Article published in the September 1983 edition of the Espoir periodical (no. 44)
The history of the relations between Free France and captive France is first and foremost the history of the relations between two men, Jean Moulin and Charles de Gaulle. No one man, of course, is indispensable in history. There would have been volunteers in London in June 1940 in any case. Almost certainly, however, they would have formed little more than a friendly band of daredevils. Only General de Gaulle could have ensured and did ensure that Free France was identified entirely with France. Yes, there would have been a Resistance but, without Jean Moulin, it risked being little more than a brave-hearted adventure drifting with the currents of opposing influences.
War brought these two men together in history, before death joined them together in legend. Today they represent one of those combinations of great men created by chance and marked out by their deeds for men's esteem.
Yet when, with hindsight, we consider how necessary it was that they should come together, we might wonder whether destiny is not a more appropriate word than chance. Who would have thought, on 18 June 1940, that these two men would ever meet? Who would have thought, on 25 October 1941, the day of their first meeting in London, that these two would so swiftly understand and complement one another?
When Moulin arrived in England, he was not a Gaullist in the sense of being unconditionally committed to de Gaulle. On the contrary, he had an instinctive mistrust of a general reputed to be a follower of the right-wing monarchist Maurras, and in any case a conservative, whom the British and American services (contacted by Moulin in Marseilles or Lisbon) readily depicted as an apprentice dictator whose dubious entourage was at least partly made up of members of a secret right-wing organisation. Moulin, a republican by tradition, a man of the left by conviction, was not keen to embark on any equivocal venture. Like all those in France, he knew nothing of Free France, its legal relations with Britain, its conceptions of the present and its plans for the political future of France. In any event, this Prefect dismissed from office had not come to Britain to join up with the Free French Forces but to carry to "the British authorities and to General de Gaulle" a call for help from the French Resistance. He was embarked on an exploratory mission to find out what possibilities of aid either could offer to the rebellious patriots back in France.
What had he come to London to ask for in their name ? Moral support, liaison, weapons, money. While Resistance forces in France felt sure that the Free French Forces were entirely dependent on the British, who alone could supply the material aid they needed, they nevertheless wanted that aid to be distributed through the intermediary of Free France. While the material requests the Resistance submitted were very precise, less clear was the quality of the relations they hoped to establish. As for the main question, what relations the Resistance forces (or at least their leaders) expected to establish with Free France and de Gaulle, even today the answer is far from clear. In military terms, they were hoping for directives from the British general staff in order to prepare a paramilitary force capable of acting in conjunction with the Allies in future operations.
Such harmonisation of future actions implied no individual military commitment, no subordination. It was self-evident to the Resistance leaders that they were at the disposal of the Allied general staff as part of any strategic plan, but that they retained command over their troops and gave their own orders. Those troops, in the autumn of 1941, were few enough. Were they, indeed, really troops ? Rather, perhaps, a network of friendships or chance relations, men bound together by a fervent patriotism who sought, to the last of their pitifully meagre resources, to share that faith with other lonely souls as destitute and, it has to be said, as foolish as themselves. For foolish one had to be, in that winter of 1940-1941, to believe in the future of France in the midst of the general indifference of the French.
Yet these men, who had taken the initiative of rallying patriots to this desperate-seeming enterprise (which was still not even known as the Resistance), had a certain sympathy for the soldiers of the Free French Forces whose few battalions heroically defended the honour of their country. In no way, however, did they consider Free France in political terms as a power with any legitimate authority to which they might be subject. In the eyes of many Resistance fighters (with the exception of those who enlisted with the General's troops to fight on the battlefields), it was in France itself that the fight should be carried on against the Germans and against Vichy. In their view, the Free French had neither precedence nor any particular prestige ; in some cases, they even felt for the men in London some of that contempt that all front-line soldiers, in any battle, always feel for the high command in the rear echelon. The 1 July 1941 issue of one of the clandestine newspapers published in the non-occupied zone, "Les Petites Ailes" (little wings), contains the following comment on the imprisonment of airmen arrested as they sought to return to England, "This is not something that we admire, for we still maintain that one may serve France better by remaining than by leaving".
