The Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris

On 17 October 1939 the Czechoslovak National Committee (Československý národní výbor) was set up in Paris as the body of the Czechoslovak political emigration, headed by the former President, Edvard Beneš. It was to represent abroad the Czechs and Slovaks, whose state had ceased to exist in March 1939, to direct the army being formed in exile, and to persuade the Western powers to recognise the continuity of Czechoslovakia and to repudiate the Munich Agreement. The Committee came into being as a compromise between the quarrelling leaders of the emigration and as a response to a step taken two weeks earlier without Beneš: on 2 October 1939 the Czechoslovak minister in Paris, Štefan Osuský, had signed an agreement with the French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, on the re-creation of the Czechoslovak army on French soil. The French government recognised the Committee on 13 November and the British on 20 December 1939, but only as a representation of the nation, not as a government. Beneš had to wait until 1940 and 1941 for full recognition.

An emigration without a state

After the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939 and the creation of the Protectorate, a day after the proclamation of the Slovak state, Czechoslovakia vanished from the map. Its diplomatic missions abroad remained, however, and some of them refused to hand their buildings over to the Germans. The most important was the legation in Paris, headed since 1920 by the Slovak Štefan Osuský, who during the First World War had worked with Tomáš Masaryk and Beneš in the Czechoslovak National Council. Osuský refused to accept the liquidation of the state and from the spring onwards became the unofficial spokesman of the Czechoslovak cause in Paris. Also in Paris was the former Prime Minister, the Slovak Milan Hodža, who had left the country after Munich.

Beneš, who had resigned the presidency on 5 October 1938 under pressure from Berlin, was lecturing at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1939. After 15 March he sent protests to the governments of the great powers, and from then on he regarded his resignation as forced and invalid, and himself as the legitimate President. In July he returned to Europe and settled in London. His position, however, was far from secure. To the British and French governments he was a living reproach for Munich and a politician whose return might hinder any possible settlement with Germany. Hodža and Osuský, who had disagreed with his policy in 1938, wanted a movement built afresh rather than a restoration of the pre-Munich authorities, and they had influence of their own in Paris. The dispute also had a national dimension: Hodža accused Beneš of disregarding Slovak aspirations, and the existence of the Slovak Republic made many Frenchmen doubt whether Beneš spoke for both nations.

Meanwhile soldiers were arriving in France. From the spring of 1939 thousands of people, many officers and airmen among them, had been fleeing the Protectorate through Poland and the Balkans. From Poland, where the Czech and Slovak Legion was later formed, more than 1,100 soldiers sailed for France between May and August. France, not yet at war, did not permit foreign armed forces to be raised, so the volunteers could only join the Foreign Legion or the colonial troops, on the understanding that in the event of war they would be transferred to Czechoslovak units.

The Osuský–Daladier agreement

The declaration of war on Germany on 3 September opened the way for that transfer. Poland was the first country to recognise a Czechoslovak military formation, by a decree of 3 September, but its defeat soon put an end to the project. In the west the initiative passed to Osuský. On 2 October 1939 he signed an agreement on the re-creation of the Czechoslovak army in France with Daladier, who at the time was simultaneously Prime Minister, Minister of National Defence and War and, since mid-September, Foreign Minister. Osuský signed it on behalf of a “provisional Czechoslovak government” which did not yet exist and which France had no intention of recognising for the time being. The agreement provided for the formation on French territory of a Czechoslovak infantry division and of air units. The force was to retain its Czechoslovak character and its own commanders but would be subordinate in operations to the French High Command, and France was to arm and equip it. It was an agreement similar to the Polish–French agreement of 9 September, on the basis of which the Polish Army in France was being formed in those same weeks.

The camp at Agde on the Mediterranean, built earlier for interned Spanish Republicans, became the formation centre. Soldiers transferred from the Foreign Legion and new volunteers were assembled there, and in mid-October the first infantry regiment was formed. The camp was unsuited to military training; there was a shortage of weapons, uniforms and equipment, and the volunteers from the Protectorate and Slovakia, a large proportion of them officers and NCOs, made up only part of the manpower needed. The rest was to come from the conscription of Czechoslovaks settled in France, mostly workers, miners and farmers, many of whom had lived abroad for years.

The agreement signed by Osuský caused unease in Beneš’s circle. It showed that the French were prepared to deal with anyone who could supply them with soldiers, and that a centre of authority for the emigration might emerge without the former President. Beneš, who had on his side authority, contacts and the loyalty of most of the Czech politicians in exile, could not afford a movement led by his rivals.

