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was, however, one political group in France which already knew a good deal about survival and the clandestine life. The Parti Communist Français, the PCF, born in the wake of the First World War from a schism of the left at Tours in 1920, had zigzagged through the turbulent currents of French interwar years. Briefly in shared power as part of Léon Blum’s coalition of radicals, socialists and communists in 1936 and again in 1938 as the Front Populaire, with a platform of better conditions for the workers and a banner of Pain, Paix et Liberté , the PCF had seen its numbers rise sharply in the mining towns of the north, in areas of heavy industry and in ports.
    The party had attracted a wide sweep of followers, from the Stalinists, who believed in a revolution of the workers and were veterans of the early struggles with the socialists, to a whole generation of youthful idealists inspired by the PCF’s vision of a more equal France. What united many of them was their support for the Spanish republicans after Franco launched his rebellion against the Frente Popular and invaded Spain in July 1936, and their disgust at France’s decision to sign the non-intervention pact. Many of these younger communists had gone to Spain to fight in the International Brigades, while their families back in France collected money to help Spanish republican women and children. And, when the refugees fleeing Franco’s soldiers began to cross the Pyrenees and into France, the French communists were the first to take in destitute Spanish families and to campaign on their behalf. To be young and active in France in the 1930s was to care passionately about politics.
    One of these young idealists was Cécile Charua, a strong-minded, physically sturdy young woman who was born in Paris’s ceinture rouge , the ‘red’ suburbs. As she saw it, to grow up French was to grow up communist, and if you did not fight injustice and xenophobia, well, then there was no point to life at all. Cécile’s parents divorced when she was a small child, and her mother then married a painter, a man whose anarchist beliefs occupied more of his time than bringing in money for the family. Most of Cécile’s considerably older brothers and sisters had long since moved away. Her mother left home before dawn in the early summer months to pick cornflowers in the fields to sell in the Gare Saint-Lazare on her way to work. She was a furrier by trade, but earned very little money.

    Cécile Charua, ‘le Cygne d’Enghien’
    At the age of 13, Cécile was sent as apprentice to another furrier. She enjoyed working with fur, sewing it on to a lining, selecting the different pelts; she savoured their colours and the way the fur lay, making patterns. She particularly liked astrakhan, the fleece of central Asian lambs. Cécile saw herself as feisty and capable, and skilled at spotting the match between the different furs, but she was not much good at finer needlework. She could not afford a fur coat herself, and like all workers in the fur business, was laid off when the demand for fur dropped at the end of December. When she had money, she spent it on theatre tickets, going to the cheapest seats at the Comédie Française or to see Louis Jouvet perform at the Athenée; one day, her artist stepfather took her to meet Picasso.
    Soon after her 16th birthday Cécile decided that she was sick of her mother’s strictness and her stepfather’s idle ways. Wanting, as she said later, a bit more to eat and a little freedom, she married a man who worked for the post office and was a keen trade union member. Nine years her senior, he took her along to political meetings, where she met anti-Fascists and learnt about what was happening to republican families in Spain. Soon she, too, began collecting money for milk for Spanish babies in Bilbao. Cécile had a daughter, and at weekends she put the baby into a sling on her back and went off camping in the forests around Paris with her friends.
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