If we re-read today the clandestine press up to the end of 1941, we find that the exploits of the Free French Forces are virtually never mentioned, any more than is the name of General de Gaulle. Clearly, the Resistance was not Gaullist and had no reason to become so. Indeed, this was precisely what Henri Frenay wrote in the newspaper Vérité (truth), in September 1941: "We are neither Gaullist nor Communist". The help that the Resistance hoped to obtain from the British, far more than from the General, therefore implied no suggestion in their own minds of subordination or of any form of hierarchy. De Gaulle was considered as an equal. After their refusal to recognise the authority of the Vichy government, each leader had an equal chance of rallying to his particular flag the small groups springing up all around. This illusion was maintained by the compartmentalisation of clandestine existence, which allowed each leader to believe that his was the strongest and the best organised group.
Furthermore, partially-failed attempts at unification had already been made at the instigation of Henri Frenay, in the non-occupied zone and even between the two zones, before Moulin left for England. At most, the movements were willing to establish and carry out a concerted plan with General de Gaulle to realise the two objectives all agreed upon: to intensify propaganda and to organise collective action over the long term. Moulin stressed that it would be to the advantage of the British to arm the troops that would be fighting alongside them in any future landing. He also emphasised the raison d'être of the Free French Forces, which was to aid those who each day suffered and died for the liberation of France. This is what Moulin wrote in the report he presented to General de Gaulle on his arrival, and in which he described the fledgling state of a Resistance which could not as yet be inventoried in full, since it was composed of a tiny minority scattered across the whole of the country and operating under conditions of secrecy that made it impossible to gauge their numbers precisely.
After setting out the needs and the hopes of the Resistance forces, what did Jean Moulin find when he arrived in London in the autumn of 1941 ? First, that the relations between de Gaulle and the British had always been difficult and at times impossible. Contrary to what many in the Resistance imagined (encouraged by British agents because the misconception suited their purposes), de Gaulle and the British were certainly not the same thing. The General and his volunteers had been welcomed into Britain with the sole purpose of forming a French Legion to fight alongside the Allies to save the nation's honour. This the Free French Forces certainly did, with the modest means at their disposal: an army of thirty thousand men (when Vichy had 100 000 in metropolitan France alone), a handful of aircraft and ships (whereas Vichy had virtually the entire French fleet), plus a few distant territories (while Vichy governed metropolitan France and controlled the Empire). Worse still, Moulin discovered that Free France was, in administrative terms, as much a prisoner of the British as Vichy was of the Germans. De Gaulle, however, was the opposite of Pétain and whereas the Marshal, with so many strong cards in his hand, had knelt before the Germans, de Gaulle, who was nothing and had nothing, dominated his allies by a form of noble fascination. He claimed to be the spokesman of a nation gagged by the invader, the temporary guardian of the permanent interests of France, an independent and sovereign nation, one whose aim was to restore that nation to its greatness, to restore freedom to the French people, because Free France was France. The claim clearly caused a certain amusement among the Allies who considered it, depending on the circumstances, a case of either minor derangement or insanity on a grand scale and wholly refused to take General de Gaulle's claims seriously.
