Information about French Resistance

The French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. Resistance groups comprised small groups of armed men and women (referred to as the maquis when based in the countryside), publishers of underground newspapers, and escape networks that helped allied soldiers.

In recent years some have stated that the French Resistance has not been afforded due recognition for its contribution to halting Hitler's march through France. In 1946 the Allied Forces acknowledged French heroics and declared that the resistance was not only central to diverting Hitler's forces away from an easy route across the English Channel, but also that France's reclamation of Paris ensured German forces were without a strong base during the last stages of the war.

Another contribution by French Resistance groups in their cooperation with Allied secret services (see Office of Strategic Services and Special Operations Executive), was the providing of intelligence on the Atlantic Wall and coordinating sabotage and other actions to contribute to the success of Operation Overlord. The Resistance was pulled from all layers and groups of French society, from conservative Roman Catholics (including priests), to liberals, anarchists, and communists.

Risks involved

The German occupation authorities did not hesitate to employ brutal means in order to subdue the French population. The risks were high for those involved in resistance and also for those surrounding them, since the Germans soon established practices of retaliation against innocents to punish anti-German activity.

• The German military authorities would execute guerrillas and suspected guerrillas.
• They would take hostages from among the general population to be executed in the event of resistance activity, executing several French people for a single German death. Sometimes, the hostages were taken from the same group as the presumed resistance fighters or saboteurs (e.g. railroad workers for railroad sabotage); a large number were among those accused by the Germans of being communists. Others, perhaps, were merely unlucky. The Gestapo and the SS tortured suspected guerrillas and sent them to concentration camps. Threats would also be made on the relatives of captured guerrillas; for instance, the Gestapo might threaten parents with torturing their children or sending off their daughters to be sex slaves in a military brothel.
• Occasionally, German troops would engage in massacres, such as the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane where an entire village was razed and the population killed for resistance activities in the vicinity.

In addition, the Vichy government had established paramilitary groups (presumably considered part of the Vichy security forces), such as the Milice, in order to fight the Resistance. These groups, collaborating closely with the Nazis, were very brutal and did not hesitate to use methods such as torture.

The networks of the BCRA

Further information: Operation Jedburgh

The BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action), was a French resistance agency created in 1940.

In July 1940, after the defeat of the French armies, the Germans controlled the French Atlantic coast. With the threat of a possible cross-channel invasion of Britain, Churchill asked the Intelligence Service to set up with General de Gaulle an information network made up of the Free French Forces. Colonel Passy, of the Deuxième Bureau ("Second Office": Military Intelligence Service), took the responsibility of creating such a network, with the main goal of informing London of German military operations across the Atlantic coast and the English Channel.

By the end of the war there were nearly 2000 volunteers. Among them, Gilbert Renault, known mainly under the pseudonym of Colonel Rémy, returned to occupied France in August 1940. He went on to create one of the most active and important resistant networks of the BCRA: the Notre-Dame Brotherhood. From 1941 on, supported by multiple networks, the BCRA was able to send material and armed parachutists to carry out missions on the Atlantic coast. Henri Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves was a naval officer who had created a network of 26 people in the occupied zone. He was arrested in May 1941 and was shot on August 29 1941.

The role of the French Resistance in the Liberation

A main point of the two forms of resistance, external and internal, was that the French were present with the Allies at the time of liberation. The question which stems from that is: What was the role of the resistance in the liberation? It is difficult to give an answer to this question but there are some brief replies: In September 1943, the Corsican resistance started a movement which liberated the island with the assistance of commandos from North Africa. Starting from the D-Day Landings in June 1944, the FFI and FTP, theoretically unified under the commandment of General Kœnig, fought to free other French provinces.

In September 1944, with the continuation of unloading armies and supplies in Normandy, the Maquis and other sabotage groups intervened, either by starting battles to fix German forces in one area, or by disorganizing railway communication networks used by the Germans: the green plan for railways, the purple plan for telephone lines and the blue plan for electric installations. The Paul plan aimed to destroy German deposits of ammunition and fuel, to badger German reinforcements, and to prepare for the arrival of Allied troops.

The Liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, with the support of Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, was one of the most famous and glorious moments of the French Resistance. However, it is very difficult to understand the effectiveness of the popular demonstration, with the psychological operation on the one hand, and the military on the other. Less debatable is the liberation of most of the southwest and central France, and the southeast was finally liberated with the progression of the 1st French Army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, which landed in Provence in August 1944.

One often refers to General Eisenhower's comment in his 'Report on Operations of the Expeditionary Forces in Europe':

Our HQ estimated that at the moment, the value of assistance brought to the countryside by the FFI represented the equivalent of 15 infantry divisions, and thanks to their assistance, the speed of our advance in France was largely facilitated by them.

One infantry division (DI) represented about 10 000 men. The conversion of the resistance forces into infantry divisions had its limits: How can information provided to the Allies be converted? And intoxication of the Germans whom the Intelligence Service did try by handling the Prosper network of the SOE? One will never have an answer to the question: "was the contribution of the resistance so decisive that the beachhead at the invasion of Normandy was not thrown back into the sea?"

List of groups

Groups included:

• Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR - Clandestine central underground committee, organised by Jean Moulin, to coordinate every inland resistance group, with patriotic political parties, and syndicates). CNR supported de Gaulle against Giraud for the unification of the French Empire forces, under the authority of Comité français de la Libération nationale (CFLN), in Algiers
• Agir
• Armée Secrète (AS or Secret Army) - Gaullist resistance group of Charles Delestraint.
• Bureau d'Opérations Aériennes (BOA) - Service for arranging clandestine air operations in northern France.
• Carte. A putative organisation conceived by André Girard.
• Ceux de la Resistance
• Ceux de la Libération
• Combat - Formed 1942 by Henri Frenay. This group was moderate left-wing and concentrated on sabotage and counterpropaganda. It published an underground newspaper Combat that was printed in Lyon and distributed in Paris. Albert Camus was active in the editing of the book alongside Georges Bidault. Along with Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre was a famous member, and their membership served to make the group famous after the war. The paper Combat was privatized in 1949 and continued publication.
• Combat Zone Nord
• Comité d'Action Socialiste (CAS) - Founded in January 1941 by Daniel Mayer, member of the French Socialist Party.
• Comité Départemental de Libération (CDL or Departmental Liberation Committee)
• Comité de libération du cinéma français (Liberation Committee of the French Cinema)
• Confrèrie Notre-Dame - Catholic resistance group
• Défense de la France - A group of students of Sorbonne University that began to produce an underground newspaper of the same name. The first printing in August 1941 was 15,000. The paper survived through the occupation. The group also had espionage and escape networks and produced false ID papers for resistance members. In the end it had close contacts with the maquis.
• Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (Français) (FTP or FTPF) - It was formed by the French Communist Party and ended up as the military wing of the Front National (see below).
• Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) - It was originally communist, and mostly composed of foreigners. In contrast with maquis this group was doing urban guerrilla fighting. See Manouchian, Affiche Rouge
• Francs-Tireur This was a Left-wing group formed by Jean-Pierre Lévy in Lyon in 1941. In December 1941 they began to publish Le Franc-Tireur underground newspaper. There were also members in the Mediterranean area.
• Front National (FN or National Front, now also known as the Front National de la Resistance) - This group was founded by members of the French Communist Party in May 1942. Its leader was Pierre Villon (It should not be confused with the current far-right wing party Front National).
• Interallié - Intelligence organization of Roman Sziarnowski and Mathilde Carre. It was crushed in 1942.
• Libération-Nord Organized by Henri Ribière; Paul Rassinier joined it.
• Libération-sud One of the first groups founded by Emmanuel d'Astier, Lucie Aubrac and Raymond Aubrac. It published an underground paper Libération with the support of remnants of the SFIO socialist party.
• Musée de L'Homme Another Parisian clandestine newspaper group, of a more conservative patriotic tendency. It also transmitted political and military information to Britain and helped to hide escaped Allied Prisoners of Wars (POWs). Vichy agents however infiltrated the group and most members were arrested and many executed.
• Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM or Civil and Military Organization). Founded by Colonel Alfred Touny in April 1942. He was killed with 12 others in Arras two years later.
• Organisation de Résistance de l'Armée (English: Army Resistance Organization; ORA) Founded by General Aubert Frère on 1 December 1942, he was arrested by the Gestapo in June the next year, but his organization survived. It was loyal to General Henri Giraud. François Mitterrand, future President of France, joined it in 1943. ^[1]
• Réseau Brutus, created by SFIO member Félix Gouin.

