Jean Mouin Main Page

POST MORTEM
Legacy of Resistance


Liberaton
The Barbie Affair
The Vergès Affair
Les deux France

Liberation


National Council of Resistance(CNR) in the parade after Liberation.
When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, thanks to the efforts of Moulin and Frenay among others, the Resistance had grown large and coordinated enough to play an important role in the battles that followed, harassing the German forces all over France, delaying their advance to Normandy, forcing isolated German columns to surrender, and sabotaging railways and bridges.
As the Germans gradually fell back, local Resistance organizations took over town halls and prefectures from Vichy incumbents. De Gaulle's provisional government immediately sent its own delegates into the liberated areas to ensure an orderly transfer of power.
On August 19, Resistance forces in Paris launched an insurrection against the German occupiers, and on August 25, Free French units under General Jacques Leclerc entered the city. Most high-ranking Vichy officials (including Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval) had moved eastward with the Germans;they adopted the posture of a government-in-exile at the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany.
General de Gaulle gave an emotional yet myth-making speech to the citizens of Paris:
Paris, outraged Paris; Paris, broken Paris; martyred Paris, but liberated Paris, liberated by the men, liberated by its people, with the participation of the French army, with the support and participation of all of France, that is to say, of France in its entirety, of only one France, that is to say, the true France, the eternal France!
De Gaulle's provisional government, formally recognized in October 1944 by the U.S., British, and Soviet governments, enjoyed unchallenged authority in liberated France. The long-awaited liberation arrived.

Yet France was in chaos. 2.5 million French prisoners of war, conscripted workers, and deportees were still in German camps. An informal and spontaneous purge of Vichy officials or supporters ensued immediately after liberation. Especilly the Communists, who were looking to create the revolutionary condition of anarchy, and the opportunists, so-called eleventh-hour resistants made matters worse. It is estimated that summary executions by Resistance bands exceeded 10,000. The task of liquidating the Vichy heritage verged on anarchy.
Special courts set up to try citizens accused of collaboration heard 125,000 cases during the next two years. Some 50,000 offenders were punished by "national degradation" (loss of civic rights for a period of years), almost 40,000 received prison terms, and between 700 and 800 were executed. [22]

The Grand Illusion

France was spared from the ravages of civil war that raged in Greece, Poland, and Yugoslavia, but it soon became clear that the apparent unity forged in the Resistance with CNR was superficial. Perhaps this was time when Moulin was most sorely missed. The party politics and political machinations that destabilized the Third Republic ruled the land as usual. On January 20, 1946, De Gaulle, upset by the "régime des partis" (regime ruled by the specific interests of the parties), suddenly resigned his post as provisional president, expecting that a wave of public support would bring him back to power with a mandate to impose his constitutional ideas. Instead, the stunned public was confused and failed to react. The assembly promptly chose the Socialist Félix Gouin to replace him, and the embittered de Gaulle retired to his country estate in his self-imposed twelve-year "traversée du désert" (time in the wilderness). The Fourth Republic (1947-1959) was a huge disappointment to many who saw in the Resistance the opportunity for rebirth of French nation. [22]

