This article is for a large part a summary of a lecture at a symposium held at the Universities of Assisi and Perugia in 2013[1]. This research followed a previous publication for a symposium at the University of Pavia on an almost unknown aspect of the French Resistance, the clandestine founding in occupied Lyons of the French Committee for the European Federation (CFFE)[2], and it will be followed by a more specific research connected with the Gaullist “Free France” related press or other French publications published in exile or out of the metropolitan territory during WWII.
What are the conditions or the reasons for the beginning of the French Resistance and the progressive affirmation of a clandestine press? Why is the Resistance far from spontaneous movement after the lightning victory of Germany in June 1940 and why does it appear first in the North where the Nazi occupation induces a first form of “patriotic” opposition while it is rather late coming in the South-zone where the army of occupation is less present and where the majority of the population seems to be satisfied, until the autumn of 1941 with the apparent autonomy of the Maréchal Petain’s regime?
The context between the two wars.
The National Assembly at Vichy gives Petain the full powers on July 10th, 1940, 569 votes for 80 against, to institute a new constitution and realize a “National Revolution” that the German historian, Walter Lipgens, specialist of European integration, describes as “principally inspired by the ideas of the anti-republican French milieux before the war with marked tendencies towards authoritarianism and antisemitism”[3]. He stresses that French society was much divided between the two wars, he recalls the proposals from the right-center of Aristide Briand to create the conditions of a real European entente going as far as a project of federal union and established that the socialist left led by Léon Blum had an analogous inspiration. He denounces that at the extremes the radical right often refused any action against Hitler, and on the other hand the communist party (PC) outlawed since the signing of the Germano-Sovietic Pact presented the future war as an “enterprise of capitalist brigands” to share the territories and profits, with the risk of a massacre between the popular classes. Lipgens, then, adds that a certain number of intellectuals, sometimes connected with the Christian Personalism (for example the Catholic writer Jacques Maritain, the Director of the Revue Esprit, Emmanuel Mounier, the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, the non-conformist Alexandre Marc …) considered before 1940 that the causes of the new war were due to the errors and severity of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 and the later weaknesses of the Society of Nations, not universal and unable to have its decisions applied and respected. These authors proposed as “objectives of war” the future creation of European governmental institutions able to take decisions and if necessary to enforce them without the agreement of the national governments: the United States of Europe being seen as only competent in particular for defense and foreign policy. Blum, himself, in the socialist daily The Populaire of October 14th 1939 published an article in which he made clear “the aims of war” which will remain those of the socialists. “We always back this way to the same formula, the same conclusion: the independence of the nations within a federated and disarmed Europe. Such are our ‘aims of war’, and it means that such are for us the conditions of the peace”. But other intellectuals, for example Albert Camus and his friend Pascal Pia, take their own position from Algiers in 1939, for federal solutions; they were close to “libertaires” and pacifist milieux, both are going to become members of the Combat movement and will be among the founders of the CFFE.
These antecedents allow us to touch with one finger the basic and central themes of the pro-European articles of the clandestine press and of the immigrated French press... and even indeed the positions of a number of exiled authors.
The beginnings of the Resistance and the progressive development of the clandestine press.
The French major historian of the Resistance, Henri Michel quotes the first roneo-typed or printed bulletins under titles which appeared with some regularity in Paris in 1940 such as Pantagruel, En captivité, Resistance, L’Université libre, and La France au combat and he confirms that in the South-zone the awakening came later “and it took the meeting at Montoire between Petain and Hitler (October 1940), for the weakening of the opinion”. He writes that the first task of these bulletins was “to make known what was hidden by the official press”, and he adds that it was only from 1941 that real newspapers were put in circulation that intended to be monthly papers as organs of the more and more numerous Movements with large networks of diffusion and well-equipped printing presses. If Valmy and Petites ailes did not last long, for the North zone Libération, La Voix du Nord et du Pas de Calais and Defense de la France, or for the South zone Libération-Sud, Franc-Tireur and Combat managed to survive until the “Libération”. He also explains that all the Movements were not structured around a newspaper. Some groups preferred editing only tracts, brochures or short pamphlets and sometimes simple internal bulletins or circulars. He underlines that it is but progressively that new titles will be added to the simple press of the early days: “Their circulation will be more limited but the political range will be greater; other publications, thicker and better written because written more carefully, are consecrated to the preparation of the future; they include detailed studies on the situation of pre-war France and on the problems of the present. These subjects are evoked mostly to situate and back up their points of view on the future. Such are... Les Cahiers de libération, La Revue libre, Les Lettres Françaises. Thanks to these political reviews one passed from the doctrine built up for the liberation of France to programs for its future Renovation.
