A Train in Winter (5 page)

The party found itself bitterly divided. Outraged by the PCF’s initial stand of support for the pact, feeling betrayed by Stalin, a number of members now left the party. But many more remained within, preferring to ignore a move that they either could not or did not want to understand, and as they watched comrades arrested and led away to internment camps, their sense of solidarity grew stronger.

With the German occupation in June 1940 came a further moment of confusion. Watching the troops march into Paris made Cécile feel physically ill. Standing near the Panthéon, she thought to herself, ‘How terrible this is going to be.’ After
L’Humanité
—still Underground but widely distributed and read—published an article saying that German soldiers were nothing but workers, just like French workers and should be treated with friendliness, communists felt optimistic that they might be allowed by the occupiers to return to the public arena. A number of prominent communists came out of hiding, which only made it easier to find them when Pétain and the French police suggested to the Gestapo that militant communists should be rounded up, along with Freemasons and foreign Jews, as ‘enemies of the Reich’. Pétain’s proposal was more than acceptable to the Germans, who praised the prefects and French police for their zeal and declared that the communists in detention would henceforth be regarded as ‘hostages to guarantee the safety of German soldiers’. Pétain’s internment camps were fast turning into holding depots for resisters and Jews.

By September 1940, what with all those who had been made prisoners of war and were in camps in Germany, and those now in custody, there were said to be barely 180–200 active Communist Party members left in the whole of the Paris area. But these were men and women who, like Cécile, now felt that they had a new goal, one more in keeping with the mood of much of the country: anti-Fascist, anti-Vichy and anti-occupier. Quickly, they set about regrouping, spurred on by Maurice Thorez, the PCF leader in exile in Moscow, who issued his own
appel
to the French: ‘Never,’ declared Thorez, ‘will a great nation like ours become a nation of slaves.’

As Cécile saw it, she now had real work to do. She contacted a man she knew from the fur business, who was also a communist local councillor, and asked how she could help. She discovered that Raymond Losserand was running the military section of the communist resistance in Paris and that he had been forced to go underground, fearing arrest. He had grown a bushy moustache and wore a wide-brimmed hat. Losserand offered Cécile 1,500 francs a month for her expenses, and gave her half a métro ticket, telling her only to trust the person who contacted her if he presented her with the other half. Using two different names, sometimes Cécile, sometimes Andrée, she began to act as a liaison officer, and it became her job to pay the clandestine printers and to arrange for the collection of anti-German flyers and pamphlets and their distribution between printers and various depots. Sometimes her packets were so heavy that she could barely lift them, but she dreaded offers of help. Her main contact within the Resistance, the person who held the other half of her métro ticket, was a man called Maurice Grancoign, a former printer with
L’Humanité
. Cécile would later admit that, despite her bravura, she was afraid, all the time. ‘How could you do this work,’ she said, ‘and not be afraid?’

By now, Cécile was divorced from her husband and when she went off on missions for the PCF, she left her little girl with her mother in the 11th arrondissement. Increasingly at odds with her feckless stepfather, and fearing that what little food came into the household seldom reached her daughter, she decided to send the child to live with a foster family outside the city. She herself moved into a small flat in the centre of Paris, rented for her by the PCF. ‘How can you do this work if you have a child?’ asked her mother. ‘It is because I have a child that I do it,’ replied Cécile. ‘This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.’

While Cécile was busy helping set up the Paris networks, another young woman, Madeleine Passot, known to her friends as Betty, took off to travel from one end of France to the other, to recruit new members for the communist Resistance. Betty was 26, the only child of a Parisian family of committed socialists; her mechanic father had served a prison sentence for opposing French involvement in the First World War. As a small child, Betty had appeared so interested in politics that her father had nicknamed her
la petite communiste
. Drawn into the PCF, like Cécile, by the fate of the Spanish republicans, Betty had abandoned her job as a secretary in a big firm and volunteered for resistance work as soon as war was declared. With so many of the men under arrest, she quickly became a crucial courier between Paris and the south.

Slender, fearless, elegant with her red nails and tailored suits, she was, she liked to say, the perfect candidate for ‘life in the shadows’. Often, she chose to sit with Germans on the trains going south, rightly confident that they would gallantly protect her at checkpoints, though these journeys, with money hidden in the false bottom of her suitcase and papers in the lining of her handbag, were terrifying. She particularly dreaded passing through Marseilles, where the staircase was exposed and police stood watching the passengers arriving. Often, she was stopped and searched.

Betty Langlois, ‘Ongles Rouges’, and her companion Lucien Dorland

During the autumn of 1940, Betty was seldom not on the road; walking miles in her high-heeled shoes, with weapons concealed in baskets of grapes, she begged for lifts from farmers across the demarcation line. On her journeys, she was sometimes able to catch up with her companion Lucien Dorland, with whom she lived in a small flat in Paris, though he was busy setting up youth groups in the free zone. On her travels, Betty used other names, sometimes calling herself Madeleine, Odette or Gervaise and would say she sometimes had trouble remembering who she was meant to be. Lucien was also a communist and high up in the party hierarchy. She found the long separations hard, but, like Cécile, did not feel she had much choice in the matter.

By October 1940, the PCF in the Paris area had grown to over a thousand active members. Many were women, pressed into the fold by the absence of men, and, like Betty and Cécile, they were proving excellent as printers, distributors and liaison officers. The
Bulletin de la France Combattante
was run off by two women hidden in an abbey, while 84-year-old Mme Cumin worked a printing press in her launderette.