One of the most disillusioned was Henri Frenay. His vision for France is expressed in his Manifesto written in November 1940, which circulated in the resistance movement that would later become Combat until the spring of 1941. The manifesto called for Resistance under aegis of Marshall Pétain, whose National Revolution was warmly approved. It implicitly condemned the Free France of de Gaulle and recommended the acceptance of only "authentic Frenchmen" within the ranks of the movement and the exclusion of Jews who had not "fought in one of the two wars." Frenay's vision for National Revolution to take place "one the Boches were booted out of France" was essentially the same as that of anti-Semitic, anti-republican Vichy regime except for his rejection of "Boches." (Frenay indignantly denied authorship of the manifesto, which Daniel Cordier published in 1980's. Some historians expressed doubts about authorship, but it is generally accepted as genuine by neutral historians.)
Not surprisingly, Frenay was also more forgiving of former Vichy officials than other resistants. Frenay wrote in a wartime letter, "France's drama is that its honest and impartial men believed, during a certain time, in Marshal Petain and placed their trust in him. They, without a doubt, made a mistake, but it was an innocent mistake that we cannot hold as a crime against them."
Besides Frenay, many in the Resistance Right had hopes in a new, more Christian and authoritarian France which would fulfill the spiritual renewal that they longed during the chaotic 1930's. One of the biggest movement in the north outside the Communists, the right-wing Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM) was a coalition of conservative to rightist army officers, writers, and politicians, was the biggest and most effective movement in the north. Its underground paper published an article in 1943 that the "Jewish minority" was insufficiently assmilated into French society. As for their great leader, Léon Blum, the article argued, "it is revealed that this Jew only had Jewish friends and has confidence only in Jew." [4]
It is a scandal now that a Resistance movement had repeated the most odious Nazi allgegations about French citizens of the Jewish faith. But it was this vision of France - France that was more French and less influenced by Jews and minorities who were not really part of "la France profonde" - that led many people to support Pétain regime and was shared by many in the Resistance Right.
Moulin suffered from no such illusions. He had met Admiral Jean Darlan, the Vichy prime minister when he was the head of French Navy, whose headquarters had been at Maintenon in the Eure-et-Loire before the debacle. He knew about his pro-Nazi and anti-English views. [2]

In the subsequent political struggle, Frenay and the Resistance Right were outmanuevered by the Communists and the Left. When de Gaulle held a combined referendum and election on October 21, 1944, the Resistance Left dominated the constituent assembly. Women, for the first time in French history, were granted suffrage. By an overwhelming majority (96 percent of the votes cast), the nation rejected a return to the prewar regime and expressed desire for renovation and for change. Three-fourths of the deputies were Communists, Socialists, or Christian Democrats who had adhered to the new party of the Catholic left, Mouvement Républicain Populaire.The Communists, on the strength of their Resistance reputation, toped the poll with 26.2% of the vote and remained the most popular party for the much of the Fourth Republic. [22]
As one English commentator observed, France after liberation was a victory neither for fascism nor communism. It was a defeat for imaginative reconstruction. Aneurin Bevan once noted that French voters for the Communists were "good socialists looking for a leader".
They were mourning Jean Moulin. But disillusioned Frenay chose to blame everything that went wrong after the liberation on a man who had been dead since July 1943.


The Barbie Affair


Izieu children, whom Barbie deported to death camps in 1944.


Klaus Barbie then and now (during the war and at his trial)


Le Monde reporting Barbie's extradition to France.


Cartoon on Barbie's trial
Meanwhile, Klaus Barbie himself went on to lead a fascinating life after his path briefly crossed with Moulin. Not that Barbie himself was anything extraordinary, but the political circumstances of his time put him in the position to inflict so much damage and entangled no less than five countries in the web of complicity and moral ambiguities. Germany, France, the United States, Vatican, and Bolivia now have something to hide on Barbie's account.

Remarkable Career

Barbie's connection to Germany is of course best known. It was the Nazi system of hate that made thugs like Barbie a part of machine that carried out the Final Solution. Besides the torture unto death of Moulin, some of his better known crimes include deportation of 44 Jewish children in Izieu and numerous massacres such as St. Genis massacre. All told, he was responsible for murder and deportation of 7,591 Jews and 4,342 resistants.
After the Caluire arrest, Klaus Barbie was personally congratulated by Heinrich Himmler for "his outstanding achievements in the criminal police and his unstinting commitment in the fight against the Resistance organization in France." He was awarded by Hitler himself, the 'First Class Iron Cross with Swords.'

In France, Barbie was aided with the official collaborationist policy of Vichy French government and tips from local French people, without which he could not be so effective in his murderous campaign.
On January 31, 1943, Pierre Laval and Marshal Pétain formed La Milice to "fight against communism" and "maintain order." By the fall of that year, about 10,000 people were enrolled in the Milice. Along with pro-Nazi French organization Parti Populaire Français (PPF), Milice joined the Gestapo in their arrest, torture, and execution of Jews and resistants.

