Jean Mouin Main Page
Henri Frenay on Moulin
from Epilogue in The Night Will End by Henri Frenay
. . .
In 1942 de Gaulle still thought that the Resistance should take orders from whatever agent he designated to represent him. The logical result was that the latter, and the latter alone, received control of the only real handles of power in our clandestine war - first, money; later, communications; and, finally, arms.
This plenipotentiary agency was bad in itself, regardless of the man chosen to embody it. Its powers were so broad as to make him absolute lord and master of the Resistance. Instead of opening new channels to that ardent and protean force, de Gaulle personally jammed up the already existing ones. Henceforth our messages, appeals and suggestions could be transmitted, accepted, modified, distorted or even blocked de Gaulle's agent - whaever his good pleasure dictated.
De Gaulle thus pushed aside those captains who, during eighteen months without contacting him, had levied the legions of the Resistance. In so doing he refused these men, who knew the Resistance so well and who exercised such unquestioned authority over it, the right and the channels to communicate directly with him.
De Gaulle had condemned himself and, consequently, his services to see and hear only through the eyes and ears of one man.
That man was Jean Moulin.
In January 1942 de Gaulle entrusted him with "building a cohesive organization out of all those who resist the enemy and his collaborators in the free zone." In granting him such broad powers, de Gaulle incurred a very heavy responsibility. In the use he was to make of them and by the influence he in turn exerted on de Gaulle, Moulin himself incurred a still heavier and more political responsibility.
In criticizing him I do not mean to begrudge Moulin his exceptional and proven qualities - his piercing intelligence, his staunchness in action and the courage that eventually made him one of the great heroes of the war. I was among those Companions of the Liberation who stood on the steps of the Panthéon on December 19, 1964, when his ashes were conveyed into the temple of glory. Yes, I was there, despite our differences, despite what I am going to say now and what I already then knew.
I was required a certain distance to understand that our mutual opposition, far from being a string of random altercations, was the inevitable consequences of a great blueprint that was undeniably political and had precise aims.
What satisfactory explanation can there be for the behavior toward the Resistance of a man as intelligent, reflective and pertinacious as Jean Moulin? What could his underlying motivation have been, a motivation that would answer every question that my comrades and I ever asked ourselves about him? Questions such as:
Why did he perpetually insist on removing numerous functions from the resistance movements and discharging them himself, thus diminishing their strength and augmenting his own?
Why did he systematically play the movements one against the other, with the particular aim of weakening the two biggest ones, Combat in the southern zone and the O.C.M. in the nothern zone?
Why did he deliberately refuse to implement his standing order to amalgamate all the groups in the southern zone under the M.U.R. umbrella, and why did he favor certain independent groups by financing them instead of merging them with us?
Why, just when we had to fight back against stepped-up forced-labor deportation, did he slash our budgets while continuing to fund sub rosa various maquis that should be all rights have been attached to us?
Why did he favor the reconstitution of certian political parties, especially the Socialist Party, when he had received clear written instructions to the contrary?
Why, despite the opposition of all the movements, did he do his utmost to obtain de Gaulle's authorization to set up the National Council of the Resistance(C.N.R)?
To these questions, which already plagued me during the war, I added several others after the war on obtaining further information:
Why, in violation of directives received, and concealing his acts from both London and the Resistance movmements, did he send an envoy into the northern zone in 1942, and why did he select a Communist for this mission?
Why, without telling us anything, did he urge Georges Bidault to join the National Front?
Why did he sponsor as secretary of the C.N.R. directorate Annie Hervé, a Communist militant and the wife of Pierre Hervé, a future ediotrialist for L'Humanité?
Why were all his principal assistants - Manhès, Meunier, Chambeyron - eminent members, or future eminent members, of the Communist Party?
There is but one satisfactory though purely hypothetical answer to all these questions, an answer that reflects my own deep convictions: Jean Moulin was the Communists' man.
I do not mean to imply that he was a card-carrying member of the C.P. but simply that he played their game and that all his actions - at least, all that I knew of - directly served Party interests.
The fact, for example, that Moulin was Pierre Cot's protégé and staff secretary in the Air Ministry in 1936 is highly suggestive. In effect, since the beginning of the Popular Fron, Pierre Cot has not once diverged from the C.P. line. For thiry-six years he had been, and remains today, a model crypto-Communst.
As it happened, Moulin's own favorites - Manhès, whom he secretly dispatched into the occupied zone to prepare his subsequent actions there; Meunier, whom he elevated to the C.N.R. secretariat; Yves Farge; and Chambeyron - had all served under him on Pierre Cot's staff. It was they, and they alone, whom he chose to assist him in his political endeavors.
That Jean Moulin was a crypto-Communist is the only satisfactory answer to my questions. If we adopt this hypothesis, suddenly all is clear.
After patiently laboring all during 1942 to curtail the importance of the resistance movements for his own advantage, Jean Moulin killed two birds with one stone by creating the C.N.R. First, he humbled the movements, to the great profit of the remnants of the Third Republic; second, he offered the C.P. an exceptional opportunity.
The latter, legitimately suspect and isolated because of its attitude prior to June 21, 1941, had been unable to make any headway in the land. Still dynamic, well organized and disciplined, it discovered in the C.N.R. a perfect instrument with which to sparing of praise to any but their own, have always glorified the memory of Jean Moulin.
I would not even dismiss the hypothesis that Moulin first went to London in 1941 with the blessing of the Communist Party.
In light of these facts we can see how gravely de Gaulle blundered in interposing an agent between himself and France. Worst of all, he chose a political partisan whom he had mistaken for a disinterested servant of the state.
The interposition of Moulin, though of course the general's own doing, eventually worked against him.
As the events of 1940 receded into the past, the Resistance grew apace and also became conscious of its own strength. I believe that de Gaulle feared the power and prestige of a Resistance claiming to represent France.
Is there any other explanation of his sudden outburst in the Savoy Hotel in November 1942 when he reproved me with the strange words, "'Charvet,' France must choose between you and me"? What can explain, if not the fear of a potential rival - a Richelieu's reflex - his constant desire to place his own men, men whose destiny depended on his good graces alone, over the Resistance?
De gaulle had a certain tendency to enlist the aid of any man who suited his own purposes, supremely confident that he could eventually cancel the inconvenient side effects of that man's personal convictions or political ideas. It was thus, for example, that he entrusted the Interior portfolio to D'Astier. However, it was his choice of Moulin that had especially sinister consequences for France, for D'Astier in his capacity as interior minister only inherited the role already carved out by Moulin. Like his predecessor, D'Astier - along with his counterpart in France, Pascal Copeau - frustrated the political renewal we desired and winked at the C.P.'s infiltration of our organization.
Although it is true that de Gaulle's prestige and authority were the country's only serious defenses - aside from the American troops - against a Communist takeover after the Liberation, it was his own bad choice of men, and his own misbegotten relationship with the Resistance, and had paved their way in the first place.
The Gestapo did the rest. Very few of my companions of 1940-41 were to arrive at the end of the road.
Decimated by arrests and executions, mired in the machinations of the old parties, subverted by the Communists, by the summer of 1944 our movements no longer had the strength and autonomy necessary to initiate the revolution we bore with us.
. . .