Yet, in spite of everything, Jean Moulin believed that this fiction in words was the only possible hope and the only possible future, and that Free France was a shoot, tender, fragile yet authentic, of France itself and that the French National Committee was the legitimate government of the country, while Vichy lost a little more of its legality with every day that passed. It was by no means the least of miracles in that sacred union forged in London by Free France that this conservative general should have convinced the Prefect of the Front Populaire of the orthodoxy of his intentions and the necessity of his projects. Forty years on, it is eminently clear that in placing his confidence in General de Gaulle, Jean Moulin was not mistaken and not deceived. And yet everything should have stood between the supporter of Pierre Cot and the supporter of Paul Reynaud. If they understood one another instantly (in the strict sense of the term), it was because, in the dire straits in which their country found herself, each had recognised in the other a servant of the state, of the republic and of France. It was on the evening of their first meeting that de Gaulle gave Moulin his first mission. As a result, Moulin informed the British that, on reflection, he had decided to work with Free France. The aid of every sort that Jean Moulin had come to seek to enable the Resistance to survive was granted immediately by de Gaulle, within the constraints of the meagre resources provided by the British. This aid was accompanied, however, by precise directives on the military organisation the General intended the movements to adopt. For while the Resistance had no policy as regarded the General, he certainly had his own unquestioned policy as far as the Resistance was concerned.
Neither the famous Appeal of 18 June nor other subsequent calls could be construed as encouragement to set up organised and active groups in metropolitan France to fight against the Germans. They were exhortations to French soldiers to continue the war upon the fields of battle.
Yet by the end of 1940, de Gaulle began to hear that French men and women had taken the initiative of resistance within metropolitan France. Immediately, in a number of radio broadcasts, he laid down the principles that should govern the relations between Free France and occupied France. These principles were set out in few words, but left no room for doubt as to the role the General intended to assume. What were his words ? "In its battle against the enemy, the French people requires a watchword. That watchword comes from the French National Committee which directs the nation in its resistance".
"The war of the French people must be led by those whose task it is, i.e. by myself and by the National Committee. All combatants, both within France and without, must obey their instructions to the letter." "As soon as we are in a position to move onto the attack, you will receive the orders you have been waiting for."
These principles were a natural outcome of the position adopted by de Gaulle vis à vis the Vichy government, from the moment of defeat: for him, there could be no power that was not independent and sovereign. From this standpoint, the men of the Resistance were in exactly the same position as Vichy. In addition, scattered as they were, they had no overall view of the nation's political or military problems. As the objects of relentless pursuit, likely to be eliminated at any moment, they could not constitute any independent and stable power base. It was for this very reason that de Gaulle had decided to set up a government overseas that would be out of the enemy's reach. Since power was indivisible, as he himself had written, once this government was in place in London, the Resistance could not be allowed to grow and develop outside the control of the National Committee.
Jean Moulin subscribed unreservedly to these principles. As a prefect in rebellion against the Vichy government, as soon as he was certain that de Gaulle was fighting to liberate France and restore to the French people their ability to express their will, he recognised de Gaulle as the sole legitimate power and dedicated himself to his service. He swiftly found himself in a familiar position, as that of a representative of the central power. Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that de Gaulle addressed Moulin by his title of Prefect when assigning him his mission.
As always, it proved easier to establish the principles than to apply them. De Gaulle had set up two services with special responsibility for relations with metropolitan France: the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) or central intelligence and operations service, led by Colonel Passy, and the Commissariat National à l'Intérieur or national commission for the interior, led first by Diethelm then by André Philip. The first took care of military matters, the second was responsible for political issues. Both services produced a range of plans. On the military front, the aim was to send military teams of two men, an organising officer and his radio operator, to make contact with Resistance groups (identified by the intelligence networks), to organise and lead them and to bring them under the authority of London. On the civil side, plans for propaganda networks were devised, distributing a newspaper printed in London, infiltrating administrative and political spheres and, finally, drawing up an inventory of the civil and military capabilities of the Resistance. Results in the military field were disappointing: despite arrests and deaths, only one important sabotage operation was carried out, near Bordeaux. On the civilian front, the results were non-existent, since only one agent could be sent into France but with no radio support, so no news came back to London.
