head of the Delegation of Resistance Movements, becoming their spokesman in London. In March 1944 he led the London delegation of the Commission for Prisoners, Deportees, and Refugees, an organisation headed by Henri Frenay.
Serge Asher took his nom de guerre Ravanel after the celebrated family of mountain guides in Chamonix. He joined D’Astier de La Vigerie’s Libération-Sud movement in Lyon in June 1942, and in September of that year he entered the movement’s executive committee. Arrested with Raymond Aubrac on March 15, 1943, he escaped in May with the help of Lucie Aubrac. In June 1944 he became the youngest colonel in the French army, aged twenty-four. In August 1944, he assisted the commissaire de la République in coordinating fighting in the Toulouse region, and as commander of the Toulouse military region he organised the French Forces of the Interior and helped liberate several towns in the region. De Gaulle accused him of leaving the Communists too much leeway but named him a compagnon de la Libération.
Raymond Aubrac, born Raymond Samuel, was an engineer and cofounder with D’Astier de La Vigerie of the Libération-Sud resistance movement and second-in-command of the Secret Army under General Delestraint. He was arrested on March 15, 1943, and his wife Lucie successfully organised his escape, and that of Ravanel and others, on May 24. He was arrested again, along with Jean Moulin, in Caluire on June 21, 1943. He escaped, again with the help of his wife, on October 21, 1943. At the Liberation, Aubrac was named commissaire de la République for Marseille in August 1944, where he was responsible for the delicate task of disarming the Communist-led militia, the Milices Patriotiques, as well as initiating the arrest of the author Jean Giono. Later, through his contacts with many international Communist personalities, Henry Kissinger asked Aubrac to arrange contacts with the leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, with a view to ending the Vietnam War.
22. Translator’s note: Jacques Baumel. [A future minister under Presidents de Gaulle and Pompidou].
24. Translator’s note: Giraud was a five-star general, while de Gaulle had only two. De Gaulle was careful to remain bareheaded whenever photographed in Giraud’s company, to avoid embarrassment to either party.
25. Translator’s note: “On 1 January 1942, Churchill, Roosevelt, Maxim Litvinov of the USSR, and T.V. Soong of China signed a short document. This document became known as the Declaration by United Nations. The next day, representatives of 22 other nations added their signatures. The governments that signed this declaration pledged to accept the Atlantic Charter. They also agreed not to negotiate a separate peace with any of the Axis powers” (History of the United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/model-united-nations/history-united-nations, accessed March 6, 2024).
28. Translator’s note: It was a forty-minute bicycle ride from L’Haÿ-les-Roses to rue des Plantes in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, where Jean Moulin took an artist’s studio.
30. Translator’s note: Age groups.
Chapter XXXXX
1. Translator’s note: A monumental sculpture on one of the northern pillars of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris sculpted by François Rude between 1883 and 1886, illustrating the departure of the volunteers of 1792 on their way to fight the decisive battle of Valmy.
2. Translator’s note: Originally a left-leaning newspaper, L’Oeuvre became collaborationist during the war, which contributed to its eventual demise.
5. Translator’s note: I.e., “would hand in my resignation . . .”
6. Translator’s note: André Mercier (1901–1970), French politician and member of the Communist Party who represented the Communist Party on the National Resistance Council and in the Consultative Assembly in Algiers (November 1943). After the Liberation, Mercier became a deputy in the National Assembly in Paris.
7. Translator’s note: Charles Joseph Tillon (1897–1993), a French metal worker, Communist, labour leader, politician, and French Resistance leader.
8. I took part in the French TV show Les Dossiers de l’écran on October 11, 1977. [This was a regular show in the 1970s, in which a film was shown, followed by a panel discussion; Cordier appeared alongside Henri Frenay.—Trans.] It was my recollection of this response, practically word for word—which had struck me for the light it shed on what Jean Moulin thought—that led me to respond to the former head of Combat’s accusation that Moulin was a crypto-communist. Those words, and Moulin’s decision to withhold the FTP’s monthly subsidy, impelled me to seek out the whole truth about Moulin’s mission.