It is only from the autumn of 1941 that significant clandestine groups appeared and Lipgens reminds us that before there had been “except in Alsace, three or four tracts or pamphlet with little influence published by a few isolated men and often immediately confiscated by the French police”. Lipgens is also, and it is worth mentioning, the first European historian who stressed the importance for the non-communist Resistance of the debate on the future peace, and the place of Germany. Though in 1941-42 many French men would think of Europe as an idea monopolized by the Nazi type collaborationists, even though the Hitlerian “New Order” was only a perversion of the ideal of European unity, Lipgens could write that “Combat, the biggest and stronger group of Resistance in the South non-occupied zone before 1942, had inscribed the European idea in its program even before 1942, together with the group at Toulouse Libérer et Fédérer”.
However, it was as early as June 1940 that some groups timidly included the European dimension in their reflection. We may give some examples. The “Front ouvrier international contre la guerre” (International Workers Front against War) distributed by tracts a call to “German Workers and Soldiers” in their own language, reminding them of the proletarian solidarity and asking them to go back home; the FOI, a left wing socialist movement, had been founded in 1938 by the British Independent Labour Party, the Italian Maximalist Socialist Party, the French “Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan” (PSOP, Workers and Farmers Socialist Party), a scission of the socialist Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO, French Section of the Worker’s International) led by Marceau Pivert and other small groups, mostly based in Europe. In October 1940, some members of the North-of-France SFIO Federation founded “L’Homme libre” (The Free Man, “Bulletin of working class information”); as early as November they wrote: “Peace cannot last only by the United States of Europe freed from the chauvinism of a minority of the rich and wealthy”. The same month, Lipgens quotes the first copy of another bulletin, Pantagruel, published by the Alsatian Raymond Deiss, who writes that “the enemy is not the German people but Nazism, Racism, the attacks against the Jews, the Churches and the Rights of man; (…) on the day of victory, France will have to be the first to hold out her hand to the Germans”.
At least two other attempts took place under the influence of the socialist movements. Jean Rous, a former secretary of Trotski in Norway, had broken off with him and joined the “Pivertistes” in 1939; in the autumn of 1940, he founded with a few friends the Movement National Révolutionnaire (MNR), its publication La Revolution Française published three issues (sept 1940 to January 1941) and has been classified among the first titles of the Resistance, after some initial hesitation.
Following the banning of the MNR by Vichy and a short sojourn in jail, Rous joined Libérer et Fédérer in Lyons. Pierre Rimbert and some comrades, sometimes coming from Socialism or Trotskism, with the ex key member of the PC and the Komintern André Ferrat, had in the 1930’s founded a dissident Marxist and anti-Stalinist group and Review: Que faire? At the end of 1940, Rimbert created in Paris the clandestine Notre Révolution, which became Notre Combat and finally Libertés, and it would become a weekly after the Liberation. Rimbert wrote a manifesto “Our Position” in October 1940, of which I will quote the last lines: “Liberty of the peoples to dispose of themselves,… to take advantage of the social crisis provoked by the present war, to overthrow the capitalist regime, to take over the power and collectivize the means of production, to insure the peace forever by the abolition of frontiers and the constitution of a Federation of free peoples”. Even before the creation of the MNR and Notre Révolution, a meeting of some of their future leaders took place at the end of 1940 at Toulouse. Victor Fay, a friend of Rimbert and Ferrat, remembers in his Memoirs: “I arrive at Toulouse where I am to meet my comrades of Que faire? (…) around Zacsas (…) and André Hauriou, a law-teacher, we are all together to react against the climate of dejection and rallying to Pétain”; he says that a “small movement has been agreed on, Libérer et Fédérer around Gilbert Zacsas, Rimbert, Pierre Lochac and Rous to be established in Paris, Lyons and Toulouse. Its objective was to give the Resistance a revolutionary purpose leading at the same time to the liberation of the country, the renovation of the institutions and preventing the reconstitution of the days before the defeat”. It seems there was a meeting at the end of June 1940 between the future founders of the MNR, Notre Révolution, Libérer et Féderer and with Hauriou, later in charge of the Combat larger movement and Journal and one of the authors of its Manifeste. I linger over these initiatives for many of their originators are among those who wrote the most advanced texts on the Europe of after the war, some of them being also among the founders and principal organizers of the CFFE, or being engaged in various founding movements of the French Union of Federalists, the French section of the UEF when it will be created in Paris at the end of 1946.