This was the situation when Moulin parachuted back into France, over Provence, on the freezing night of 2 January 1942. He had arrived in London two months earlier as the spokesman of the Resistance ; he returned to France as a representative of General de Gaulle and a delegate of the National Committee. The moral support and material aid he brought with him was welcomed with enthusiasm by the members of the Resistance, because it kept them in existence and enabled them to continue and extend the struggle. They were astounded, however, by the directives that accompanied this material assistance. Moulin discovered that the principles of organisation and command to which he had unreservedly subscribed were by no means as evident to the Resistance fighters as they were to himself. The members of the Resistance were surprised to be faced, in the person dealing with their affairs, with the representative of a government of whose existence they were barely aware and for which they saw little need.
The surprise with which Resistance leaders greeted the directives from London was indicative of the difficulties that awaited Jean Moulin. Where the soldiers of Free France had a commander-in-chief, in the form of General de Gaulle, whom they obeyed under military discipline, the members of the Resistance were first and foremost civilians with only very limited recognition of the symbolic existence of de Gaulle. This ambiguous formula was very widespread at the time, since it enabled the Resistance leaders to obey the military orders of de Gaulle the general while at the same time contesting the political authority of de Gaulle the President. While a head of government may see his authority criticised by the parties, he cannot possibly accept conditional loyalty on the part of his armed forces.
The Resistance was made up of citizens who were producing anti-German and anti-Vichy propaganda at the same time as organising a clandestine army to sabotage German installations and prepare for the liberation of the country. This confusion between two roles was to give rise to many conflicts ; the Resistance was so lacking in military cadres and troops that the same individuals were engaged on both propaganda tasks and military action. For security reasons (which the British insisted upon), it was essential, however, for the two activities to be separated. Those who carried on the propaganda war were more vulnerable and a source of danger to those preparing a military organisation for the long term.
As the delegate of the French National Committee, Moulin's mission was a threefold one. On the civilian front, he was to coordinate the propaganda and action of the three movements in the non-occupied zone. Lastly, as a representative of the General, commander in chief of Free French Forces, his mission was to set up a clandestine army under the direct orders of de Gaulle. To achieve this, he would first have to separate the military and the political activities within each movement, and then bring each of the paramilitary organisations thus formed under the direct control of the Staff in London.
Rallying the Resistance movements to Free France proved to be the easiest part of Jean Moulin's mission, though it took him three months to achieve it. First "Libération" in January, then "Franc-Tireur" in March and, finally, "Combat", in March-April recognised in their news-sheets the authority of General de Gaulle as leader of Free France.
Coordinating the movements proved a longer and much more difficult task. Personal rivalries between the heads of different movements, divergent political tendencies, slanders aggravated by the compartmentalisation required for secrecy, long absences, all worked against the accomplishment of measures vital to the efficiency and the very survival of the Resistance. To overcome the impotence of the different movements, Moulin established services common to all but reporting to Free France: a civil section to plan for the political future after liberation (Informations et Études), and a military section (responsible for parachute operations and radio transmissions).
Setting up a paramilitary force was harder still. Firstly, because each of the movements had its own conceptions of the organisation and tactics to be adopted. Secondly, the shortage of cadres and troops made it difficult to separate military from civilian activities. It took Moulin eleven months to bring this part of his mission to a successful conclusion. Thanks to the grassroots Resistance fighters, however, who could not see why three different movements were needed to arrive at an identical goal, the merger was agreed in principle in the summer of 1942. That autumn d'Astier, the leader of "Libération", and Frenay, the leader of "Combat", came to London to seal their agreement to the merger. On 17 November 1942, they carried General de Gaulle's instructions back to Moulin. These instructions said that in the course of their visit the two leaders had recognised the authority of the National Committee to head the Resistance and had agreed to the creation of a single secret army, whose commander in chief, independent of the movements, would be General Delestraint. Finally, a Committee of Coordination had been created to direct propaganda and the activities of the three movements in the non-occupied zone: d'Astier, Frenay and J.-P. Lévy were members of the Committee, under the chairmanship of Moulin.
