Georges Picquart was born in Geudertheim, Alsace, in 1854. A bright student of the Lycée Impérial, in Strasbourg, his schooling was interrupted when war broke out with Prussia, in 1870. Following the annexation of Alsace-Moselle, his family fled to Versailles. The trauma of defeat and the effect of being uprooted doubtless played a part in his decision to pursue a military career, which got off to a very promising start: fifth in his year group, he graduated with flying colours from the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. A brilliant officer committed to republican values, Picquart rose rapidly through the ranks. A highly cultured polyglot, fluent in six languages, he was a regular frequenter of salons, museums and theatres. A music lover, he became a friend of Gustav Mahler, travelling across Europe to attend concerts conducted by him. After a number of campaigns in Algeria and Tonkin (a former French protectorate in northern Vietnam), in 1893 he joined the staff of General Galliffet. It was in this role that he became involved, without playing a central part, in the investigation into Captain Dreyfus, accused of spying for Germany. Alfred Dreyfus was tried behind closed doors by a council of war which, at the end of 1894, stripped him of his rank and deported him for life to French Guiana.

 In July 1895, Georges Picquart replaced Colonel Sandherr as head of counter-espionage in what was known as the “Statistics Section” of the Deuxième Bureau.  In other words, he became head of the French intelligence service. Meanwhile, he taught topography at the École Supérieure de Guerre. A man of few words who respected military order, he was driven by a desire to modernise the army for the sake of technical efficiency. On 6 April 1896, he became the youngest lieutenant-colonel. Trusted by his superiors, his appraisals commended his “friendly, likeable” character, his “very sound” judgment, his “perfect” manners, his “very wide-ranging” education, and his “superior” intelligence. He unquestionably represented the future of the French army.

Everything was to change a year later.

In March 1896, Picquart discovered, in a bundle of papers from the German Embassy, a document that would lead to the reopening of the Dreyfus case. In Picquart’s opinion, this sheet of paper - the famous petit bleu - taken in conjunction with the document unjustly attributed to Dreyfus at his trial, provided irrefutable evidence of the innocence of the Devil’s Island deportee. His mind made up, Picquart undertook with absolute determination to see that the truth prevailed. This sense of a duty of truth, this concept of justice which he set above all other considerations - including an uncertain higher interest of the army - were decisive traits in Picquart’s personality. Relaunching his predecessor’s inquiry, Picquart soon became convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence and of the culpability of Ferdinand Esterhazy. As his conclusions were not in line with the official version of the affair, Picquart’s career came to an abrupt halt: sacked from his post as intelligence chief in October 1896, he was sent on an open-ended tour of inspection around France, followed by Algeria and Tunisia, in a sector so exposed that, on 2 April 1897, feeling in danger, he drew up his will.

But Georges Picquart was unyielding in his quest for the truth, and the humiliations he suffered only made him more determined to seek justice. He aligned himself increasingly with Dreyfus’s supporters, the dreyfusards, which led him in turn to be a target of accusations. It should be noted that war minister General Mercier was himself a fierce anti-dreyfusard. The fact that the French President, Félix Faure, was also hostile to any revision of the Dreyfus case helps give a clearer idea of Picquart’s tenacity. It was because of that tenacity that he was discharged - i.e. dismissed - from the army in February 1898, then arrested and imprisoned for 11 months, from 13 July 1898 to 9 June 1899, for passing on the evidence he had in support of Dreyfus’s innocence to a politician, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.

A hero for the dreyfusards and a traitor for their adversaries, Picquart played a key role in the Rennes case of 1899, which ended with Dreyfus’s pardon and amnesty. But Picquart, who now had no more than his army discharge pension to live on, did not abandon his fight for the truth: the verdict, which spared the army’s honour without restoring his own, made him sick to the heart. The uncompromising Picquart was ardently opposed to all those he considered too hasty in forgetting the past. On his journey through the wilderness, his only goal was to get his name cleared. Dreyfus must be retried in order for his innocence to at last be recognised; that alone could both erase the injustice done to the degraded captain and make amends for the damage inflicted on the honour and career of the discharged lieutenant-colonel. Picquart’s quest for truth therefore caused his own destiny to become tied to that of Dreyfus.