Following the war, Barbie, wanted for his war crimes, went underground, where he joined fellow SS officers. In February 1947, the CIC infiltrated this group and arrested everyone except Barbie, who escaped by climbing out his bathroom window. (For this reason, it was speculated that Barbie was already working with the Americans possibly even during the war, but there is no evidence to support this conspiracy theory.) To counter Soviet espionage, CIC eventually recruited SS officers for their "police skills" and anti-communist zeal, and Barbie surrendered himself to a CIC agent in June 1947. For two years, he worked as a US intelligence asset in Germany, where he would live "very comfortably" and receive "hundreds of dollars" for his anti-communist activities.
When this became known to the French authorities, the Americans were reluctant to hand him over because they feared that the French intelligence agency was infiltrated by the Communists. Besides, some CIC officers were now hobnobbing friends with Barbie, whom they described as "idealist" and "professional." (Later, U.S. government were to offer a formal apology to France.)

Instead, through the Vatican-run 'Ratline' (network established to get wanted Nazis out of Europe to South America), CIC shipped Barbie out of reach of justice to Bolivia, where he continued to use his Gestapo expertise in service of the military dictatorship. Only his name changed to Klaus Altmann. Colonel Hugo Banzer gave total powers to Klaus Altmann to concentrate on the creation of internment camps for his political opponents...torture and executions were common in those camps. Security police under Barbie's command was witnessed proudly shouting, "We are the Gestapo! We are the Gestapo!" [15]
Barbie, according to one CIA source, was also involved with his Nazi friend, Friedrich Schwendin a plot to assassinate Victor Paz Estenssoro, leftist president of Bolivia who was ousted and forced into exile in Peru. When Barbie was not doing dirty works for dictators, he participated in drug-running schemes and visited Europe on a regular basis, even going on a sightseeing tour of Paris. He led a peaceful life as businessman and was an active socialite in some La Paz circles though he was expelled from the German club in La Paz when he shouted "Heil Hitler" to an envoy from the West German government in 1966.

Yet, as Daniel Cordier said, if Barbie had not killed Moulin, he would have been only a "atrocious, monstrous, but altogether ordinary torturer who did what thousands of other Nazis did or would have wanted to do."

The Barbie Trial

Klaus Altmann was eventually identified as Barbie through energetic campaign of a German woman named Beate Klarsfeld. In the early 1980s, when Banzer was replaced by a leftist regime, Barbie's luck finally ran out. Barbie was finally extradited to France and he arrived in Lyon on February 6, 1983. After four years of pretrial preparations, on July 3, 1987, Barbie was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Klaus Barbie died from cancer in prison on September 25, 1991.
Yet there were other reasons for delay of Barbie's trial besides enormities of his crimes.

At first, Barbie's return seemed like a no-lose situation. For the Mitterand administration, which extradited Barbie, it would exorcise all the wrongs and inconsistencies of the Occupation era. The government thought that if they prosecuted the most notorious Nazi in France, who was guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt, they would become more popular among their constituents.
For the Communist Party, the trial was a chance to highlight its role in the Resistance and accuse the Right. Daniel Voguet, lawyer for the Party, was quite optimistic about the upcoming trial: "The entire trial will be an accusation of the Right. The French right-wing was in collaboration with the Germans." [3]
The French Right was much less enthused, but still it provided an occasion to call for reinstatement of death penalty. But no one counted on Barbie's lawyer JACQUES VERGÈS to ruin the party.


The Vergès Affair


Barbie's defense layer, Jacques Vergès.


Vergès is a colorful character. An Eurasian born in 1925 of French diplomat and his Vietnamese wife, he was often called "Infra-red" by his friends and enemies alike.
Vergès was himself a Resistance fighter, having joined de Gaulle's Free French in London in 1942.
However, when the war ended in 1945, an uprising took place in Algeria against the French. The repression was immediate and brutal. In the Algerian city of Constantine, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) counted 40,000 victims. The French administration admitted to 1,500. It was the beginning of France's disastrous colonial policy, which belied lessons of the Resistance.
For Vergès, it was deeply shocking event. He recalled, "I simply could not understand how nations could hold [Nuremberg] trials so that the sort of things the Germans did would never happen again. It was clear to me that the victorious colonial nations were doing exactly what the Germans had done in France." [3]

