Abstract
Reviewed by: Donald M. Reid, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Charles Potter has translated four important texts on the first years of the Resistance. Read together they allow an examination of the existential choice to resist and what it involved in occupied France. Much is rightly made of the change in the Resistance as it grew with new recruits following the introduction of the labour draft in 1943, but Tillion notes that this change was also a consequence of the imprisonment or death by 1943 of many who had resisted in 1940, including two of the four figures in this collection.
Prefect Jean Moulin’s First Fight is largely concerned with his efforts to deal with the emergencies occasioned by the breakdown of services as Chartres was flooded with refugees fleeing the German invasion, followed by his unremitting attempts to challenge German abuse of French citizens and the illicit requisition of goods. Moulin stayed in Chartres as the Germans approached against government orders. He insists that though many army officers and civil servants pulled back or left, French soldiers wanted to stand their ground, the prequel of the embrace by many French of resistance that all four texts evoke. Moulin concludes with an account of being tortured by the Germans in their failed effort to get him to sign a document that falsely attributed a civilian massacre to Senegalese troops. As much as his success bringing together Resistance movements in 1942–1943, it was this act that made Moulin the antithesis of another wartime prefect, Maurice Papon.
Like Marc Bloch in Strange Defeat, Moulin writes his way to resistance in First Fight. Henri Frenay’s manifesto ‘National Liberation’ of 1940 is also clearly the product of this process. He embraced the National Revolution, calling on resistance to German occupation in anti-Semitic, xenophobic terms as the precondition to a liberated France which could carry out the needed counter-revolution. Inclusion of Frenay’s tract reminds readers that not all resistance came from ardent republicans, as well as that resisters’ reasons for resisting could evolve over time.
Germaine Tillion’s article on the Resistance before her arrest in 1942 is reflective and insightful. She analyses the importance of personal relationships in the creation of networks and, in turn, the significance and the dangers of infiltration when networks worked together, bringing together people without pre-existing bonds of trust. In 1957, a year before the article was published, Tillion met secretly during the Battle of Algiers with FLN leaders Yacef Saadi and Ali la Pointe. This article presents what Tillion shared with them in a conversation between resisters that led to Yacef Saadi’s offer of a cease fire.
Tillion contrasts her experience in the Resistance to the ‘administrative ideal’ of resistance in which leaders in London made decisions that volunteers carried out (126). Like Tillion, Jean Garcin in We Were Terrorists (1996) addresses the earliest resistance movements in what he calls ‘the period of the oil slick’, when each new recruit contacted a few others (192). Garcin refers to the difficulties he faced when, in addition to directing the combat units in the Vaucluse, where he knew those he led, he was asked to take charge of forces in a large area of south eastern France.
Garcin wanted to take military action right from the beginning against the Vichy regime. Trained in the use of explosives in the army, he speaks initially of committing sabotage against Vichy targets ‘of little strategic value… entirely on our own pure and youthful initiative’ (203). Though Garcin’s account shares with an important genre of Resistance literature and films a focus on military action, it has its surprises, as when the female resistance leader Kléber gives Garcin his assignment and then holds out her hand for him to kiss.
The figures whose texts we read are quite different, but they share important traits and experiences. Moulin defended Senegalese troops; Tillion’s first resistance activity was aiding colonial troops to escape German captivity. The two colonels who organized this activity and with whom Tillion worked closely were political conservatives like Frenay. Garcin was given responsibility for protecting the landing of Moulin at the beginning of 1942. The mother of Tillion and the father of Garcin were resisters who died in German concentration camps. The Resistance, 1940 has been produced to enable students to analyse the motivations and actions of early resisters. This is a subject of particular interest in the United States in which the book was published, where the concept of resistance and what it entails has taken on a new importance among many in Potter’s student audience.