 On 12 July 1906, the French court of appeal annulled the Rennes judgment, recognising Dreyfus’s innocence and clearing his name. As for Picquart, it was not a case of getting his name cleared, because he had not been convicted. But his military career had come to an abrupt end, and he was determined to obtain recompense. On 13 July 1906, two bills were tabled, one concerning Dreyfus’s reinstatement, the other Picquart’s. Both were passed with a very large majority, in the National Assembly and the Senate. The text of the bill read as follows:

“The proclamation of Dreyfus’s innocence shows that the efforts made loyally and courageously since 1896 by Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, at the risk of ruining his career irrevocably, to ensure that truth prevailed, were justified. This senior officer, discharged on 26 February 1898, can only be reinstated into the ranks of the military by law. We request, in addition, that you permanently erase the effects of his discharge, promote him to the rank of brigadier, to which 64 officers of the rank of lieutenant-colonel with the same or fewer years of service than he have been appointed, and backdate his appointment to 10 July 1903, the day before the longest-serving of these officers was promoted.”

Justice had been done for Picquart. His honour restored, he progressed once more in his career. Now a brigadier with three retroactive years of service, he was promoted to major-general on 23 October 1906. Meanwhile, the elections brought victory for Georges Clemenceau’s radicals, the very same Georges Clemenceau who had previously worked for L’Aurore, the daily that published ‘J’accuse... !’, Émile Zola’s open letter in support of Alfred Dreyfus. France’s “number-one cop” became prime minister. He knew the Alsatian general well, having witness his strength of character, independence of spirit and courage. To everyone’s astonishment, beginning with that of Picquart himself, he made him his Minister of War.

The former outlaw knew more than anyone else how much the Dreyfus Affair had left marks and divisions within the army. Once in government, he strove to rebuild it more democratically. The new minister made frequent tours on the ground, showing a concern for improving the lives of the ordinary troops through advances in the areas of lodging, food, hygiene, transport and employment conditions. He intended to show the country that the government cared about its soldiers. He improved soldier training and urged Foch and Joffre to modernise the military academies. He worked to reconcile the army with itself and with the nation. His actions eased political tensions and asserted the core values of the Republic. Finally, the guiding principle of his work as war minister was the desire to modernise military hardware, in particular artillery. In late July 1909, with the fall of the Clemenceau government, it was almost with relief that Major-General Picquart left his ministerial functions, despite a more than respectable administration.

After a few months’ freedom which he spent travelling, Picquart was given a command role in February 1910. At the age of 56, he became - what was a constant throughout his career - the youngest commander of an army corps, when he took command of the 2nd Army Corps, stationed at Amiens.

On 14 January 1914, as every day, Georges Picquart set out on horseback. It was 7.30 am, bitterly cold, and the ground had been frozen solid for several days. He mounted Voltigeur, a notoriously agitated horse, accompanied by his flag-bearer. At full trot along a mud track between Dury and Saint-Fuscien, Voltigeur stumbled, then kicked. His rider lost hold of the reins and was thrown to the ground, landing on his head. He got up, quite composed despite considerable bleeding, and, refusing to rest, got back on the horse and set off for Amiens. On arrival at his headquarters, he alighted from his horse and, as usual, did not leave without first giving him a sugar cube. That day and the next, contrary to the advice of his doctor, friends and family, the general was at his post. But his condition deteriorated: the violent fall had caused facial swelling, which got worse, bringing on ever more severe fits of breathlessness. The last one was fatal. Georges Picquart died on the morning of 19 January 1914. He was not yet 60.

The portrait of Georges Picquart by Eugène Carrière is reproduced by kind permission of the Musée Eugène Carrière.

Colonel Fred Moore, Honorary Chancellor of the Order of Liberation, 8 April 1920 - 16 September 2017

Fred Moore was born in Brest on 8 April 1920. He was brought up in Amiens, where his father, a former officer of the Royal Navy who became a French citizen in 1926, opened a shop in 1921.

After completing his schooling at the Lycée d’Amiens, Moore trained as an optician at the École Nationale d’Optique, in Morez, in the Jura.

Too young to be mobilised, in May 1940 he enlisted as a volunteer with the 117th Air Battalion stationed at Chartres, but was not allowed to join his unit.

Having gained his driving licence in 1938, Moore was eventually assigned to the 1st Transport Regiment, before taking part in the Dakar expedition in September 1940.