The Real Battle of Algiers

One of the worst aspect of de Gaulle's obsession with France's grandeur was the Fourth Republic's bloody effort to hold its colonial empire.
France's colonies had provided de Gaulle with his first important base of support as leader of Free France. The colonial peoples, therefore, now felt justified in demanding a new relationship with France.
But unlike the Labour government of the Great Britain, which granted independence to India on August 15, 1947 and to most of her colonies thereafter, the French leaders including de Gaulle found the prospect of a loss of empire unacceptable. The national urge to reassert France's stature as a superpower in the world gave a birth to disastrous colonial policy.
The Constitution of 1946 therefore introduced only mild reforms: the empire was renamed the French Union, within which the colonial peoples would enjoy a narrowly limited local autonomy plus some representation in the French parliament. This cautious reform came too late to win acceptance in many parts of the empire. [22]

In 1946, France became engaged in what would become futile eight-year battle to retain its colony of Indo-China. This colonial war was further disillusionment to Jacques Vergès. France, the country he had fought for, was engaged in a war against other heroic nationalists of his mother's homeland.
In 1954, the Algerian war began, and Vergès, who by then became a lawyer and an exteremist, rose to prominence by defending the Algerian independence fighters (or terrorists depending on your view) in French courts.
Meanwhile, General Jacques Massu, also a hero of the French Resistance who stormed the Gestapo headquartes in Paris and pulled down Swastika from Arc de Triomphe, was assigned to destroy both terrorism and the political organization of the FLN. This he accomplished with the use of torture, a practice he defended quite openly in his 1971 book, The Real Battle of Algiers. The Algerian war raged until 1962, when a majority of French citizens recognized in a referendum that the colonial world was over and independence for Algeria was inevitable. Still, the Algerian war radicalized both the Right and Left, the latter evolving into the force behind the social-protest movement of 1968. [3]

Thus Vergès came to hate the hypocrites of the French Resistance who adopted colonialist position and Gestapo tactics on Algeria. Barbie's trial would give him a perfect opportunity to expose this hypocricy.
So when Barbie was extradited to France in 1983, Vergès became his defense counsel and promised that Barbie's trial would become the trial of the Resistance. The Barbie affair turned into Vergès affair.
Vergès asked, for example, how Barbie could be tried for what he did as a lieutenant when President Francois Mitterrand, who was interior minister for a time during the Algerian war, has never been held accountable for abuses committed by French police against Algerian rebels. [3]

The Ghost of Vichy

Regardless of Vergè's motive, which served a bizarre alliance of the extreme-left and extreme-right forged by the Baribe affair, one cannot help but question the hyprocricy of France's postwar colonialism.
Here de Gaulle's campaign to rebuild France's self-respect backfired. Perhaps it was a mistake after all that France was recognized as one of victors in the war against Nazism. Under de Gaulle's myth in which every Frenchman was a resistant, France had no opportunity to examine her fascist past in the way the Germans did. How else can one explain what happened in Algeria?
How else can one explain national amnesia that blotted Vichy past out of memory?
Jean-Paul Sartre, the philospher and outspoken supporter of Algerian independence, commented:
In 1943 in the rue Lauriston, Frenchmen were screaming in agony; all France could hear them. In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and we did not want to think about the future. Only one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name.

Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister who announced on June 22, 1942, "I hope for the victory of Germany because without her, communism would take over everywhere in Europe."


Vichy police poster offering reward for tips on resistants."
As Patrick Marnham noted, even the example chosen by Sartre showed this Vichy amnesia. For when Frenchmen "screamed in the rue Lauriston in 1943 they were being made to scream by torturers acting in France's name. The rue Lauriston in Paris was the headquarters of the Gestapo française, the French auxiliaries of the Nazi SS, who followed the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval in hoping for a German victory. [2]

After all, the Germans had had only 2,500 Gestapo police in the whole of France and they could not achieve such success without willing participation of millions of French people in the roundup, deportation, and even killing of their fellow citizens. The the suppression and oppression had been the official state policy of Marshal Pétain. Up to 5,000 auxiliary French police had carried out the tasks of enumerating Jews so that the Germans could use the lists for deportations. 30,000 miliciens, a paramilitary force of French fascists waged a war against the resistants as enemies of Vichy. Of 76,000 French Jews deported, 90% were arrested by the French police. Only 3,000 survived.
But no one wanted to remember such things. Behind the Resistance myth, all these were forgotten. In August 1953, the National Assembly passed a general amnesty law for former collaborationists. Thereafter, the disturbing past of 1940 to 1944 was hurriedly shoved into the back closet of history. [3]