In November 1940 a Christian Democrat, François de Menthon, creates the movement Liberté (singular) in the South-zone; meanwhile, Henry Frenay, the future founder of Combat (after the war he will be General Secretary of the UEF), and his friend Bertie Albrecht diffuse from Lyons their Bulletin d’information (the first only in 18 copies!). At the beginning of 1941, following an agreement of Frenay with the North group who publishes Les Petites Ailes du Nord, they decide to publish jointly Les Petites Ailes in both zones. Lipgens quotes an interesting remark of Frenay: “One spring evening in 1941, as I worked on the next number of the Petites Ailes, I found myself writing ‘what we want is a federation of equal states, including a Germany cured of its megalomania’. That idea was going to create some surprise among many of my friends, who could not imagine the Germany against whom we fought to become an actor of the future Europe on an equal footing with the other States. But this short sentence about Europe written in the spring of 1941, was the point of departure of a reflection later shared by most of the non-communist Resistance”.
The summer of 1941 saw the creation of two other important movements: at Lyons, Libération Sud by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, and in Paris, Défense de la France by Philippe Viannay and Robert Salmon. In November Liberté writes that “Europe is the continent where the population is the most numerous, it is the smallest, and 28 nations are crammed in it. With the international division of work (…) these borders have become unbearable. They must be suppressed. But each people will keep its language, its habits, its customs in the equality of Peoples and races in a fully democratic way”. A few weeks later Liberté was to merge with the organization of Frenay to create what was going to be the main movement of the Resistance: Combat. At the same time, at Toulouse were held the first meetings to found Libérer et Fédérer with the Italian exile Silvio Trentin and Zacsas, while at Lyons the Alsatian Jean-Pierre Lévy started Franc-Tireur.
As far as the socialist SFIO is concerned, at the end of 1941 Socialisme et Liberté is published monthly in the North-Zone; progressively in close contact with Blum, who was in prison, and under the responsibility of Daniel Mayer, the socialists will be restructured within the Comité d’Action Socialiste (CAS) in the North Zone, then in the South-zone from May 1942, they will express themselves in Le Populaire which is re-edited.
Having presented this framework, I am short of space to quote from this point extracts that the interested reader will be able to find very soon on the site of the Presse Federaliste (www.pressefederaliste.eu) or in the Acts published by Peter Lang with short commentaries. We may write that these few texts come from some fifteen clandestine reviews and papers on different groups in both zones, but do not constitute an exhaustive anthology.
The CFFE and the Federalist Conference of Paris in the spring of 1945 prior to the foundation of the supra-national UEF in December 1946.
The end of the hostilities and occupation are coming near, together with the end of this article, but before I want to come back to the CFFE, founded in June 1944 in Lyons under the German occupation, inside the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN) that progressively gathers all the principal non-communist movements of the Resistance of the two zones. The initiative is due to Ferrat of Franc-Tireur, who as early as the end of 1942, probably at the head of a clandestine federalist committee, tried to get in touch with the Italian anti-fascist Altiero Spinelli with the intention to organize a transnational federalist movement. Deported to the Isle of Ventotene in the Gulf of Naples after long years in prison, the former Communist Spinelli with the Liberal Ernesto Rossi wrote the “Manifesto of Ventotene for a Free and United Europe”, which to this day remains the best known of the Federalist documents of the European Resistance. This text reached Rome clandestinely and was distributed from one prison to the next as early as 1941 (even before its first clandestine edition prefaced by their socialist friend Eugenio Colorni in 1944); it seems that the Manifesto was also known quite early by small groups outside Italy and particularly at Lyons and Toulouse. At the beginning of 1944, Ferrat finally succeeded in getting in touch via Switzerland with Spinelli and Rossi, who went there after having founded the Italian Movimento Federalista Europeo at Milan during the ephemeral regime of Admiral Badoglio and the return of the Germans.
