Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 Read Online Free PDF

included anything from hiding Jews or Allied airmen, distributing leaflets and underground newspapers, writing poems, minor sabotage or involvement in military action right up to the all-out battles which delayed the Das Reich Division in its advance north against the Normandy bridgehead in June 1944.
    Men and women in most cases joined because a particular experience or event opened their eyes to the reality of Nazi occupation. Jean Moulin, who was to become the most important martyr of the Resistance, had been Prefect of the
département
of Eure-et-Loir in 1940. At the time of the defeat, two German soldiers taking over a house in the village of Luray shot an old woman because she had shouted at them and shaken her fist. They tied her corpse to a tree and told her daughter that it was to be left there as a warning. Moulin telephoned the local German headquarters from his office in Chartres to demand justice.
    That night, he received a summons to the headquarters. A junior officer asked him to sign an official statement which asserted that a group of French Senegalese infantry had committed a terrible massacre in the area, raping and murdering women and children. Moulin, knowing that he would have heard if any such incident had taken place, demanded proof. He was beaten savagely with rifle butts for his persistent refusal to sign and thrown into a cell. Fearing that he might weaken after further torture, Moulin slit his throat with a piece of glass. This desperate act was probably more of a bid to escape than an attempt at suicide, for he took care to cut close to the jaw: deep enough to spill a lot of blood, but not deep enough to let him lose consciousness or sever an artery. He was taken to the hospital and released soon after. Moulin spent four more months as the Prefect of Eure-et-Loir before being sacked by Vichy. He moved back to his native village of Saint-Andiol, near Avignon, and for a while it looked as though he was settling into semiretirement. It was not until April 1941 that he started making contact with the Resistance.
    There were numerous Resistance organizations, some dedicated to sheltering Allied airmen and escaped prisoners, others to gathering intelligence for the Allies. ‘Colonel Rémy’ was the
nom de guerre
of Gilbert Renault, a film director who had rallied to de Gaulle. He set up a highly successful intelligence network known as the Confrérie de Nôtre-Dame. The Alliance organization, which became known to the Gestapo as ‘Noah’s Ark’ because each member had a bird or animal as code-name, was set up by Marshal Pétain’s former military aide, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, and taken over by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade when the Gestapo arrested him. She had been Loustaunau-Lacau’s secretary on his extreme right-wing review just before the war. Under her own code-name of ‘Hedgehog’, she continued with astonishing courage to build a nationwide network in liaison with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
    One movement – the French Communist Party – did not lack for clandestine experience, having been proscribed in 1939. It had, however, been deeply disorientated by the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. Twenty-seven members of the National Assembly had resigned from the party. The following year, Communists hardly knew how to react to the invasion of France. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, sent Hitler a message of congratulation on the fall of Paris, and some party loyalists welcomed the conquerors.
    When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the news came almost as a relief. The Nazis were once again the enemy. But the bitterness did not entirely disappear. A blacklist of party traitors was circulated, with orders for their assassination. A number of those on the list had collaborated with the Vichy regime, but many were fighting bravely in the Resistance; their crime was to have criticized the Nazi–Soviet pact openly in 1939 and 1940. These renegades – falsely