It wasn't until filmmaker Marcel Ophuls' 1969 documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, that the French began to remember the Vichy past. Ophuls shocked the nation to the core with the images of French crowds giving Nazi salute.
25 years after the fact, de Gaulle's myth was exposed. And with Barbie's trial, the ghost of Vichy came back to haunt the conscience of France yet again.
A journalist Guy Baret wrote in France Soir on February 7, 1983:
Forty years after the death of Jean Moulin, Klaus Barbie will appear before his judges. Are we ready? No, we are not ready to hear the atrocious accounting that night and fog will never engulf. We are not ready to hear, in sorrow and pity, the witness whose eyes are still filled with horror. The history of genocide will become current news again.
Are we ready to look a the true face of France, at the dark years reflected in the mirror of this trial?
Are we ready to see old wounds reopened and the unextinguished fire of yesterday's passion relit?
Are we ready to end the Manichean myths that nourished civil wars?
Are we ready to renounce the image of Epinal whereby the entire population of France rose against the occupier and only a handful collaborated?
Are we ready to recognize that at certain times the most difficult thing is not doing one's duty, but rather to know what it is?
Are we ready, forty years later, to reconcile ourselves not in compromise, but in truth?
All this will be part of the trial of Klaus Barbie. It will be an ordeal for our country . . . but it will be to our honor to attempt to confront [our past]. [3]
Hypocrites of the Reistance

Vergès knew exactly where to strike. In his 1983 book called Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate, Vergès announced: "Every effort will be made during the Barbie trial to avoid the discussion of Jean Moulin, because people do not want the circumstances of his arrest and death discussed in public. Why is this so? Because Jean Moulin was not arrested in the course of a chance swoop by the Gestapo; he was handed over to the Germans by other members of the Resistance."

There was nothing new in this "revelation", but the way Vergès posed the question was incendiary.
Vergès charged that Moulin was betrayed for idealogical reasons, because he was a communist and that an entire cabal of anti-communist memers of the Resistance betrayed him in a plot cooked up with Barbie and the Gestapo. When Moulin eventually realized he had been betrayed by his comrades, he committed suicide by banging his head against a wall, said Verg&es, quoting his client. His client was merely a cog in the machine to sacrifice Jean Moulin.
The problem was not so much that the suicide theory was raised yet again, but what hurt was the idea that Mouin wanted to kill himself because he "realized" that he had been "betrayed" by the Resistance. Reaction was violent. Henri Frenay declared, "there are no words severe enough to describe what Maître Vergès has done." [3]

In Vergès' hands, the threads of all the conspiracy theories - Hardy, Aubrac, the right-wing faction in Combat, Moulin the communist - were weaved together to form The Conspiracy Theory: the Resistance was a hoax, most of France supported the collaborationist Vichy, and influential leaders who rose to prominence on the strength of their resistant reputation were in fact traitors and collaborators who turned over Moulin to the Gestapo.
Against that background, many French commentators even predicted that the government would never dare go ahead with the trial. Barbie could make damaging revelations about the wartime past of current political leaders or drag France through a part of its history that most of the country would prefer to forget. [21]

Barbie accused at one time or another Hardy, Bénouville, and Aubrac of being the traitor who betrayed Moulin. Not surprisingly, each of these accusations followed the popular trend of the time. Barbie accused Hardy when he was facing a trial. Later when Bénouville's name came up in this saga, Barbie claimed that it was Bénouville indeed who betrayed Moulin and spoke of a secret agreement "to struggle against communism." Then during the trial, Barbie claimed that Aubrac had been his agent all along. When Barbie died of cancer in prison, Vergès rewrote this accusation and called it Barbie's "testament."

