Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [15]
Passy saw him first, and realized that Moulin was the ideal man to bring the Resistance together under Free French control. Passy was already planning his organization, the BCRA, a Free French version of Britain’s SOE. Reports from Gaullist networks such as Rémy’s had convinced him that the Resistance groups of the interior could be just as important in the struggle as the conventional Free French forces outside. They would also play an important role in the political struggle which was bound to follow the Liberation.
On New Year’s Day 1942, Moulin, accompanied by his conducting officer, Dodds-Parker (who was later involved in Darlan’s assassination), was taken to an RAF Whitley bomber. Moulin, with a small liaison team, and armed with de Gaulle’s authority and a radio set, was parachuted into Provence that night. He made his way to Marseilles to meet Henri Frenay, leader of the Combat Resistance movement. Frenay’s initial enthusiasmat the idea of a coalition cooled once he studied the instructions from London more closely. De Gaulle and Passy seemed to be expecting the Resistance groups to fall into neat ranks and snap to attention. On balance, Frenay acknowledged that it must be right for the main movements of the centre and centre-left – Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur – to unite where possible. What he resented was the way that the men of London expected obedience and loyalty from a resistance which had sprung up in France quite independent of de Gaulle, and how London had so little appreciation of the problems and perils that local Resistance movements faced every day. But perhaps the greatest resentment felt towards the London Gaullists was provoked by their implication that to have remained in France in 1940, rather than joining the General in London, somehow represented a lapse of duty.
As part of his attempt to create an effective umbrella organization, Moulin recruited Georges Bidault, a Catholic of the centre-left, to be the head of the Resistance’s public information branch, the Bureau d’Information et de Presse.
Another of Moulin’s initiatives was to set up a sort of constitutional think-tank, the Comité Général d’Études, to prepare the governmental structure of post-war France and its relationship with the Allies. Members of this body, almost all lawyers, included several future ministers: François de Menthon and Pierre-Henri Teitgen, the first two Ministers of Justice of liberated France, Alexandre Parodi, and Michel Debré, a future Prime Minister.
The most important of these developments came in September 1942, when the military wings of Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur joined to become the Armée Secrète. De Gaulle immediately gave it his blessing. In his eyes the Secret Army was a vital step towards bringing the Resistance within the framework of a reconstituted regular armed service. That many French Resistance groups had worked with the British from early on was, in his eyes, akin to treachery.
The British, on the other hand, were relieved that the Resistance had grown up in three different ways: the groups backed by SOE and the Secret Intelligence Service, the Gaullist groups and the Communists. This, they felt, reduced the chance of a civil war between Gaullists and Communists. The British were able to provide radio sets as well as transport, whether by Lysander landings on moonlit nights or by parachute drops. Passy claimed that the British always reserved the larger share of whatever planes, weapons and funds were available for their own operations, while Free French operations were kept on short rations. And yet the fact that London could provide support, however meagre, meant that the misunderstandings, suspicions and exasperations that were bound to develop between ‘les gens de Londres’ and ‘les gens de l’intérieur’ never resulted in a permanent rupture.
In November 1942, the possibility of Communists and Gaullists working together was greatly improved by their common anger at the Americans’ deal with Darlan. Neither Bogomolov, Stalin