Ferrat and his friends, in this way, were informed of the Federalist meetings in Geneva in the spring of 1944, with the complicity of the federalist (and personalist) Jean-Marie Soutou, member of the Representation of the Gaullist “Free France” in Geneva, with resistants of various countries including two anti-nazi German women in exile. The “Federalist Declaration of Geneva” was approved by the CFFE and by the Group editing La Revue Libre (Franc-Tireur), then it was re-used in great part in the international program of the local MLN. Spinelli, still banned from France as a former communist, went clandestinely to Lyons with his wife Ursula Hirschmann at the beginning of 1945 to meet Ferrat and the group who revolved around him at Lyon libre, the local daily of the MLN. Their aim was to organize a federalist conference in Paris after the Liberation. The meeting is positive and Ferrat advises Spinelli and Ursula to meet Camus, they go on to Paris to meet Jacques Baumel, general secretary of the MLN, and Camus, both of them previous members of Combat and associated to CFFE since its creation. The Federalist Conference of Paris, convoked by Camus under the heading of the CFFE, took place in March 1945 with the presence of many French personalities and some foreign delegates.
At the same time, to return to a review of the publications of the Resistance, the CFFE at Lyons published the first of the two issues of the Cahier de la Fédération Européenne. The second published in Paris will be used as the Acts of the Conference and published in August 1945 under the aegis of the International Committee for the European Federation (CIFE), created in Paris to replace at this time the CFFE. One finds in the summary well-known themes and names: “For a democratic European Union” from the ex-leader of the PSOP Michel Collinet; “The tasks of the French foreign politics” signed by A. Altier, one of the pseudonyms of Spinelli; the “German Problem” by Altiero Spinelli; “Federalist Meditations the day after San Francisco” on the creation of the United Nations by the famous law professor Georges Scelle; “Europe Turns toward England” by the Swiss François Bondy, one of the two international and clandestine contacts of the CFFE and an ancient of Que faire?; “Is the Federation anti-Soviet?” by Pierre Brizon, the pseudonym of Lochac. This second and last Cahier ends with a press review and the Resolution of the conference of Paris.
The first secretariats of the CIFE animated by Francis Gerard Kumleben, a German anti-Nazi exiled at Paris in the 1930’s, is composed of various members of CFFE (Camus and the future high official Gaullist Baumel, Ferrat, the future Christian Democrat Senator of the Rhône Maurice Guérin), Robert Verdier of the SFIO, the British labourist member of parliament John Hynd, Altiero Spinelli, Bondy and the German anti-fascist Willi Eichler, a refugee in London. Several of the French members still have important responsibilities in the MLN or remain active in the press issued from clandestinity, even though some of them will progressively leave the federalist fight. Finally, there is Francis Gerard, Secretary of the CIFE, who a few months later, receiving the unexpected visit of Henri Brugman, the Dutch Federalist and resistant, in his office of chief editor of Libertés permitted to re-establish the contacts between the Federalists of different countries and envisage the foundation of the UEF at the Congress of Paris on the 15th and 16th December of 1946.
A great number of newspapers of the non-communist Resistance continued to be published, sometimes with new formulas and sometimes under new titles. It was the case of Combat, Défense de la France, Franc-Tireur, Libertés…, or even to-day La Voix du Nord or Témoignage Chrétien.
Translated by Joseph Monchamp
[1] Cf. J.-F. Billion, «Les revues de la Résistance française et l’Europe», pp. 359-396, in Communicating Europe – Journals and European Integration (1939-1979), eds. Daniele Pasquinicci, Daniela Preda and Luciano Tosi, Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2013, p. 610.
[2] Cf. J.-F. Billion, «Il Comité Français pour la Fédération Européenne: le radice, la fondazione i contatti», pp. 237-266, in, Altiero Spinelli il federalismo e la resistenza, eds. Cinzia Rognoni Vercelli, Paolo G. Fontana and Daniela Preda, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2012, p. 622.
[3] Interested readers will find more information on quotations and sources in a next coming publication by UEF France on a symposium hold in Paris, 3 December 2016, at the occasion of the 70th Anniversary of UEF founding in 1946.
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