Barbie had something to say about Moulin as well. In 1975, Michel Goldberg met Klaus Barbie to avenge his father's death in Auschwitz posing as a journalist. In the end, he decided not to kill but heard Barbie boasting when one of his friends asked: "But Klaus, why are [the French] after you so much? During most of the time you were in Lyon, you were only an Obersturmführer [first lieutenant]."
Barbie answered:
"Of course. But I had more power than a general, and in the capital of the part of France that was still resisting! By arresting Jean Moulin, I changed the course of history. Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's man in France, was so intelligent that had he lived it is he and not de Gaulle who would have presided over the destiny of France after our departure. France would probably have become communist."
Even in his cell and beyond the grave, Barbie continued to torment his old enemies.


Les deux France

The Panthéon II

Before Barbie was finally brought to justice, he claimed that he visited Paris in 1971, even laying flowers on the tomb of Jean Moulin in the Panthéon. He said, "I know it may seem strange, but I put a bouquet of flowers there. That man was my enemy during the war, but I admired him.
It is often said that one can learn much about a country by looking at its heroes. In case of France, you can easily identify its national heroes by visiting the Panthéon.
As Patrick Marnahm writes in his biography of Moulin, the Panthéon was perhaps a most appropriate resting place for Moulin; the story of the Panthéon tells violent history of two Frances - the Catholic Right and anticlerical Left.

The domed church was originally commissioned by Louis XV, who had vowed to God to build a magnificient new church if he recovered from his serious illness in 1744. He did recover, so it was built at the highest point in Paris's Latin Quarter. But just when the building was completed in 1789, ready to be dedicated to the glory of God, the Revolution swept away the monarchy and the churches were desecrated.
In 1791 the Revolutionary Assembly gave the structure its classical Roman name and transformed it into a secular temple for the great men who had fought for Liberty. The church's bell towers were razed to the ground, the cross above the dome was removed, and a motto "Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante" (To Its Great Men, Their Country's gratitude) was inscribed in gilt letters over the west doors. Mirabeau's remains were palced inside, followed by those of Voltaire, Marat and Rousseau.
But when the monarchy was restored, the edifice was consecrated, the secular inscription was replaced by a Latin dedication, and remains of Voltaire and Rousseau were removed to a space beneath the front steps outside the consecrated area.
Then with arrival of Louis-Philippe in 1830, the Panthéon became a national mausoleum and its cross was removed again. With each change of regime, this process was repeated. It was only in 1885, under the Third Republic, that the Panthéon reached the present form. The church was once more renamed the Panthéon, the motto was once more fixed to the pediment, and the bodies of the republican heroes Victor Hugo, Emilr Zola, Gambetta and Jean Jaurès were in due course transferred. But the cross was allowed to remain.
So the scenes from the saint's life adorning the interior walls and a cross at the top of the Panthéon reflect a religious legacy that three secularizing republics could not entirely to erase.
The Panthéon, which was supposed to be a symbol of national identity, became instead a memorial to legacy of the French Revolution - polarization of two Frances that often verged on a civil war and continues to this day. [2]

Half-Lies and Half-Truths

Likewise, Moulin's story offers us a conflicting tale of Resistance - the unified and the fractious, the heroic and the complex, and of the Left Right. And it tells us the story of two Frances - the Resistance and Vichy.
In fact, historian Henri Rousso called the period of German Occupation "a civil war" in which Resistance not only fought against the Germans but also French Milice, Parti Populaire Française (PPF), Gestapo française, and Vichy police among others.
And the memory of the Resistance itself was a battlefield as it oscillated like a pendulum between victorious veneration and denigration in defeat.
The national trauma following the stunning defeat and collaboration required de Gaulle's myth of the Resistance France massively confronting the invader. According to Henry Rousso, this "sublime half-lie allowed, from the Liberation, a reconciliation of the French with one another. It served as the moral cornerstone for the reconstruction of the country." Rousso termed this difficulty to come to terms with the Vichy past, Vichy syndrome.'
But for Paul Thibaud, the problem of remembering the Resistance also lies in France's incapacity to acknowledge its debt to the Resistance generation. If the Occupation was such a dark period in France's past, it is more comforting to believe that all were guilty than that the honor of the nation was saved by a tiny minority, especially if that minority was political opponents. Resistance itself has become a blank, a taboo in historical research. It is reverse side of 'Vichy syndrome.' [13]
Jean Moulin figured prominently in both campaigns as the subject of both santification and deconstruction process.

