The New Criterion

Walking through the market squares of Midi towns, amidst French shoppers wearing sandals and carrying string bags, one often sees bronze statues of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin gazing down on the leisurely crowd like a benign deity. Patrick Marnham’s lucid, dramatic, and riveting biography cuts through the legend and, moving deftly through extremely complex material, solves the mystery of who betrayed Moulin to the Germans in June 1943. “To know who he was,” Marnham subtly observes, “you must find out who killed him.”

In this engagingly short biography, which complements Ian Ousby’s excellent book The Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940– 1944 (1998), Marnham concentrates on interpreting the major events of Moulin’s life. While Moulin occasionally fades into the French underground, Marnham gives a first-rate account of the social, political, and military situation. His caustic comments, for example, on the disgracefully opportunistic politics of Simone de Beauvoir are dead on. During the occupation, he notes, with a keen eye for vivid detail, the suicide rate dropped, the birth rate (despite the loss of nearly two-million French prisoners of war) rose and, for lack of proper food, the growth of school-age children slowed.

Two historical points need clarification. Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”) decree of December 1941, which ordered that violent militia action against German forces be punished by death, was given that name (according to Field Marshal Keitel’s Memoirs) because the accused “were to be hauled across the frontier under ‘cover of darkness’” and secretly executed in Germany. Marnham twice says, without explaining why, that Roosevelt disliked and distrusted de Gaulle. After meeting de Gaulle at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt felt he was a megalomaniac who wanted to establish a dictatorship in postwar France. “The day he arrived,” Roosevelt said, “he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted he was Georges Clemenceau.”

Moulin was born in Béziers in southern France—the son of a radical and freemason, a teacher and influential local politician with ancestral roots in a Provençal village—in 1899. That extraordinary year also produced Hemingway, Nabokov, Borges, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Noël Coward, Elizabeth Bowen, Hitchcock, and Bogart. All of them were solidly anchored in the nineteenth century, came to maturity during World War I, flowered during the artistic resurgence of the 1920s, lived through the economic depression and what Auden called “the low dishonest decade” of the 1930s, and (except for Crane) experienced the horrors of World War II.

In 1918 Moulin joined the engineers, was trained as a sapper, but did not see action. After earning a law degree at Montpellier, he joined the high-powered provincial administrators, the Corps préfectoral, and became the youngest sub-prefect and then the youngest prefect in France. His meteoric success was due “to his ferocious ambition, to his astounding ability as an administrator … to his personal connections and the influence of his father—what the French call le piston.” After a marriage, arranged by his father, that lasted for only two years, the charming and charismatic Moulin—also a bit of a playboy—had a series of sage mistresses, often juggling three of them at the same time. He amusingly described his seduction technique (right out of a Billy Wilder movie) as “a few languorous tangos, several glasses of champagne… . At two o’clock in the morning there were no taxis, but plenty of hotel rooms … . ‘But I have no pyjamas,’ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll lend you mine.’ … Cue the violins.”

Transferred from Chambéry in Savoy to Quimper in Brittany, Moulin fell under the influence of the homosexual artist and Catholic convert Max Jacob, who encouraged his work as an artist. Moulin signed his paintings with the pseudonym “Romanin,” the name of the castle near his Provençal village. He would later use the name for the art gallery he ran in Nice—a convenient wartime cover. In a passage that effectively synthesizes Moulin’s character in 1934, Marnham notes that he was a secretive man with a talent for duplicity and “the social habits of a libertine, a weekend painter with an acknowledged gift for caricature, attentive from a distance to his elderly parents and still without any particular political commitment.”

During the Spanish Civil War, whose bloodthirsty factionalism foreshadowed that of the French Resistance, Moulin helped smuggle aircraft to the Loyalists. His first transforming moment came in June 1940, when, as prefect in the provincial capital of Chartres, he remained behind after everyone else had fled and formally surrendered the town to the Germans. After being abandoned by their French officers, some Senegalese troops fought the invaders and caused considerable casualties. When they were captured, the infuriated Nazi commander, contrary to the rules of war, had more than two hundred of them shot. To cover up the massacre, the Germans ordered Moulin to sign a document stating —in opposition to the evidence he had seen with his own eyes—that the black troops had been executed for raping and murdering women and children. When Moulin refused to sign and sully the honor of the African soldiers, he was beaten for seven hours. When he could no longer stand the torture, he tried to kill himself by cutting his throat with a piece of broken glass.