There were other resistance groups like Liberté and Verité (that merged with Combat) and Gloria SMH (that was betrayed). Later Combat, Franc-Tireur and Libération formed Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) which also had armed bands of its own.

The different forms of the Resistance

The Resistance movements acted with two distinct plans: on the one side, they wanted to contribute to the defeat of the Germans, and on the other side, they wanted to influence the public opinion for France.

Activities

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) began to help and supply the resistance from November 1940. Head of the independent (non Gaullist) 'F' or French section was Major subsequently Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, Intelligence Corps. They sent weapons, radios, radiomen and advisors. One of the section's agents was Peter Churchill (no such relation to Winston).

The Secret Intelligence Service and the Poles, Belgians and Dutch also sent agents into France in cooperation with the French in exile.

Because the US and British governments did not always agree with him, Charles de Gaulle organized his own intelligence organization Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), led by André Dewavrin, a.k.a Colonel Passy and assisted by a high-profile intellectual and politician, Pierre Brossolette. There was also the Direction Général des Services Spéciaux (DGSS or Special Services Executive), headed by Jacques Soustelle.

The Resistance was opposed by the German Wehrmacht, Abwehr, Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst as well as the Milice, the Vichy France police force led by Joseph Darnand. Its methods were as brutal as those of the Gestapo. One particularly zealous—and successful—adversary was Abwehr Feldwebel Hugo Bleicher. He disabled the Franco-Polish Interallie intelligence network based in Paris and personally arrested its leader, Polish Air Force Major Roman Czerniawski cryptonym 'Armand' to the French and 'Walenty' to the Poles. (He ostensibly then became a German agent, cryptonymed 'Hubert' for the Germans who sent him to Britain for them but in actuality he volunteered to do this in order to become a British Double Agent; subsequently cryptonymed 'Brutus' by MI 5).

On January 1 1942, Jean Moulin parachuted to Arles with two other men and radio equipment and continued to Marseille. De Gaulle had sent him to coordinate activities of different resistance groups. Many groups were not enthusiastic at first.

When the Germans initiated a forced labor draft in France in the beginning of 1943, thousands of young men fled and joined the Maquis guerrillas. SOE helped by sending more supplies. The American organization Office of Strategic Services (OSS) also began to send its own agents to France in cooperation with SOE.

In June 1943 the RF (Gaullist cooperation) Section of SOE sent Edward Yeo-Thomas for the first time to liaise between Gaullist BCRA and SOE activities in Paris. In February 1944 he was betrayed and the Gestapo arrested him.

Eventually Jean Moulin convinced Armée Secrète, Comité d'Action Socialiste, Francs-Tireur, Front National, and Libération to unify their efforts in the Conseil National de la Resistance (CNR or National Council of the Resistance) under de Gaulle's direction. Their first common meeting was in Paris on May 27 1943. Moulin became a chairman.

Initially the American government supported Henri Giraud. However, at the Casablanca conference in June 1943, de Gaulle and Giraud were forced to reconcile and became joint presidents of the CNR. Giraud was outmaneuvered by de Gaulle and left in October 1943.

On June 7 1943 the Gestapo captured resistance member René Hardy. Klaus Barbie tortured Moulin's whereabouts out of him and Moulin was arrested (alongside others) in Caluire on June 21. Moulin died after heavy torture on July 8 1943. After that, Georges Bidault became president of CNR.

The Gestapo apparently let Hardy go. He was accused of collaboration after the war but was acquitted.

Operation Overlord was approaching. In the spring of 1943 COSSAC begun to direct SOE and OSS activities that were connected to the invasion plans. Eventually it took orders from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Resistance members concentrated on information collection and sabotage against transportation and communication lines. They destroyed tracks, bridges and trains.