One could say the holy grail of French historians since the French Revolution has been the quest for true face of France. Following the 'Dark Years' of 1940-1944, the frequent question has been: which of these two was true face? Perhaps the answer is that both are manifestations of the true France. The Resistance cannot be understood outside the context of Vichy, and vice versa.
As Jackson puts it, any attempt to build an identity around the idea that Vichy was not France will be doomed to failure. On the other hand, it is no less misleading to repudiate the heroism of the Resistance which also represented France.


A female FFI member. (Forces fraçaise de I'intérieur, into which the Secret Army evolved into)


A resistant facing German firing squad.
But even if political trappings of the Resistance were myth, the heroism of individuals like Moulin was a reality.
In May 1943, BCRA estimated that the Secret Army could count on 208,000 men and women. Only tiny portion - 10,000 at most - of these potential forces were armed, and its contribution to Allied cause would have been greater if France received more supplies. Allied leaders reported that the Resistance exceeded the most optimistic expectations. Eisenhower later said:
Great assistance was given us by the FFI in liberating Britanny . . . As the allied columns advanced, these French forces ambushed the retreating enemy, attacked isolated groups and strong-points, and protected bridges from destruction. When our armour had swept past them, they were given the task of clearing up the localities where pockets of Germans remained, and of keeping open Allied lines of communication . . . Not least in importance, they had, by their ceaseless harassing activities, surrounded the Germans with a terrible atmosphere of danger and hatred which ate into the confidence of the leaders and the courage of the soldiers.
It came at a great price. 30,000 French men and women were shot as members of Resistance. Another 56,000 were deported to concentration camps for resistance or political reasons; only half of them returned after the war. Many more died in direct combat with the German armies during the liberation. All in all, some 150,000 people lost their lives in the cause of resistance. [13]

France's defeat and subsequent collaboration have been since then much maligned. But as Anthony Eden noted, "If one hasn't been through, as our [British] people mercifully did not go through, the horrors of occupation by foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what that country does." [14]
Only France can judge herself. And it has done so relentlessly since The Sorrow and the Pity was released in 1971. In France, memories of who did what during that period have remained an important theme in political and social life 60 years later.
In June 1940, the German army achieved tactical breakthrough that perhaps no other army at the time could counter. This continued until two yars later when the superior Allied forces were harrassed by the Germans in North Africa.
As for Vich government, most Frenchmen only naturally looked to Pétain to save France like he did in Verdun. After all, it was recognized by every country - including the United States - except Great Britain, which was the only country to recognize de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French. Vichy enjoyed legitimacy as a legal goverment of France when Marshal Pétain was given mandate by the National Assembly in the dying throes of the Third Republic. No collective institutions called for resistance in 1940. The elites of the political parties, trade unions, churches, and other moral forces did not provide guidance to the stunned nation. It is in this background that one must appreciate Jean Moulin and the French Resistance.

Postscript

France would have been liberated with or without the Resistance thanks to the sacrifice of the American soldiers and the Allies. However, the Resistance not only saved the lives of countless Allied soldiers, it allowed the transcendent unity that was unique in French history.
Despite flashes of conflicts and clashes that occasionally marred this unity, it remains that through the efforts of Jean Moulin, the Communists and Trotskyists, liberals and conservatives, nationalists and Cagoulards all closed ranks in the common struggle against the Nazis and for most part trusted the former enemies with their lives.
In a broader sense, they were a part of the international brotherhood encompassing American farm boys to Russian peasants that were united in the crusade against the evil, that was unique in the history of world. For it was one of those rare times when there was a clear line of good and evil, and the resistants were few people who chose to resist the evil at an enourmous risk to their lives.
In the words of André Malraux, it was also a time when, out in the countryside, they listened tensely to the barking of dogs in the depths of the night. "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," Daniel Cordier recalled.

Perhaps it is an Englishman, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster of SOE, who best summarizes the legacy of Resistance:
Everywhere, Frenchmen looked forward to the resurgence of their country. The Resistance was a vital factor in this recovery of the French national spirit. As a triumph of human courage, as a tribute to the eternal hope which leads men to sacrifice everything in the defence of what they believe right, as an indication of the unity which can bind, for however short a time, men of different political, moral, and religious views, the Resistance is never likely to be equalled."

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