In November, after a wave of arrests, the number of PCF members fell to below three hundred, but a month later had passed the thousand mark again. Resilient, energetic and prepared to sacrifice themselves, the Communists shared a sense of solidarity and comradeship, and the courage with which they went about their work was not lost on possible new recruits. ‘Those responsible for this war have fled,’ the PCF announced. ‘They have sown desolation and death. It is now up to us to rally the people and to save France.’ As Heydrich reported to his superiors, the PCF was turning out to be the sole organisation ‘in a position to rally those in search of a political cause’.

To avoid too many losses, the PCF was structured into tight three-person cells, so that no member knew the names of more than two others at any one time. For Cécile and Betty, the arrival of the Germans had had a galvanising effect. The long months of the phoney war had been a bleak and perplexing time and when Betty looked back on them she spoke of them as a ‘void’. Now, she had a mission.

It was, however, getting more perilous all the time. One by one, highly conscious of the danger their work posed to their families, aware of the growing numbers of informers and the sophistication of the Gestapo, many of the activists—like Cécile—were leaving home and disappearing to work in other neighbourhoods and under other names. What many would later remember was how lonely they felt, constantly changing lodgings, seldom talking to anyone for more than a few minutes at a time.

Among the members of the pre-war PCF was a large number of university teachers and graduates from France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure. And it was from these men and women that now emerged the first serious, united, intellectual resistance to the occupiers.

In the 1930s, French intellectual life, epitomised by a small group of people—not all but most of them French—living and meeting on the Left Bank of Paris, had been at the centre of the European stage. This group read and wrote for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, gathered in the art deco auditorium in the basement of the Palais de la Municipalité or in cafes in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Though not all politically to the left, the mood was for the most part radical and socialist and there was much talk about the menace of Mussolini and Franco, about the need for peace and the importance of winning better working conditions for France’s impoverished working classes. The cause of the Spanish republicans was supported passionately by many of them. André Gide, André Malraux, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon and his companion Elsa Triolet were among those whose voices were frequently heard in the pages of magazines with titles that perfectly expressed the longings for a better age:
Esprit, Combat
and
Ordre Nouvelle
. When, in 1929, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre had launched their
Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale
, to look at society through a different lens, one that focused on the conditions in which ordinary people lived rather than on the deeds of politicians and rulers, it seemed perfectly to express the mood of the times.

Between 1933 and 1940, Paris became one of the only safe meeting places for intellectual exiles from Hitler, Mussolini and Franco and their dictatorships. One of the issues that exercised many of those sitting and arguing in the cafes was whether the proper role of the intellectual should be that of a seeker after truth, as the novelist and philosopher Julian Benda maintained, or whether on the contrary, it was important to become an
écrivain engagé
, one who got his hands dirty. In a decade of floundering political causes and alliances, with foreign, military and economic policy adrift from one end of the world to the other and French intellectuals defined by their attitude to communism, there were few easy answers. Some of the shrewdest critics of doctrinal rigidity had in fact even drifted into the neo-Fascist camp.

The sudden arrival of the Germans in Paris in the summer of 1940 caught the intellectuals, like everyone else, unprepared. Some fled abroad, some joined the exodus to the south, among them Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Jean Cocteau, and made their homes in the free zone. Others returned to occupied Paris. But while those on the far right quickly and pleasurably discovered a new popularity among the Nazis and their collaborators, those on the left were faced with the question of how they should react to occupation. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and François Mauriac soon decided that they would coexist with the enemy and let their own work go on appearing, even though the very fact that their articles were published alongside those of the pro-Germans and anti-Semites lent the Fascists a certain legitimacy. (‘Alas!’ remarked Jean Zay, who had been Minister of Education under Léon Blum, ‘How much kneeling and renunciation there is in the world of French literature!’) As Aragon saw it, the role of the man of letters was to speak out, to keep writing, since that was his métier, but to twist the words, giving them new, hidden meanings.

Other writers found this too shaming. Jean Guéhenno, appalled by the ease with which Pétain had made ‘of dishonour a temptation’, disgusted by those he referred to as an ‘invasion of rats’, had no difficulty in deciding what to do. Because he had effectively been made a prisoner, he would live like a prisoner; since he could not write what he wanted, he would write nothing at all. Before falling silent for the remainder of the war, Guéhenno wrote one final piece. ‘Be proud,’ he told his readers. ‘Retreat into the depths of thought and morality’ but do not, whatever else you do, ‘descend into the servitude of imbeciles.’ A socialist and trade unionist called Jean Texcier wrote what would later be called a ‘manual of dignity’, a list of thirty-three ‘bits of advice to the occupied’. Husband your anger, he counselled, for you may need it. Don’t feel you have to give the Germans the right directions when they ask you the way: these are not your walking companions. And above all, ‘have no illusions: these men are not tourists’. His pamphlet was printed and reprinted, circulated from hand to hand, read and reread, and Texcier was soon a hero to the growing band of resisters. For Betty and Cécile, his jaunty defiance was infectious.

Along with being a writer, Guéhenno was also a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure. And it was here, as well as in the various faculties of the Sorbonne, that students, returning in the early autumn of 1940 to their classes, began to question their professors and each other about the extent to which they were prepared to accept the Nazi occupiers. They were angry that their Jewish teachers had been declared ‘intellectually feeble’ and ‘undesirable’ in the first anti-Semitic edict. When German officers began to drop in on their classes, they walked out. Some took to wearing a Croix de Lorraine, others to carrying a
gaule
—another word for a fishing rod.