In 1944 a London HQ, named EMFFI for the Etat Major Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI or French Forces of the Interior) was inaugurated under the command of General Marie Pierre Koenig as a part of the Allied armed forces. SOE sent three-men teams (codename Jedburgh)—planned as one US or British representative and one representative of the country concerned (although never actually achieved in practice and intended also for Holland) and including a radioman—to organize sabotage from D-day onwards. There were 93 Jedburgh teams all of which were named for English language boy's Christian names.

On June 5 1944, the BBC broadcast a group of unusual sentences. The Sicherheitsdienst knew they were code phrases—possibly for the invasion of Normandy but their correct alert was ignored due to the welter of spurious data generated by the systematic and sustained deception efforts of the Allies aimed at confusing the Wehrmacht's intelligence staffs. All over France resistance groups had been coordinated. Various groups throughout the country increased their sabotage and guerrilla attacks. They derailed trains, blew up ammunition depots and attacked German garrisons. Some relayed info about German defensive positions on the beaches of Normandy to American and British commanders by radio, just prior to June 6.

Victory did not come easily. In June and July, in the Vercors plateau a newly reinforced maquis group fought 15,000 Waffen SS soldiers under General Karl Pflaum and was defeated with 600 casualties. On June 10 Major Otto Dickmann's troops wiped out the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in retaliation.

The resistance also assisted later Allied invasions in the south of France in Operations Dragoon and Anvil. When Allied forces began to approach Paris on August 19, its resistance cells also activated. They fought with grenades and rifles and arrested and executed collaborators. Most of the Paris police force joined them. American forces sent troops to help—the first Allied troops arrived on August 24. The last Germans surrendered on August 25.

On August 28, de Gaulle gave an order to disband Free French Forces and the resistance organizations as such with those who still wanted to fight being embodied in the new French army.

Notable persons

Main article: List of people involved with the French Resistance

After the war, many Frenchmen falsely claimed to have had connections to the resistance. Some—like Maurice Papon—even manufactured a false resistance past for themselves.

Memories and legends of the Resistance

In the immediate post-war period, most former resistance members went back to their everyday lives, and at the same time became ex-servicemen. The extreme right opinion of the time was to support the Vichy Government of Pétain, against the Allied "Victors" who were the old resistance members, using expressions such as the "mythe de la Résistance" (the myth of the resistance, following the "épuration sauvage" (wild purification). They were the last sudden starts to the civil war which shook the nation in the last years of the occupation and the liberation.

During the two following decades, the collective memory, expressed for example by textbooks, tended to propose a very much resistant France opposed to the Vichy government. According to the historian Henry Rousso, "From 1954 to 1971, the memory of Vichy was conflicting... but the French seemed to drive back this civil war, helped in that by the establishment of a myth dominating Résistancialisme" .

Treating the resistance and the Vichy regime in a historical method did not prohibit the development and maintainment of the myths. The legendary myth was born in reality but had to give significance to an experiment considered to be revealing. It was in this category that it became necessary to classify all kinds of commemorative ceremonies, and to construct museums and monuments. The legendary myth feeds a multiform memory of the resistance, differing according to places, cultures, and moments. The myth retains only some elements of history which it standardizes. The poet Pierre Emmanuel, a resistant himself, asserted in 1945, "It is necessary to dare more, to proceed from the symbols to the myths... in the light of these large flashes of history which reveal the succession of the centuries and the sequence of civilizations". Thus, André Malraux, when he put in scene the ceremony of transfer of the ashes of Jean Moulin to the Pantheon, his tragic incantations concerned the development of a myth, that France identified with "the poor formless face" of a face torture victim.

After the war, the very influential PCF was dubbed the "party of the 75 000 shot". Louis Aragon and others artists chanted the acts of the Manouchian Group in the various poems.

The Resistance in cinema

French cinema of the post-war period testifies to a broad consensus of a resistant France, when members of the resistance were in fact a minority. The official Cinematographic Service with Armies (SCA) defend their thesis that the Pro-communist Committee for the Release of the French Cinema (CLCF), did sometimes embellish facts, in particular at the time of the Cold war, but always in the glorification of the resistance.