These instructions confirmed the success of Moulin's mission, as they now incorporated the Resistance into an institutional framework linked to Free France. From now on, Moulin would be invested with real power to discuss matters relating to the Resistance, matters which had hitherto been dealt with at informal meetings during which the advice and directives he gave were accepted and listened to only because of his skills as a negotiator and because of his natural influence. It should be added that his control over the distribution of funds and the allocation of weapons was the source of much of his authority over the Resistance movements. In exchange for recognising Free France, the leaders of the three movements had obtained a kind of monopoly over the Resistance in the non-occupied zone, i.e. other groups had to contribute their troops to the secret army and their militants were required to join one of the three "approved" movements.
Except in terms of the propaganda war, where the initial results proved lasting, the Coordinating Committee and the Secret Army immediately became the target and the object of divergent interpretations, dissension and conflict. The institutional framework that had been marked out revealed fundamental oppositions and disagreements that had hitherto been masked by the informal relations of the past. Once the November instructions were issued, the relations between the three leaders and Moulin ceased to be purely personal and became a matter of law. Dialogue, which had once been between men whom a shared goal and shared perils had transformed into friends, was now between heads of the movements and the representative of the French government who, moreover, had the most say in the Committee. This body, which was meant to put an end to a certain anarchy, marked the beginning of dissent which was sometimes to descend into sharp clashes that took place on two levels: outside the Committee, but also within the Committee.
Outside the Committee, the groups that had been excluded found it intolerable that they had not been consulted on this reorganisation of the Resistance, in which they had no place. The most vindictive of these was the Socialist Comité d'Action (action committee), a clandestine regrouping of the SFIO party. Since it was refused a seat on the Committee, this group decided to set up an Executive Committee of the Resistance which would incorporate the movements, the parties and the union movements. It effectively denied the Coordinating Committee created by London any representative status to speak on behalf of the national Resistance. Another dispute, of a different nature, broke out within the Committee itself.
On the civilian front, first of all, Henri Frenay was calling for an immediate merging of the three movements, a call which d'Astier rejected. On the military front, using the events in North Africa as a pretext, Frenay was seeking to eliminate General Delestraint and assume direct command of the secret army. In the end, he carried his point on the civilian issue, since the three movements merged in January 1943. As a result, there remained just one large group in the non-occupied zone: the MUR (Mouvements Unis de Resistance, or united resistance movements). The Coordinating Committee disappeared, to be replaced by a Steering Committee which was still, paradoxically, chaired by Moulin. While it might be perfectly natural for the representative of Free France to preside over a body which, from the outside, coordinated the activities of three different groups, calling for constant choices to be made between the claims of the three, the case was very different for a steering body, since the choice would no longer be between the three groups, but between a single unified movement and Free France itself. The ambiguous position now occupied by the delegate of Free France was to spark growing clashes, in which the very different temperaments of the participants played their own compounding role.
In order to solve the problem raised by the ejection of the Socialists from the Coordinating Committee, Moulin was obliged to adopt the initiative put forward by the Socialists themselves, by the Fourcaud group and by Christian Pineau, of widening the restrictive framework of the Coordinating Committee. He proposed the solution of a Council of the Resistance on which six former political parties would be represented (two from the left, the Socialists and Communists, and four moderate parties, the Radicals, the Popular Democrats, the Democratic Alliance and the Republican Federation), two trade unions (CGT and CFTC) and eight Resistance movements (the three from the non-occupied zone and five from the occupied zone). This federating body proved to be another source of discord between Moulin and the Resistance movements, since it restored to the former political parties a place in national life that was hotly contested by the movements, especially since these had every intention of replacing the parties in post-war politics. While the role of the Communist party and the Socialist party in national life was accepted as of right, the role of the moderate parties was rejected because, with the exception of a handful of individuals, their involvement in the Resistance had been non-existent. Yet the presence of political figures representing moderate political tendencies was necessary in so far as the aim was to engage all anti-German French citizens in the reconstruction of France and to be in a position to present to the Allies a unified front of all patriotic forces, irrespective of ideology, rallied around de Gaulle.
