Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

proof. He was beaten savagely with rifle butts for his persistent refusal to sign and thrown into a cell. Fearing that he might weaken after further torture, Moulin slit his throat with a piece of glass. This desperate act was probably more of a bid to escape than an attempt at suicide, for he took care to cut close to the jaw: deep enough to spill a lot of blood, but not deep enough to let him lose consciousness or sever an artery. He was taken to the hospital and released soon after. Moulin spent four more months as the Prefect of Eure-et-Loir before being sacked by Vichy. He moved back to his native village of Saint-Andiol, near Avignon, and for a while it looked as though he was settling into semiretirement.It was not until April 1941 that he started making contact with the Resistance.
    There were numerous Resistance organizations, some dedicated to sheltering Allied airmen and escaped prisoners, others to gathering intelligence for the Allies. ‘Colonel Rémy’ was the
nom de guerre
of Gilbert Renault, a film director who had rallied to de Gaulle. He set up a highly successful intelligence network known as the Confrérie de Nôtre-Dame. The Alliance organization, which became known to the Gestapo as ‘Noah’s Ark’ because each member had a bird or animal as code-name, was set up by Marshal Pétain’s former military aide, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, and taken over by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade when the Gestapo arrested him. She had been Loustaunau-Lacau’s secretary on his extreme right-wing review just before the war. Under her own code-name of ‘Hedgehog’, she continued with astonishing courage to build a nationwide network in liaison with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
    One movement – the French Communist Party – did not lack for clandestine experience, having been proscribed in 1939. It had, however, been deeply disorientated by the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. Twenty-seven members of the National Assembly had resigned from the party. The following year, Communists hardly knew how to react to the invasion of France. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, sent Hitler a message of congratulation on the fall of Paris, and some party loyalists welcomed the conquerors.
    When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the news came almost as a relief. The Nazis were once again the enemy. But the bitterness did not entirely disappear. A blacklist of party traitors was circulated, with orders for their assassination. A number of those on the list had collaborated with the Vichy regime, but many were fighting bravely in the Resistance; their crime was to have criticized the Nazi–Soviet pact openly in 1939 and 1940. These renegades – falsely accused of being ‘agents of the Gestapo’ – had to keep looking over their shoulder for the Germans, for the Milice, and also for killers sent after them by the Stalinist leadership, usually a fanatically loyal young militant mounted on a bicycle and armed with a revolver.
    The Communist Resistance organizations were the most difficult for the Abwehr and the Gestapo to infiltrate, partly because of theirstructure, based on three-man cells. But the most important innovation was a set of ruthless security measures established by the young Auguste Lecoeur, who, like the absent party leader Maurice Thorez, was a tough and intelligent miner from the northern coalfields. One can only guess at the number of innocent men and women killed or sacrificed to maintain Communist security during those years of clandestine existence.
    Whether or not the Communists were the first to strike openly against the Germans – the question is still not clear – the party claimed the first casualties. Martyrs were very important for propaganda: the French Communist Party later called itself ‘
le parti des fusillés
’ – the party of the executed – with the grossly inflated claim of 75,000 casualties.
    The first assassinations of German officers had unpredictable and far-reaching consequences. On 21 August, two months after the invasion of Russia, a Communist militant who later became the Resistance leader Colonel Pierre Georges Fabien shot down a very junior officer of the Kriegsmarine called Moser in a Paris métro station. A retroactive decree was passed which effectively made every prisoner, whatever his crime, a hostage liable to execution. To appease the German authorities, three Communists who had nothing to do with the attack were then sentenced to