The founding of the National Council of the Resistance

On the morning of 15 May 1943 the London daily France, as well as The Times and The New York Times, published a communiqué from the Gaullists in London: a Council of the Resistance (Conseil de la Résistance, later known as the National Council of the Resistance, Conseil national de la Résistance, CNR) had been formed in occupied France. It brought together representatives of all the main underground organisations, of the trade unions re-established clandestinely and of the former political parties of the Third Republic. The Council recognised General Charles de Gaulle as the sole legitimate leader of Fighting France. The communiqué was based on three telegrams of 8 May, signed with the pseudonym “Rex”, which had reached London on the evening of 14 May. Their author was Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal envoy in France.

Some chronologies state that on this day “the French create a resistance movement”. This is a simplification. The French Resistance had existed since the summer of 1940 and had almost three years of conspiracy, sabotage, underground press and assassinations behind it. What came into being in May 1943 was something else: a joint leadership that for the first time united the scattered movements, unions and parties in a single body subordinate to de Gaulle. The communiqué of 15 May announced something that was formally completed only at the Council’s first meeting in Paris on 27 May.

A fragmented resistance

After the defeat of 1940 and the Armistice of Compiègne, resistance in France grew from the bottom up, in many places at once and without a common plan. In the unoccupied zone, governed from Vichy by Marshal Philippe Pétain, three large movements emerged: Captain Henri Frenay’s Combat, Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie’s Libération-Sud and Jean-Pierre Lévy’s Franc-Tireur. In the occupied zone the active groups included the Organisation civile et militaire, Libération-Nord, Ceux de la Résistance and Ceux de la Libération. The communists formed a separate and numerous current: from 1941 the French Communist Party built up the Front national (National Front), and its armed groups, from which the Francs-tireurs et partisans grew, carried out attacks on German officers from the summer of 1941 onwards, such as the assassination of Karl Hotz in Nantes.

These movements differed in outlook, had ambitious leaders and guarded their independence. They were united by hostility to the Germans and to Vichy, but not always by their attitude to de Gaulle, whom many conspirators at home regarded as a general without an army, distant and suspiciously authoritarian. De Gaulle, for his part, needed the Resistance: without support at home his Free France was, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Washington, merely one émigré faction among others.

“Rex’s” mission

The man who was to change this was Jean Moulin, until 1940 prefect of the Eure-et-Loir department in Chartres, dismissed by Vichy in November that year. In the autumn of 1941 he made his way through Spain and Portugal to London, where he presented de Gaulle with a report on the state of the underground in France. The General made him his delegate in the unoccupied zone. On the night of 1–2 January 1942 Moulin parachuted into Provence with orders to persuade the movements to recognise London’s authority and to separate their political activity from their military activity. The money and the radio link with London at his disposal gave him real leverage.

The work went slowly and amid quarrels, above all with Frenay, who did not want to surrender control of his movement. Nevertheless, on 27 November 1942 a Coordinating Committee for the southern zone was set up at Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or near Lyon, and in January 1943 the three great southern movements merged into the United Resistance Movements (Mouvements unis de la Résistance, MUR). Their armed units formed the Secret Army (Armée secrète), at whose head de Gaulle placed General Charles Delestraint. Meanwhile the German Operation Anton of November 1942 had done away with the division into zones, and the creation of the STO, compulsory labour service in the Reich, drove thousands of young Frenchmen into the forests and the underground in February 1943.

In mid-February 1943 Moulin flew to London with Delestraint. De Gaulle awarded him the Cross of Liberation and appointed him a member of the French National Committee and his sole representative for the whole of metropolitan France. He was also given a new task: to create a single body for the whole of France in which representatives of the trade unions and parties would sit alongside the resistance movements. The idea was not his own. It had been circulating among the conspirators since the summer of 1942, and Moulin himself had at first been wary of it. He became convinced, however, that a council including the parties would show the Allies that the whole of political France, not just a handful of conspirators, stood behind de Gaulle. In the second half of March 1943 he returned to France by aircraft, landing by night in Burgundy.

Disputes over the council and the rivalry with Giraud

Not everyone wanted such a council. The leaders of the movements, Frenay among them, feared that the pre-war parties, discredited in their eyes by the defeat of 1940, would rob them of the fruits of their clandestine work. Pierre Brossolette, London’s envoy in the northern zone, had organised a coordinating committee there in March 1943 consisting solely of the movements, and he too looked unfavourably on the participation of the parties. Moulin, who held de Gaulle’s full powers and his money, eventually pushed his plan through. The compromise was that the resistance movements would have more seats on the council than the parties.

