Fifty years ago, on June 21st, 1943 a gang of Gestapo policemen led by the infamous Klaus Barbie raided a doctor's surgery at Caluire on the northern outskirts of Lyons. Among captured Resistance leaders they identified the president of the recently established CNR. the National Resistance Council and personal representative of General de Gaulle. Jean Moulin. Moulin was led away to be horribly tortured and he died, probably on July 8th on a train bound for Berlin His sister Laure said that his death came 'at the limits of human suffering, without revealing a single secret. and he knew them all'.

A frequently reproduced photograph shows Moulin for all the world like the prototype clandestine figure. with a scarf around his neck, and casting a shadow on the wall behind. This image--and his martyrdom--have no doubt contributed to his special reputation. His are the only remains added to the Pantheon in recent years. to lie there alongside those of Lazare Carnot, Victor Hugo and Jean Jaures. At the special ceremony in December 1964 to place them there, his former chief, the then President de Gaulle, officiated. In a high flown address, the Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux seemed to call out across the years to the leader of the people of the night' who followed in the footsteps of the soldiers of the French Revolution, and showed 'the true face of France'.

There were many who were more involved in direct action against repression and occupation. There were even some who showed similar fortitude in the face of inhuman torture. Yet Moulin also demonstrated skills as agent for, and negotiator between. faction-ridden Resistance organisations. He was. in the words of his first biographer, Henri Michel, the unifier', the one who brought together the scattered forces to create a movement. Thereafter he came to be seen as the one person who stood out against all the political and personal back-biting of the time.

Moulin has become the necessary hero of those days. His reputation remains untarnished, in spite of all the disillusionment at what was subsequently achieved. Today his memory is perpetuated in numerous street names, and in countless schools and other public buildings. The anniversary of his killing this summer will surely provide an opportunity to recall the trials and achievements of that minority of French men and women who took enormous risks to do what they considered to be their patriotic duty. however, it is a long time since the simplicity of their choices has been accepted without question in France.

Since the famous Pantheon ceremony in 1964, many cherished assumptions have been undermined, especially about the once common identification of the Resistance with all the French people. The Marcel Ophuls film, The Sorrow and the Pity, caused a sensation in 1971 by suggesting that collaborators were not necessarily the tiny minority acknowledged by comforting myths. In 1990 the historian, Henry Russo, in his book The Vichy Syndrome accused the French political establishment of deliberate amnesia and even hypocrisy, especially about the anti-Semitic legislation and actions of the French authorities during the Vichy period.

Since 1990, the fiftieth anniversaries of the events of those 'terrible years' of defeat and occupation have been coming thick and fast. President Mitterrand, both by virtue of his own creditable Resistance record and of the office he holds, has dissociated the Fifth Republic from the atrocities of the 'illegitimate regime' of Vichy. However, great pressure has compelled him to accept on behalf of the present regime some responsibility for the remaining victims of deportation, who suffered at the hands of French police and officials as well as of the Nazis. Meanwhile the National Front leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, has insisted on associating himself with the commemoration of Marshal Petain. The memory of those years has by no means lost its impact.

Disputes relating to Moulin have also rumbled on over the years. From the beginning there has been argument about how the Gestapo stumbled upon the house in Caluire. This was largely because of the role of Rene Hardy, a Resistance activist who had been captured by the Gestapo and then released shortly before. It is generally accepted that it was Hardy who led Barbie to the meeting place. For many years he denied responsibility for this, and though few other Resisters ever accepted his story, Hardy went to his grave in 1987 still protesting his innocence.

When Barbie himself was tracked down and brought back to Lyons to face trial in 1987, his mercurial defence counsel, Jacques Verges, tried to capitalise on the dispute about Hardy's role by claiming that the raid was the result of a dispute within the Resistance. This was a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and illustrated that it was not easy to prove after so great a passage of time the precise role of Barbie himself in capturing and torturing Moulin. Whether or not he was personally involved, Barbie perpetrated more than enough other atrocities to merit the life imprisonment that he received.

Another controversy about Moulin was provoked by the late Henri Frenay, leader of Combat, the largest of the divided and competing Resistance groups in the Southern Zone. Frenay wanted his organisation to take over its smaller competitors. and thought that the political alternative thus created should keep well away from any previously established political parties, especially the Communists. In 1977 Frenay published a volume entitled The Jean Moulin Enigma which essentially continued this argument, but going further in portraying Moulin as a 'crypto-Communist'. These allegations have been hotly disputed by virtually all of Moulin's colleagues, and have not been taken seriously by historians. They have led Daniel Cordier, who acted as Moulin's secretary for a time, to launch a massive six-volume biographical refutation which is still in progress. Earlier this year a book called The Great Recruitment by Thierry Wolton claimed that newly opened Russian archives show the Communist connections of Moulin and many others. The evidence is most unconvincing, however.