Sent for cadet training at Camp Colonna d’Ornano, Brazzaville, in December 1940, on 14 July 1941 he was appointed a junior officer and sent to Beirut to serve with the Levant forces.

On 1 September 1941, he was assigned to the Moroccan Spahis, as leader of 2nd Platoon, 1st Squadron of the Army Corps Reconnaissance Group (GRCA), in Damascus, in training for the Libya campaign.

In April 1942, he went to Egypt with his unit, which soon became the 1st Infantry Regiment of Moroccan Spahis (1st RMSM). From then on, as leader of the 2nd Reconnaissance Platoon, he took part in all the campaigns with 1st Squadron, 1st RMSM, fighting in Egypt, then Libya.

In 1943, Moore distinguished himself in Tunisia, in particular on 6 March at Oued Gragour, where, outnumbered, he engaged his platoon with dogged determination against enemy armour, holding them back twice. This delaying action gave time for the bulk of the troops to arrive and defeat the enemy. In April, he took part in the fighting around Djebel Fadeloun with General Leclerc’s “Force L”.

In July 1943, he was assigned for a month and a half to General de Gaulle’s guard of honour in Algiers, before returning to the 1st RMSM in Morocco, where the 2nd Armoured Division (2nd DB) was being formed.

On 10 April 1944, he embarked at Oran for England with his unit.

Promoted in June 1944 to the rank of lieutenant, Moore landed at Grandcamp, Normandy, with the 2nd DB, on 2 August 1944. He fought in Normandy as commander of 2nd Platoon, 5th Squadron (the renamed 1st Squadron) of the 1st RMSM. Between 15 and 29 August 1944, he and his platoon put three German anti-tank guns out of action and captured over a hundred prisoners and a significant amount of equipment, losing only two men in the process.

In the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, he played an active part in the taking of the École Militaire, then, on 27 August, in the battle of Dugny-Le Bourget, at Seine-Saint-Denis.

Next came the Vosges campaign where, showing boldness and initiative, on 23 September 1944 he joined the fighting in the Mondon Forest, inflicting heavy material and human losses on the enemy at Buriville, on the Luneville-Strasbourg road.

In the Alsace campaign, he fought actively at Mittelbronn near Sarrebourg on 20 November, in the liberation of Strasbourg on 23 November, then in the taking of Plobsheim, Krafft and Gerstheim on 28, 29 and 30 November.

In April 1945, Lieutenant Moore took part in operations on the La Rochelle front, before participating in the final combats in Germany.

After being demobilised in April 1946, he opened his own optician’s shop in Amiens.

Promoted to the rank of reserve captain in 1950, Moore was called up again in May 1956 and assigned to the 6th Regiment of Moroccan Spahis. He served in Algeria until November 1956, as commander of 4th Squadron.

He was promoted successively within the reserve, first to squadron commander in October 1958, then to lieutenant-colonel in 1966 and colonel in 1971. He was commanding officer of the 54th Divisional Infantry Regiment (RID) of the Oise from 1962 to 1978.

He was made an honorary colonel on 8 April 1982.

Elected as a member of parliament for Amiens (the first constituency of the Somme department) in 1958, he served as a technical advisor to the Ministry of Industry (1962-64) and as a member of the Economic Council (1964-66). In 1969, he retired from all his political functions to devote himself to his work as an optician.

Between 1969 and 1974, he was national vice-chairman of the Order of Opticians, chairman and CEO of Société Industrielle de Développement Électronique et Nucléaire (SIDEN), and also served on the boards of a number of companies.

From 1977 to 1982, he was general secretary of the French opticians union and its European equivalent, EUROM.

In March 2004, Moore was appointed a member of the board of the Order of Liberation; by decree of 11 October 2011, he succeeded François Jacob as the Order’s chancellor.

On 16 November 2012, he was appointed general secretary of the Order of Liberation’s governing body, the Conseil National des Communes “Compagnon de la Libération”. After having his appointment renewed in October 2015, he retired from his functions in January 2017 and was made Honorary Chancellor of the Order of Liberation.

Fred Moore died on 16 September 2017 in Paris, where he is buried.