To qualify for membership of this new body, Moulin required potential members to pledge themselves to the four principles he laid down in what became the charter of the Council of the Resistance. It is important to set out these principles, for they reveal to those of us examining them today the full significance that Jean Moulin gave to his own involvement.
Against the Germans and their allies by every possible means and in particular by force of arms ;
Oddly enough, it was not Moulin who had the idea of creating this body, nor was it he who persuaded General de Gaulle to create it, but three other agents of Free France, André Boyer, Boris Fourcaud and Christian Pineau, who happened to be in London a month before Moulin arrived on 14 February 1943. After a number of modifications, on 21 February, just a week later, General de Gaulle signed the New Instructions presribing the creation of the Council of the Resistance. As with the first Coordinating Committee, de Gaulle automatically assigned the chairmanship to his representative, since it was out of the question for this representative assembly to perform anything other than a consultative role or to acquire any form of independence. By appointing Moulin as national commissioner-delegate, de Gaulle was anxious to underline the Council's subordination to the National Committee which held the sole executive power.
Finally, with the exception of Frenay and Blocq-Masquart on a personal basis, all the movements joined this new body.
To complete this new organisation, General de Gaulle placed General Delestraint under his orders and extended his powers to the two zones by creating a single secret army for the whole of France. At a stroke, the Steering Committee of the non-occupied zone was stripped of its command and control of the non-occupied zone's secret army. Oddly and somewhat dramatically, although this event could have been foreseen from the moment Moulin arrived in France since it formed part of his mission orders, no one perceived the implications until Moulin returned from his second trip to London at the end of March 1943.
The necessarily clandestine nature of Resistance operations had led to the emergence, in both occupied and non-occupied zones, of outline paramilitary organisations, more akin to armed bands than to a regular army. De Gaulle was aware of this, and the first task he entrusted to Jean Moulin was to organise an army placed under the authority of London, an army which would automatically be under de Gaulle's command. This was why he had insisted on the separation between political and military activities. Yet while the Resistance movements seem at first to have considered only the difficulties of execution arising from their own great weakness, the longer-term implications of these directives seem to have escaped them, though these were clearly apparent from the outset. Once the movements had brought together men determined to run any risk to liberate their country, armed force must necessarily be involved. Militants within these movements therefore constituted the very sinews of the secret army. As the Resistance leaders lost control of this army which, as the army of the nation, could not under any circumstances be allowed to remain under the command of any one movement, what was left to the movements ? Answer: propaganda, i.e. the printing of newspapers and their distribution network, plus the infiltration of government services and some administrative services. Effectively, the vast majority of their militants were taken away from them to join the Free French Forces for which the Resistance movements became a kind of recruiting office.
Confronted with this foreseeable but nonetheless unforeseen situation, Henri Frenay (one of the founders of the most important paramilitary groups) rebelled. Claiming that Free France was providing neither weapons for his troops nor money to support the emerging maquis movements, he embarked on negotiations (unknown to the other two Resistance leaders and to Jean Moulin) with the US intelligence services in Switzerland to obtain the material resources that would restore his independence. When Moulin refused to give in to his manoeuvrings, Frenay considered the possibility of abandoning Free France, taking with him the secret army and, if possible, the other two movements. This crisis came to a head at the very moment when Fighting France was in a state of isolation and deadly peril, as Giraud, supported by both the Americans and the British, sought to deny de Gaulle any form of representative status or legitimacy.