The bitterness surrounding these accusations clearly indicates the disappointment of those whose political vision was not fulfilled by the Liberation. It also illustrates the particular political role of Moulin. He was never a Communist, but neither was he a non-political bureaucrat. After his appointment in March 1939 as the youngest prefect in France to the Department of Eure et Loire, Moulin spoke openly of his political views and antecedents. He was 'the great grandson of a Soldier of the Revolution, grandson of one who knew the prisons of the Second Empire for having dared to proclaim his support for the Republic.' Moulin's father. Antonine-Emile, had been President of the League of the Rights of Man in his home town at Beziers on the Mediterranean coast.

When the young Jean Moulin worked his way upwards in the ranks of the French administrative elite, he developed contacts in left-wing republican political circles. His earliest posting from 1922-25 was at Chambery in the Savoie Department where he came to the notice of the new Radical Socialist Deputy, Pierre Cot. Later Cot was a government minister, eventually Minister of Air in Leon Blum's Popular Front Government of 1936, when he summoned Moulin to Paris to work as his chef de cabinet. It was in this role in July 1936 that Moulin met his future eulogiser, Andre Malraux, to organise the transport of the eighty planes that went to the Spanish Republic in the short period before the Blum administration reluctantly adopted the policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

Moulin the prefect was at his post in the cathedral town of Chartres on June 17th, 1940, when he refused to sign a document presented to him by German military occupiers blaming black French troops for killings for which they themselves were undoubtedly responsible. he tried to avoid being forced to give in under torture by an unsuccessful suicide effort by cutting his throat with glass. This act of defiance become well known, and led to his dismissal as prefect.

It was at this point that Moulin clearly took some further decisions. Already in Paris over the winter of 1940-41 he argued with Frenay about the need to establish a Resistance sought out other leaders of the nascent Resistance in the unoccupied Southern Zone, and made his way to London in October 1941 to meet de Gaulle and to report on what he knew. At this point, Moulin's politics. as well as his senior position in the administrative system, were both of crucial importance. Until that time many who were active in the internal Resistance were suspicious of an English-backed general sitting safely in London while they risked their lives every day. Not only that, but there were fears that a general who was inevitably from a right-wing political dictatorship.

It is not too fanciful to imagine that it was the force of Moulin's personality and convictions that clarified these matters. Within days of his first meeting with Moulin, de Gaulle suddenly abandoned much of what had so far been his studied ambiguity on political matters. In a broadcast on November 15th, 1941. he made it clear for the first time that he wanted not simply 'Honour and the Patrie', but also Liberty Equality and fraternity', because we wish to remain faithful to the democratic principles that our ancestors set out from the genius of our race'.

Having brought de Gaulle into the Republican mainstream, Moulin was then parachuted back into France on the first day of 1942 as his 'delegate general'. With the help of carefully deployed funds and considerable personal authority, he displayed remarkable political and administrative skills in bringing together the touchy, pathologically competitive, and at times understandably suspicious local barons of the varied Resistance organisations. During 1942 he set up the MUR, the Unified Resistance Movement. in the Southern Zone. Following a further visit to London in early 1943, he took charge on May 27th, at the first meeting of the National Resistance Council in Paris. Six weeks later he was dead. There were those like Frenay who hoped that from the trials of defeat and occupation would emerge a new utopian political system, without divisions or political parties. Such may well have been de Gaulle's initial conception. But Moulin was too much of a democrat for that, and he understood that they could not ignore France's past.

Moulin knew that in order to create a real alternative, not simply associated with another military leader, they had to involve political figures like Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier, who, whatever their faults, were then paying with deportation and imprisonment for standing up to the false accusations thrown at them by the Vichy regime. Moulin also considered it essential to incorporate the most vigorous and committed section of the Resistance represented by the Communists. He achieved this not because he was a Communist supporter, but because his combination of impeccable republican credentials and bravery in the face of the enemy lent him a unique authority in bringing the diverse strands together.

There were some. at the time and for many years after, who argued against the alliance thus forged. But the very breadth and support of the CNR made it possible to recapture French national pride by presenting an alternative to the 'new order' of Hitler and Petain. Before 1943, the only choice for the great majority of French people appeared to be the protection of the war hero Marshal Petain. After that it was increasingly difficult to argue that the best way to avoid bloodshed and division was to unite behind the 'double game' of the marshal.

Thus from the middle of 1943, there were growing numbers who were prepared to give their lives to defy the foreign occupation. It was Jean Moulin who had played a crucial role in creating out of these actions a movement and a focus which could embody an alternative political system that was republican and democratic. This alternative was soon in a position to win the support of the great mass of the French people, as well as eventually ever to secure the respect of the likes of Eisenhower and Stalin. So it was that the traditions of the French Republic were revived, and it is this that Jean Moulin would most of all have wanted.