• Grand Croix of the Legion of Honour

• Compagnon de la Libération, by decree of 17 November 1945

• Croix de Guerre 1939-45 (various citations)

• Médaille des Evadés

• Médaille Coloniale, with additions for “Libya” and “Tunisia”

• Croix du Combattant Volontaire 1939-45

• Croix du Combattant Volontaire de la Résistance

• Officier des Palmes Académiques

• Médaille des Services Militaires Volontaires

• Médaille Commémorative des Services Volontaires dans la France Libre

• Médaille Commémorative des Opérations de Sécurité et de Maintien de l’Ordre en Algérie

• Presidential Unit Citation (USA)

• Officer of the Order of Nichan Iftikhar (Tunisia)

• Officer of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite (Morocco)

Publication :

• « Toujours Français Libre ! », Elytis, Bordeaux 2014

ITW [P. 5] Les Chemins de la Mémoire-n°232 - Déc. 2012/Jan. 2013 (in French)

Remembrance sites | Musée de l'Ordre de la Libération

The son of a captain in the gendarmes, Henri Berthelot was born on 7 December 1861 in Feurs, in the Loire. He graduated from Saint Cyr fourth in his year, and opted to join the Colonial Army. As a sub-lieutenant in the 1st Regiment of Zouaves of Koléas, Algeria, he was sent to Indochina, where he had his baptism of fire. Promoted to lieutenant in 1886, he became a Knight of the Order of the Dragon of Annam in July 1887. A fever prompted his return to France, where he joined the 96th Infantry Regiment at Gap.

Admitted to the École Supérieure de Guerre, he obtained his General Staff Brevet and was promoted to the rank of captain in 1891. He then left for Austria to improve his German. He became General Joseph Brugère’s aide-de-camp in the 132nd Infantry Regiment at Reims, then in the 8th Army Corps at Bourges. After a spell with the 2nd Army Corps at Amiens, he was reassigned to the 132nd Infantry Regiment at Reims in 1897, then transferred to the 115th Infantry Regiment in July 1899.

Returning to General Brugère, now military governor of Paris, Berthelot supervised the organisation of the army pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Promoted to chef de bataillon (major) in November that year, he accompanied Czar Nicholas II on a visit to Reims in 1901, as Brugère’s aide-de-camp.

In 1903, he became commander of the 20th Battalion of Chasseurs à Pied in Baccarat. Recalled by Brugère in January 1906, in December he was appointed to the 2nd Bureau of the Directorate for Infantry. Made a lieutenant-colonel in March 1907, in October he became secretary of the Army Staff Technical Committee. He was promoted to colonel in 1910, and took over command of the 94th Infantry Regiment of Bar-le-Duc the following year. In 1913, he joined the staff of Joffre, the Chief of the General Staff. Involved in drawing up Plan XVII, the plan for the mobilisation and concentration of the French Army in the event of war, he did not believe the Germans would invade via Belgium.

In 1914, he was made General Joffre’s chief aide-de-camp in charge of operations. In disgrace following the failures of August, Berthelot received notice of transfer to the command of the 5th Reserve Divisions Group on 21 November. In January 1915, he led an offensive at Crouy, near Soissons. After fierce fighting, he was forced to retreat behind his starting positions.

From 3 August 1915 to 19 September 1916, he was in command of the 32nd Army Corps (32nd CA), or the “Berthelot Group”, which took part in the Champagne offensive in September-October. In March 1916, the 32nd CA was at Verdun, where it was tasked with taking back Mort-Homme and Hill 304. The 32nd CA left Verdun in June to serve in the Vosges then on the Somme.

On 14 October 1916, Berthelot led the French military mission in Romania, with nearly 2 000 officers and NCOs in his command. He reorganised the Romanian Army, which had been severely impacted by Germany and was resisting with difficulty in Moldavia. Cut off from the Allies after Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict, Romania signed the Armistice of Focșani on 9 December 1917..

Following his return to France, General Berthelot was put in command of the 5th Army by General Foch, from 5 July to 7 October 1918, taking part in the battles of Reims and Épernay.

On 7 October, he was recalled to command another Romanian mission. This time, his role was as much diplomatic as military. Now with a modernised and reorganised army, Romania took up arms once again on 10 November, just as the Central Empires were crumbling. This new military intervention succeeded in containing the pressure from the Russian Revolution in the Balkans, as well as satisfying certain Romanian claims, namely regarding Transylvania and northern Banat.