Moulin's response to this situation was to insist on General Delestraint's authority over the secret army, which must obey none but the legitimate government, i.e. the government headed by de Gaulle. He also stated his opposition to direct negotiation by the Resistance movements with an overseas power which supported an adversary of General de Gaulle. Moulin showed himself to be unswayable on all fronts and, at a time when General de Gaulle's authority was under attack, he made that authority felt in no uncertain terms. For this loyal servant of the state, in circumstances such as these (when, thanks to de Gaulle, the state was once again identified with the nation), all power must remain in the hands of the legitimate authority, i.e. in the hands of Free France. His stand attracted criticism from the Resistance leaders, who accused him of systematically supporting General de Gaulle's position over that of the Resistance.
Moulin undoubtedly knew, and acknowledged, the merits of both sides: of those men who, even in the moment of defeat, had never doubted in France, had devoted all their modest resources to printing and circulating propaganda sheets, to travelling unceasingly around the country to recruit other militants, to endeavouring to the point of exhaustion to win over to the cause a few solitary souls of like courage, all against a background of general indifference or, worse, of sarcasm and denunciation. Even when the clashes between the Resistance leaders were at their fiercest, Moulin never lost his esteem and affection for his comrades in rebellion who had never abandoned hope or honour. Nonetheless, although he bore all this in mind, he gave way on nothing.
The creation of the National Council of the Resistance, after patient negotiations and many difficulties, came at just the right moment to frustrate these attempts at division and insubordination. Thanks to the new Council, the Resistance expanded to include groups and men who, while anti-German and anti-Vichy, had remained at a distance from the movements and their squabbles. Faced with the prospect of a rehabilitation of the Vichy regime, represented by Giraud in Algiers, these new men of the Resistance (whose political imprimatur carried greater weight on the international scene than that of the movements) grasped the fact that, in this moment of crisis, General de Gaulle represented the last chance for the Republic, i.e. for the France that stood for human rights. Moulin found these figures to be his strongest weapons in providing support to General de Gaulle in his unequal battle with the Allies.
In the wake of the landings in North Africa on 8 November, Moulin bombarded the Americans and British with messages signed by the Resistance movements, the political parties and the union movements. He dinned the message into Allied ears, week after week, that de Gaulle must be the sole head of the French government, while Giraud would become commander in chief of the armed forces.
In the telegram he sent to London on 8 May 1943, in the name of the Resistance movements, the political parties and the union movements, he insisted, "Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, de Gaulle will remain in all eyes the sole leader of the French Resistance".
It so happened that this message was presented to the press as a motion passed by the National Council of the Resistance, which had not as yet been convened. The misconception had a decisive effect, however. Delivered in London on 14 May and widely reported around the world, it asserted an incontrovertible fact: the whole of the French Resistance recognised the sole authority of de Gaulle as its political leader. Faced with this fact, three days later, on 17 May, General Giraud finally invited de Gaulle to join him in Algiers after refusing him entry to North Africa only five months earlier. A few days later, on 27 May, the first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance was held in Paris at 48 rue du Four. Moulin, presiding, restated the aims of Fighting France, as laid down by General de Gaulle:
He ended this statement with a warning for the future. He stated that the free exercise of democracy supposed the existence of organised and strong political parties ; he nevertheless made it clear that "the presence on the Council of the Resistance of the former political parties should not be considered as official sanction for the reconstitution of the said parties as they operated prior to the armistice". On the contrary, he called for the effort of intellect and of discipline necessary to form broader ideological blocs capable of guaranteeing the solidity and stability of public life in France. He read out the message sent by de Gaulle for the occasion and then submitted the Council's first motion, which was passed unanimously, that the government of France at war should be entrusted to General de Gaulle alone and that General Giraud should take command of the reconstituted French armed forces.
This long-awaited event was of considerable importance to de Gaulle. Yet, thanks to a series of technical problems, the message took a month to reach him. As for Moulin, he disappeared without ever knowing the ultimate consequences, since both the British and the Americans banned publication of the news either in the press or over the radio.
One tangible and perhaps more important result had been achieved, however, on that fateful day of 27 May: in a small dining-room in Paris, France had recovered her voice.