His courage seemed to “atone” for his noncombatant role in the Great War. He also expressed his idealistic opposition to the German contamination of France and the cowardly collaboration of the Vichy leaders (“who were piling up the stones which would cover their own graves”) as well as his belief in the future of a free France. Moulin’s self-sacrificial behavior established his reputation as one of the first heroes of the Resistance.

Dismissed as prefect, Moulin began to organize the rudimentary resisters in the southern, or unoccupied zone, nominally controlled by Vichy. In October 1941 he secretly left France and was flown from Lisbon to England to meet de Gaulle. Despite his left-wing background, he won the leader’s trust. After a crash course in parachute jumping, Moulin was sent back into France. His mission, as de Gaulle’s ambassador, was to unite the three main Resistance movements into one. But he soon became entangled in “the childish and deadly game” played by the explosive factions of the underground. The danger and strain became so great that he once lost control during an argument, dropping his trousers to express disdain for his adversary. His enemies (who should have been his allies in the war against Germany) accused him of “abusing his power, misusing his funds and reimposing the political chaos of the Third Republic.” The left charged him with working to establish a Gaullist dictatorship, the right called him a Communist agent, though he’d long since lost faith in Communism.

In June 1943 the leaders met in a suburb of Lyon to replace their military commander, who’d been captured and shot. At this fateful time, Moulin was

faced with the German police and the French police, with his numerous enemies within the patriotic resistance, with his rivals in the Gaullist security service and his former comrades in the PCF [French Communist Party]. For him it was not a question of who would betray him, but of how many of them would do so.

In a masterful display of detection Marnham eliminates not only the chief suspect, René Hardy, who was acquitted of betraying Moulin in two postwar trials, but also all of the French resisters who attended the meeting. Marnham convincingly concludes that “the men controlling the Communist resistance had the strongest possible motives for removing de Gaulle’s representative from the scene and enjoyed every opportunity to do so.” Arrested by Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon,” and tortured by the Gestapo for the second time in three years, Moulin again refused to talk. Eluding for a moment the vigilance of his guards, he threw himself down a great stairwell and ensured his own silence by dying for France.

After the war Raymond Aubrac, the leading Communist at the meeting, whose presence “helped to screen the identity of the informers,” became Commissioner of Marseille. He organized a reign of terror (unequaled since the French Revolution) in which thousands of innocent political victims were accused of collaboration and executed. His wife, Lucie, another covert Communist “submarine,” had tried to murder René Hardy by sending him a pot of jam laced with cyanide: “When he failed to eat the jam she regarded his suspicious caution as a final confirmation of his guilt.”

In 1997 the exciting French film Lucie Aubrac, based on her book, portrayed Raymond’s capture by the Gestapo (after the Lyon meeting) in October 1943 and her bold rescue of Raymond and twelve other resisters, which made them legends. The film idealizes the Aubracs and says nothing at all about Lucie’s attempt to poison the innocent Hardy to protect the Communist traitors or Raymond’s massacre of the innocents in postwar Marseille. It’s an effective example of what Marnham (who doesn’t mention the film) calls “murdering history.” In 1964 Moulin’s ashes (or those thought to be his) were buried in the Panthéon—next to Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola —after a theatrical but moving oration by André Malraux. Marnham observes, in another telling phrase, that “lacking a body they reburied a ghost, and a patriotic legend was born.” Marnham shows that de Gaulle used Moulin to help create an essential myth about France’s experience in the war. Instead of a country that abjectly submitted in the Occupied Zone and collaborated under the Vichy government, “de Gaulle had imposed a false view of France as a country of resistance.”