Following the German defeat, Berthelot was tasked with fighting the Russian Bolsheviks in Bessarabia, then the Hungarian Bolsheviks in Transylvania during the Hungarian-Romanian War of 1919. He went on to become military governor of Metz until 1922, then of Strasbourg from 1923 to 1926.

He died in Paris in January 1931, and is buried in Nervieux, in his native Forez.

He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre 1914-1918 with three palms, the Médaille Militaire, the 1914-1918 Inter-Allied Victory Medal, as well as many foreign decorations.

Ministère de la défense/SGA/DMPA

The son of a clergyman, Milan Stefanik was born on 21 July 1880, in Kosariska.  After studying in Bratislava, Sopron and Sarvas, he went on to Prague University, where he studied mathematics and astronomy, before gaining a PhD in 1904. In 1905, he became assistant director of the Meudon Observatory, in France, published many treatises and organised seven astronomical observation expeditions to the summit of Mont Blanc. A great traveller, he undertook a number of diplomatic and astronomical missions on behalf of the French government, including one to Tahiti in 1910 to observe the passage of Halley’s Comet.

Milan Stefanik during a stay at the Meudon Observatory, France. Source: IMS

Naturalised French in 1912 and made a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur in 1914, Stefanik enlisted in the French Army, and in three years rose to the rank of brigadier. Assigned to the air force, he made improvements to military meteorology. In 1916 and 1917, he went in an official capacity to Romania, Siberia and the United States, to organise the recruitment of Czechoslovakian volunteers. On 21 April 1918, Stefanik signed, with Italian prime minister Orlando, the treaty establishing a Czechoslovak army on the Italian front.

Sergeant Stefanik is awarded the Croix de Guerre 1914-1918 with palm, for his service in the air force, France. © SHD

France made him a Commander of the Légion d’Honneur. On 28 October 1918, Czechoslovakia became an independent nation, and Stefanik was appointed Minister for War in the new government. On his journey home, on 4 May 1919, he was killed when his aircraft crashed near Bratislava. His body has laid to rest in the Bradlo mausoleum since 1928.

Source : Ministère de la défense/SGA/DMPA

Roland Garros, the unknown celebrity

There are some names that everyone knows, yet less well known is the fate of those who bore them. Roland Garros is perhaps one of the best examples, given that the success of the tennis tournament that bears his name is such that it has subsequently almost completely eclipsed the extraordinary trajectory of this aeronautical pioneer, who was lost in the final weeks of the Great War.

Born 6 October 1888 in the French overseas department of Réunion, Garros grew up in Saigon before leaving for boarding school in Paris at the age of 12. In fragile health, he continued his schooling in Cannes, then in Nice where he discovered a passion for sport. Cycling and football occupied much of his energies, though he did not neglect his studies.

With a degree in Business Studies, Garros opened a car dealership, even offering a sports model he had equipped himself. Following rapid commercial success he treated himself to his own aeroplane in which he taught himself to fly in the Spring of 1910. The fascination he had experienced a year earlier at an air show in Reims for the fragile canvas-covered birds he had seen stayed with him. Ending his motor business, he subsequently committed himself entirely to aviation.

It all took off quickly – that summer he won his first paid contracts at provincial shows, before training in the United States with the aviator John Moisant and heading off on tour with Moisant's aerial circus.  Returning to France in 1911, Garros participated in the great air races that were in fashion at the time, and then, tireless, set off at the end of the year for another tour in Brazil.

Having only recently returned to Paris, in mid-June 1912, he secured a spirited victory at the Grand Prix de L'Aero-club de France, donating his aircraft, a Blériot XI, to the army, which entrusted it to Captain De Rose, the first officer to earn a military pilot's licence.

The fates of these two men, founding fathers of pursuit aviation, were persistently intertwined from that point onwards. Although we do not know when they first met, we know that they swiftly became friends and colleagues, working throughout that year on the problem of synchronising machine-gun fire and propellers. At the same time, Garros continued to rise to new challenges, chasing the world altitude record at the controls of his Morane-Saulier, followed by a triumphal crossing of the Mediterranean on 23 September 1913. Competitions right across Europe followed while Garros, just like Pégoud, uncovered the secrets of looping the loop.