Politics forced the pace. After the Allied landings in North Africa and the assassination of Darlan, power in Algiers had passed to General Henri Giraud, who was backed by the Americans. In January 1943 at Casablanca, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had made him and de Gaulle shake hands in front of the press photographers, but there was no agreement. Giraud, although in March he had distanced himself from Vichy legislation, wanted to direct the French war effort as a commander, without a government, and treated de Gaulle as one general among many. Washington distrusted de Gaulle and preferred to deal with Giraud. De Gaulle wanted to go to Algiers, but the negotiations dragged on for weeks.

In this situation support at home was de Gaulle’s strongest argument. Moulin’s three telegrams of 8 May said it plainly: the Council of the Resistance had been constituted, and de Gaulle should send as soon as possible a message that would serve as its political programme. One of them stated that the French would never accept de Gaulle’s subordination to Giraud and demanded the swift formation in Algiers of a provisional government under de Gaulle’s leadership, with Giraud as military commander. De Gaulle’s people in London combined these texts into a single communiqué and passed it to the press at once. On 15 May the world learned that the French underground, from the communists to the right, had rallied behind de Gaulle.

The effect was rapid. Giraud, who could count on the army in Africa but not on the country, gave way and a few days later invited de Gaulle to Algiers. Historians regard the communiqué of 15 May as the turning point in the contest between the two generals: from then on the British and Americans could no longer treat de Gaulle as the leader of one émigré faction among many.

The meeting in the rue du Four

The first, founding meeting of the Council took place on 27 May 1943 in Paris, in René Corbin’s flat on the first floor of 48 rue du Four in the 6th arrondissement, a few hundred metres from the offices of the German security services. Moulin presided, accompanied by his assistants Pierre Meunier and Robert Chambeiron. Sixteen members sat around the table. Eight represented the resistance movements: the Front national, Ceux de la Libération, Ceux de la Résistance, Libération-Nord, Libération-Sud, the Organisation civile et militaire, Combat and Franc-Tireur. Two represented the trade union confederations re-established underground, the socialist and syndicalist CGT and the Christian CFTC. Six represented the parties: the communists, the socialists of the SFIO, the Radicals, the Christian Democrats of the Popular Democratic Party, the moderate right of the Democratic Alliance and the conservatives of the Republican Federation. Combat was represented by Claude Bourdet, the Christian Democrats by Georges Bidault, and the Front national by the communist Pierre Villon.

Moulin read out de Gaulle’s message, which called for the struggle for liberation and promised the restoration of democracy. The Council adopted a resolution demanding that de Gaulle be entrusted with the leadership of a provisional government and General Giraud with command of the army. For the first time in occupied France, people from the communists to the right recognised a single leader and a single goal. Years later Robert Chambeiron summed it up in these words: “Before 27 May there were resistance movements; after it there was the Resistance.”

Algiers and Caluire

Three days later, on 30 May 1943, de Gaulle flew to Algiers. At the beginning of June the two generals set up a joint French Committee of National Liberation, formally under their joint chairmanship. De Gaulle, however, had the backing of the country, and within a few months Giraud had been sidelined; in November 1943 he ceased to be co-chairman. In June 1944 the Committee became the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

At home the success came at a high price. On 9 June 1943 the Gestapo arrested General Delestraint in Paris, and on 21 June, at the house of Dr Dugoujon in Caluire-et-Cuire near Lyon, Klaus Barbie’s men seized Moulin together with several Resistance leaders. Tortured, he died at the beginning of July – according to his death certificate on 8 July in Metz, on the way to Germany. He betrayed no one, and the Council survived. For security reasons it gave up plenary meetings and worked through a five-member bureau. Bidault became the Council’s new chairman.

Place in the war

The founding of the National Council of the Resistance decided nothing at the front, but it changed the political balance on the Allied side. In the eyes of London and Washington de Gaulle ceased to be one of several claimants and became a leader backed by an underground organised from within France. Thanks to this, from Algiers he was able to press effectively for liberated France to come not under Allied military administration, as the Americans planned, but under the authority of his provisional government.

The Council also prepared a programme for the post-war period. On 15 March 1944, after many months of discussion, it adopted a document known simply as the CNR Programme. The first part concerned the struggle: preparing an uprising and co-operating with the Allies during the invasion. The second announced the punishment of traitors, the restoration of freedoms, universal social insurance and the nationalisation of key branches of the economy. After the liberation in 1944 and 1945 many of these pledges were put into effect. In 1944 the movements united by the Council became the backbone of the French Forces of the Interior, which operated behind German lines during the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

The Council’s founder lived to see none of these moments. In 1964 the ashes believed to be Moulin’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, and the oration delivered on that occasion by André Malraux became one of the most famous speeches in French history. Today 27 May is the National Day of the Resistance in France.