The founding of the Committee

The solution was the Czechoslovak National Committee, set up in Paris on 17 October 1939. Beneš wanted to form a government straight away, but France and Britain would not agree, so the more modest form of a committee was adopted, though it was meant to become the nucleus of a government in the future. Beneš was at its head. The leader of the Czechoslovak People’s Party, Monsignor Jan Šrámek, a priest who had served many times as a minister in pre-war governments, became acting vice-chairman. The members were Osuský; General Sergej Ingr, who was to be responsible for military affairs; the Slovak General Rudolf Viest, the future divisional commander; the diplomat and former minister in Warsaw Juraj Slávik (PL); the journalist and close associate of Beneš Hubert Ripka; and the economist Eduard Outrata. The membership was carefully balanced: Slovaks sat alongside Czechs, soldiers alongside politicians, and Beneš’s former critic Osuský alongside Beneš’s own men. Hodža remained outside the Committee.

Attached to the Committee were offices known as administrations (správy), which handled the affairs of the émigrés, finance, propaganda and communications with the home country. They were directed by the diplomat Prokop Maxa, and the most important of them was the military administration, which took charge of building the army. The Committee had its seat in Paris, although Beneš often stayed in London. Some Czech publications give 17 November 1939 as the date of the Committee’s founding; most sources, however, give 17 October, and the French recognition of 13 November confirms that the Committee already existed before then.

Recognition, but not as a government

France recognised the Committee by a note of 13 November 1939 as a body entitled to represent the Czech and Slovak nations and to direct the rebuilding of the Czechoslovak army. Britain did the same on 20 December. Both governments granted the Committee the right to conclude agreements, but did not regard them as concluded on behalf of the Czechoslovak Republic. On this basis the Committee signed agreements with the French on Czechoslovak air units and on the subjection of Czechoslovak soldiers to their own military courts, and announced the conscription of Czechoslovaks living in France. From December more than eight thousand conscripts joined the army, alongside more than three thousand volunteers. The 1st Czechoslovak Infantry Division was officially formed on 15 January 1940, and by May 1940 it numbered about ten thousand men.

The rivalry did not die down. In the autumn of 1939 Hodža set up a Slovak National Council in Paris, transformed at the beginning of 1940 into a Czech-Slovak National Council, which acted as an opposition to the Committee and courted the French. French diplomacy, wary of Beneš and uncertain what would become of Slovakia, avoided throughout the winter any unequivocal support for his plan to restore the pre-Munich republic. The Committee, however, was the only centre that had an army, and that decided its ascendancy.

Place in the war

In June 1940 two regiments of the Czechoslovak division fought in the Battle of France in the defence of the lines of the Marne, the Seine and the Loire, and Czechoslovak airmen, among them Alois Vašátko and František Peřina, were among the most successful pilots of the French air force. After the fall of France some five thousand soldiers, including almost all the airmen, made their way to Britain. There, in July 1940, the Committee was transformed into the Provisional Czechoslovak Government, with Beneš as President and Šrámek as Prime Minister, recognised by Britain first provisionally and then, in July 1941, fully, together with the Soviet Union. A State Council, a substitute parliament, was set up alongside the government, and for a time Hodža too sat on it. Osuský, increasingly at odds with Beneš, was dismissed from all his posts in 1942. Czechoslovak airmen fought in the Battle of Britain in Nos. 310 and 312 Squadrons RAF, and Josef František in the Polish No. 303 Squadron. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Britain and the Free French declared the Munich Agreement null and void, fulfilling the main purpose for which the Committee had been founded in October 1939.

The road from the committee in Paris to the government in London allowed Beneš to return home in 1945 as a president recognised by all the Allies and to rebuild Czechoslovakia within its pre-Munich borders, though by then in the shadow of Joseph Stalin, with whom he had concluded an alliance in 1943. The fortunes of the Czechoslovak emigration in these months ran parallel to those of the Poles: at the same time the government of Władysław Sikorski and a Polish army were taking shape in France, and in 1940 the two governments began talks on a future confederation, which came to nothing. In the Protectorate itself the autumn of 1939 brought the first mass protests against the occupier. Anti-German demonstrations on 28 October, the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, ended with the shooting of the student Jan Opletal, who died on 11 November; after his funeral, on 17 November, the Germans closed the Czech universities and sent more than a thousand students to a concentration camp. The Committee in exile and the resistance at home established contact from the outset, and their cooperation became one of the pillars of the Czechoslovak resistance throughout the war.