The traitors, played by Pierre Brewer in Jericho (1946) or Serge Reggiani in The Doors of the Night (1946) have a hateful face and seem to be an exception. The STO was rarely evoked, and the French Militia never. The scenario writers like Clouzot or Cayatte sometimes created an image less realistic than what the FFI really was, Autant-Lara was not allowed to illustrate the black market and the general mediocrity in the Crossing of Paris (1956). At the same time, Robert Bresson, indifferent to the air of time, presented Un condamné à mort s'est échappé as a spiritual adventure and got away with it.

After de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, the portrayal of the resistance renewed itself. The commercial cinema converged in a 'Gaullienne' vision which was not afraid to make a pact with the communist memory. In Paris brûle t-il? (1966), Ainsi said, "the role of the resistant is revalued according to his later political trajectory". One can underline a shy reappearance of the image of Vichy, as in the Le Passage du Rhin(1960), in which a crowd acclaims successively Pétain then de Gaulle. The comic form of films such as La Grande Vadrouille (1966) widened the image of the heroes to average Frenchmen, which ended after May 1968 and the withdrawal of the General.

The most famous, and critically acclaimed, of these movies is Army of Shadows (L'armee des ombres), which was made by French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969, who himself was a member of the Resistance. The film was inspired by Joseph Keesel's 1943 book, as well as memoirs of Melville's experiences, such as his participation in Operation Dragoon. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the French news magazine L'Express repeatedly called it "perhaps the best French film ever made on the [French] Resistance."

The honest manner of the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity in (1971) pointed the finger on anti-Semitism in France and denounced the confiscation of resistance ideals in the official history. Cassenti, with L'Affiche Rouge (1976), Gilson, with La Brigade (1975), and Mosco with the documentary Des terroristes à la retraite at the time directed their films on resistant foreigners of the EGO, who were relatively unknown. In 1974, Lacombe Lucien of Louis Malle caused scandal and polemic because of his absence of moral judgment with regards to the behavior of a collaborator. The same man later depicted the resistance of Catholic priests who protected Jewish children in Au revoir les enfants. In the more alleviated 1980s, one can cite Blanche et Marie (1984), as an example of the resistance of working women. Later, Un héros très discret (1996), left the revelations on the past of François Mitterrand, suggesting that many heroes were imposters. One year later, Claude Berri took as a starting point a mythical figure of the resistance to carry out Lucie Aubrac in the manner of American biopics.

French Resistance in popular culture

• In the British television sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, René Artois is a French café owner who also helps out the French Resistance, which is led by a woman called Michelle, who often thinks up very far-fetched plots. For much of the series, the Resistance are primarily concerned with helping two British airmen get home to Britain. In the latter part of the series, they are concerned with spreading propaganda messages to the local French people. The town also boasts a chapter of the all-female communist Resistance, who are much more ruthless than the de Gaulle Resistance. Allo Allo is a parody of the Belgian-set BBC drama Secret Army.
• In the multi-platform game Call of Duty 3, the player can fight as a Special Air Service member alongside the French Resistance and the Maquis taking part in sabotage and rescue missions.

References

See also

• Breton nationalism and World War II
• Chant des Partisans
• Maquis
• Free France
• Les Éditions de Minuit French publishing house set up during the Resistance by Jean Bruller (Vercors) and Pierre de Lescure
• Timeline of women's participation in warfare
• French Forces of the Interior
• Polish resistance movement (Polish Secret State)

External links

• Chronology 1940-1945
• Exiled Spanish anarchists in the French Resistance - account of Spanish refugees from the Spanish Civil War from 1939-1945
• L'histoire de la Résistance française
• Women in the French Resistance
• French Secret Agents - Roll of honour, awards and images.
• A history of the resistance in English
• A history of the resistance in English for children
• European Resistance Archive (ERA) | video interviews with members of the resistance

Further reading

• Harry R. Kedward, In Search of the Marquis, Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942-1944, Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-821931-8.
• Frida Knight, The French Resistance, 1940-44, Lawrence and Wishart,1975. SBN 85315 335 3
• Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-44, London: Pimlico, 1999. ISBN 0-7126-6513-7
• David Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, The Story of the French Resistance, New American Library, 1980. ISBN 0-452-00612-0
• John F. Sweets, The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944 : A History of the Mouvements unis de la Résistance, Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.