12. Translator’s note: Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs [The Treason of the Intellectuals] (Paris, 1926), a highly influential and controversial attack on those who instrumentalize their position in academia or the arts to stir up the masses and foment violence.
13. Translator’s note: A literary review founded in occupied France in September 1942 and one of several reviews published by the Communist-affiliated National Front. Contributors to this clandestine magazine included eminent figures such as Louis Aragon, François Mauriac, and Raymond Queneau.
14. Translator’s note: Battle of Bir Hakeim, May 27–June 11, 1942, near Tobruk (Libya), when General Pierre Koenig’s First Free French Brigade resisted superior numbers of German and Italian troops under Rommel. This feat of arms allowed the British forces to withdraw and subsequently win the first Battle of El Alamein in July 1942.
21. Translator’s note: Picasso had a studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, near the Seine, at the time.
22. Translator’s note: In fact, the statue was the work of Robert Wlérick (1882–1944) and Martin Raymond (1910–1992).
23. Translator’s note: It was de Gaulle, of course, who became prime minister after the Liberation.
24. Translator’s note: His code name Barrès should not be confused with the right-wing writer Maurice Barrès.
25. Translator’s note: Signal was the leading Nazi propaganda newspaper under the Occupation.
26. Translator’s note: This was the barrière d’enfer tollgate, which features in act 3 of Puccini’s opera La Bohème. The building on the left looking towards Montparnasse now houses the Liberation of Paris General Leclerc–Jean Moulin Museum, which opened in 2019.
27. Translator’s note: Jean Moulin’s other alias.
28. Translator’s note: Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque began the war as a captain, and as General Leclerc he led the French Second Armoured Division, the first Allied unit to enter Paris on August 25, 1944. He died in an air crash in 1947 and was posthumously promoted to the rank of marshal of France.
31. As I never thought to alter the date of these telegrams, historians and their readers will see that they set the date of the meeting for May 25, 1943.
32. I only learned this after the war, through Colette Pons, who provided his cover as an art dealer in Nice. That clarified this otherwise inscrutable suggestion.
36. Several people claim to have accompanied Moulin to the station that day. That is untrue: my duties required that I be the person to accompany him to the train for both departures and arrivals. We were alone for reasons of security.
Rex Alone against All
1. Translator’s note: Michel Debré served as prime minister of France from 1958 to 1962 under President de Gaulle.
2. Translator’s note: The batonnier, or president of the bar, is elected by lawyers qualified to plead in French courts.
3. Translator’s note: Cordier, who died in 2020 at the age of one hundred, lived to see the National Resistance Council and its programme become a central point of reference in French political discourse, if not always implemented, almost eighty years later.
6. Translator’s note: Joseph Darnand, World War I hero who became a Vichy collaborator, founded the Service d’ordre légionnaire and later the Milices to fight the French Resistance. Found guilty after the war of “collaboration with the enemy,” he was executed in October 1945.
7. Translator’s note: “Treasury” is in English in the original.
11. Translator’s note: A revolutionary song written in 1794 by Marie-Joseph Chénier, with music by Étienne Méhul.
18. Translator’s note: René Hardy, the resister and author, is most notably famous for the controversy surrounding his role in the arrest of Jean Moulin and General Delestraint. Although prosecuted in 1947 and 1950, he was acquitted on both occasions.
19. Translator’s note: As chief of staff to General Delestraint, Henri Aubry was present at the June 21, 1943, meeting in Caluire and arrested alongside Moulin, Hardy, Larat, and others. He and Hardy escaped, although Aubry was recaptured, tortured, then released later in 1943. At the Liberation, he became an official in the Ministry of Prisoners, Deportees, and Refugees, under Henri Frenay. He was a witness at the two trials of Hardy in 1947 and 1954.
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