When war broke out, he could not be mobilised, but he made all haste to sign up and on 4 August was enrolled as a pilot into MS 23 Squadron. He flew many missions while securing permission that autumn from his commanders to continue his research on guns and propellers, supported by Captain de Rose. Assisted by Jules Hue, his faithful mechanic, Garros was able to perfect a system of deflectors for propeller blades, with which he brought down his first aircraft on 1 April 1915.

Unfortunately, 18 days later he took damage to his plane and was forced to land behind German lines. His aircraft, which he was unable to completely destroy, fell into enemy hands. Three long years in prison followed, over the course of which this man of letters and friend of Jean Cocteau wrote his memoirs.

On 15 February 1918 he managed to escape, accompanied by Lieutenant Marchal, and arrived back in France after a long journey. Refusing the technical post he had been offered, he immediately asked to be reassigned to his unit, the MS 26. In May he left for retraining in Pau to acquire new fighting methods on the SPAD XIII, before rejoining his unit on 20 August. Little by little, he recovered his touch and, even if his failing sight worried him, he eventually won a victory on 2 October. Three days later he disappeared, his machine having been brought down in flight by a Fokker patrol.

Marie-Catherine Villatoux, Service historique de la défense/DAA.

Born in Lons-le-Saunier on 10 May 1760, Claude-Joseph Rouget played the violin and composed instinctively from an early age. He added his grandfather’s “de Lisle” to the end of his name in order to get into the École du Génie in Paris aged 16.

Six years later he graduated as a lieutenant and, after three postings, in 1791 was sent to Strasbourg where, with other officers, he was received into the salons of mayor Dietrich. Tired of hearing “it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine” (the words of the revolutionary song Ça ira !), Dietrich asked the young captain, who already had something of a reputation as a composer, to write a patriotic song. Surprised, Rouget tried to wriggle out of it, but at the insistence of the mayor and officers, he eventually agreed.

On returning home, he took up his fiddle and ran through some arpeggios, while his head pounded with the words he had heard that evening. Gradually a melody took shape and the lyrics were fitted to the music. Exhausted, the composer fell asleep. At daybreak, he went to see the mayor who, astonished by his speed, sat down at the harpsichord and played through the piece. He called the officers who had been present the previous evening and, in a booming voice, sang: “Arise, children of the motherland!” All heartily approved, and Rouget was delighted.

After the proclamation of the Republic, he was reinstated and joined the Army of the North, but was suspended from his captain’s duties and became a target of suspicion. Arrested and imprisoned, almost certainly for criticising the execution of the former mayor of Strasbourg, he wrote a memoir. With the death of Robespierre, he was released.

The decree of the Thermidorian Convention of 26 Messidor Year III (in the Republican Calendar), which chose the Marseillaise as a “national song”, was never implemented.

Reinstated in the army, Rouget de Lisle resigned from his post to devote himself to poetry and music. On 10 Vendémiaire Year IV, his work was performed at the Opéra and the Opéra Comique. Bonaparte asked Rouget to compose him a song, but it was not to his liking and he rejected it. Mortified, Rouget wrote him an arrogant letter. He would never serve the Empire, and once again became an object of suspicion. In 1812, he went to live in the family home in Montaigu (Jura), and compose; in 1817, he moved to Paris where, in 1825, he published a collection of 50 Chants français (French songs).

The Duke of Orléans, an old comrade-in-arms, awarded Rouget de Lisle three pensions, which freed him of any financial worries. He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. Upon his death, in Choisy-le-Roi, at the age of 77, little did he know that his song would become the national anthem of France in 1879. He was buried in the cemetery of Choisy-le-Roi, and his ashes were transferred to Les Invalides on 14 July 1915.

Marie-Louise Jacotey - Historian

Transfer of Rouget de Lisle’s ashes to Les Invalides, 14 July 1915 © BnF, Distribution RMN-Grand Palais / Photo BnF

The 2008 graduating class at the Naval Officers’ College took the name "promotion Hederer" in memory of Fernand Hederer, a Navy Commissioner, veteran of the Great War and resistant against the Nazi occupant.