For the first time since 10 July 1940, all the tendencies of French opinion were once again represented in an Assembly. While this Assembly categorically asserted to the outside world the legitimacy of General de Gaulle, on the internal front it demonstrated the unity of all patriotic forces in preparing for the liberation and the terrible problems that liberation would bring.
Its members, though temporarily united by the sole bond of patriotism, undoubtedly continued to be deeply divided by their ideologies and personal reservations. Henceforth, however, the issues of France would be debated in concert and on a permanent basis, within an Assembly in which weapons would give way to words, symbolising the rebirth of democracy.
Thanks to the National Council of the Resistance, France was able to embark on the troubled and uncertain period of the battle for liberation, without at any point witnessing fundamentally different and even opposing groups descend into the fratricidal struggles of which other countries provided such terrible examples.
On that day, Jean Moulin's mission was accomplished. In just seventeen months, he had rallied the whole of the Resistance to Free France ; he had brought the secret army under General de Gaulle's command, he had coordinated the activity of the Resistance movements and, at the last, gathered all the patriotic forces of metropolitan France into a representative assembly. Now the Resistance inside France and the Resistance outside were organically and definitively united, even if occasional acts of insubordination or conflicts were to mark their subsequent relations up to the time of the Liberation.
With this evocation of that now distant period, the shades of the dead walk once more among us. They are our comrades, who would no doubt have difficulty in recognising in us the young men who shared their hopes and their suffering but whom time has so cruelly altered. Preserved in eternity, they are unchanged in our hearts and in our memories. These young men and women, many still in their teens, travelled the length and breadth of France in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the police and the Gestapo. In the cities - Lyons, Paris, the two capitals of the Resistance - they once peopled the empty squares, the embankments of the Rhone or the Seine ; for many of them, the metro or railway stations were doors that opened only into a prison-cell ; the safe-houses where, alert to the slightest breath of danger, they held their clandestine meetings might at any moment become the antechambers to death. What fear we shared and yet, in spite of everything, what laughter we shared, for the heedlessness of our youth was stronger even than fear. In the deserted, silent, almost rustic Paris of the Occupation, each laboured to exhaustion on his or her task, modest or vital: from rendezvous to rendezvous, we conspired methodically, with an ardour and a patriotic faith that led us into every form of imprudence, the worst of which was continuing to believe in France while all the French around us had clearly abandoned their belief. Constantly attempting to discipline and channel the effervescence of that youth, our leaders directed the present and prepared for the future.
Among them, and no doubt the oldest of them (at the age of 40), was Jean Moulin, unpretentious, self-effacing, amid the anonymous crowd of the Resistance. And yet, by means of his persuasion, his influence and his authority, he sought to bring order and victory. Patiently, unwearyingly, from one meeting to another, he knotted together the threads, skilfully brokered the settlement of disputes, brought men and plans together to build his one ambition, a tool to liberate France. The Gestapo undid every night what the Resistance had built in the day, in a fervent improvisation. It is the very nature of clandestine struggle that the combatants fight bare-handed. Moulin was no exception to this law, no stranger to the fatigue, the incessant wanderings, the fear. Yet he was never other than master of himself, imposing with natural authority directives which did not seem like orders ; always he remained smiling, affable, with only brief and occasional outbursts of anger against the unforeseen obstacles that hindered his mission.
He who had overcome so many obstacles, over so many months, was crushed by the last, at Caluire. On 21 June 1943, he was betrayed to the Gestapo, arrested, tortured and his body broken without ever giving way. Do what they would to his body, the Gestapo were powerless against his spirit, against his loyalty to his comrades, against his love of France. Though his poor body might be destroyed for ever, his spirit remained, to the very end, indomitable. After interminable agony, somewhere in France, on a date not known with certainty, the body of Jean Moulin expired, leaving his name to history and to legend.