Born in 1889, Fernand Hederer was part of the 1913 graduating class of the French Naval Officers’ College. In 1914, he was assigned to the 1st Regiment of Naval Gunners, and then to the 1st Heavy Railway Artillery group, where he served as second officer and then as battery commander. On 6 April, 1916, Hederer became an air observer and then fighter pilot in September 1917. In February 1918 he took over commandment of the SPAD 285 fighter squadron, an exceptional honour for a young 3rd-class commissioner.

The war was an opportunity for him to get to know “Flying Aces”, notably Coli, Guynemer, Fonck and Navarre. Hederer received several commendations (army, division and regiment) and was decorated with the War Cross with three palms and three stars, as well as the Legion of Honour in 1917. All the commendations he received pointed out the man’s qualities, his courage, his energy, his disdain for danger and his leadership qualities. Hederer also brought home from the war a piece of shrapnel in his right forearm and a half-frozen foot from a flight during which the only way he got away from the enemy was by flying as high as he could. But there was one wound that would never heal – the twenty pilots in his squadron who were killed in action in less than one year.

When peace returned, 1st class commissioner Hederer served on board the armoured cruiser Marseillaise, then as the commissioner of the naval base in Constantinople. He then joined the maritime stewardship services at various ports. In 1925, he started a new career in the naval inspection corps. In 1929, at his own request, he was assigned to the Ministry of Aviation. He carried out sometimes sensitive inspection missions, such as that of the Compagnie Générale Aéropostale in South America, which led to his integration, in 1933, into the French aeronautics administration’s inspection corps. Appointed inspector general in March 1936, he worked with Pierre Cot, then Minister of Aviation, in directing the nationalisation of the aeronautics industry.

Still on Cot’s staff during the "phoney war", Hederer was seriously wounded in an automobile accident during the rout of June 1940. At the start of the Occupation, he took part in distributing anti-German propaganda. Under the war name "Pommery", he took part in many resistance actions and joined the Marco Polo resistance network on 1 January 1943. He had contacts with emissaries from London and supplied information to the SRA in Lyon, notably concerning the Luftwaffe’s activities between Salon-de-Provence and Marignane: warehousing "of bombs and munitions, control points, radars, location of anti-aircraft defences, etc.” As the organiser of this aviation intelligence service, his activities led him to be on the Gestapo’s wanted list for Marseille and Aix at the beginning of 1944.

During the liberation of Paris, he ensured and reorganised the administrative organs of the Ministry of Aviation under his own authority. His conduct was rewarded with the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour plaque, the 1939-1945 War Cross with palms and the Resistance Medal with rosette.

After the war, he was named director of inspections for aeronautics and then for armaments, finishing his career in government service as Secretary General for Civil Aviation. Having reached the age limit for his rank in 1951, he began a new career in industry. He held the position of CEO of the Société Française d'équipements pour la Navigation Aérienne until 1965.

At the age of 93, he was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. This decoration was presented to him by Marcel Dassault, who was happy to pay homage to the man who had defended him when, in 1941, he was arrested on order from Laval, to the man who had helped his wife during the two years that the aircraft manufacturer spent in deportation at the Buchenwald concentration camp and who had helped several Jewish families seeking refuge in the South of France.

C. Mommessin, First Class Navy Commissioner, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 197/September 2009

In 1859, a young Swiss man named Henry Dunant discovered the horrors of war on the battlefield of Solferino, Italy. He decided to create an international organisation to help people injured in conflicts.

The Red Cross was born.

Born in Geneva on 8 May 1828, Henry Dunant was the son of a very pious and charitable Calvinist family. He dropped out of secondary school and took up an apprenticeship at a Geneva bank. He became involved in social action and dedicated part of his time visiting prisoners and helping the poor.

In 1853, he went to Algeria to head a Swiss colony in Sétif. He sought to build a flour mill, but as he could not get a concession for the land he needed for it to operate, he went to Paris to meet with Napoléon III. But he was leading the Franco-Sardinian troops fighting against the Austrians in northern Italy. Dunant went there to see the Emperor. On 24 June 1859, the day of the battle, he arrived at Castiglione, in Lombardy, a small town near the site of the fighting. The next day he discovered the Solferino battlefield. "At every step, anyone who visited this immense theatre of the fighting the day before saw, in the unprecedented confusion, inexpressible despair and all kinds of misery ". Faced with so much suffering, Dunant took control of the organisation of assistance and managed to ensure that Austrian prisoners would be treated the same way as other soldiers. He also made sure that the Austrian doctors who had been taken prisoner were able to treat the wounded.

Back in Geneva, he wrote Un souvenir de Solferino (A Memory of Solferino, 1862) in which he described the battle and laid out his ideas for improving the fate of wounded soldiers. "Isn’t there a way to set up emergency relief societies whose purpose would be to provide care to the wounded in wartime by impassioned, dedicated, well-qualified volunteers?"

On 17 February 1863, Dunant created a permanent international committee for caring for wounded soldiers which, in 1875, took on the name of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). On 26 October 1863, some fifteen countries took part in the international conference of Geneva that was the Red Cross’s real founding act. Supported by Napoléon III, the committee, for which Dunant was a member and secretary, prepared the Geneva Convention signed by fifteen countries in 1864.

Dunant was now famous and was received by many Heads of State. But his financial affairs were in poor condition – he declared bankruptcy in 1867. Ruined, deep in debt, he had to resign from his position at the International Committee. In Paris, he was reduced to sleeping on park benches. But Empress Eugénie called him to the Tuileries Palace to get his opinion on extending the Geneva Convention to war at sea. Dunant was then named an honorary member of the National Red Cross Societies of Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Prussia and Spain.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he visited the wounded soldiers brought back to Paris and introduced the use of identification tags, or “dog tags”, to be able to identify the dead.

When peace returned, Dunant went to London where he tried to organise a diplomatic conference to rule on the fate of war prisoners; the Czar encouraged him, but England was hostile to the project. On 1 February 1875, at his initiative, an international conference for "the complete and definitive abolition of the trafficking of negroes and the slave trade" opened in London.

The following years were a time of wandering and poverty: Dunant travelled by foot to Alsace, Germany and Italy; he lived off the charity and hospitality of a few friends. Finally, in 1887, he found himself in a small Swiss town overlooking Lake Constance: Heiden.

Ill, he took refuge at the hospice and that is where a journalist found him in 1895 and wrote an article published in the press throughout Europe a few days later. Dunant suddenly became famous and received honours. He received the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He died on 30 October 1910.

Source :

In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 196/July-August 2009 

Charles de Rose, father of the art of the fighter pilot

Jean-Baptiste Marie Charles Tricornot de Rose, aka Carlo, Baron de Tricornot, Marquis de Rose, is unknown to the general public. But this inventive free spirit was the emblematic figure behind fighter aircraft, of which he was the founding father.

Born in Paris on 16 October 1876, Charles de Tricornot de Rose chose to carry on with the family tradition of taking up a military career. Indeed, for six generations the Tricornots had been cavalry officers. Admitted to Saint-Cyr in 1895, has was then assigned to the 9th Dragoon Regiment in Lunéville. The brilliant career that lay ahead of him was cut short in 1906. Carlo de Rose was arrested for refusing to expel a priest from his church in application of the law on the separation of Church and State.

Acquitted by the Council of War, he was nonetheless inactive for three years. Carlo de Rose took advantage of this difficult situation to study mechanics and internal combustion engines, even finding work at the Brillié automobile company. This experience, which was to be decisive for the rest of his career, revealed a free spirit, a man who was curious and imaginative, who understood the changes that were to lead to future technical advances. His time in limbo came to an end on 25 March 1909, when he was reinstated into the French Army.

Assigned to the 19th Dragoon Regiment in Carcassonne, Carlo de Rose nonetheless did not hesitate to volunteer at the end of the year for pilot training as General Roques was setting up the Army Aeronautical Service. He received his civilian licence from the Aéro-club in December 1910 and made a name for himself by participating in several races. Carlo de Rose had found his calling in aviation, where his inventive, energetic spirit was able to express itself to the fullest.

In pursuit of enemy aircraft

In May 1911, he was officially attached to the establishment in Vincennes where he carried out several research projects in the aviation field. De Rose undertook many experiments, performing the first aircraft artillery fire adjustments the following August. He had a passion for aircraft weaponry, and his meeting with Roland Garros in 1912 turned out to be a decisive step in this process.

When the war broke out, he was put in command of the 5th Army’s aeronautical division, and his experience was invaluable. Frantz and Quenault’s victory, shooting down a German aircraft on 5 October 1914, was clear proof for de Rose that his intuitions were justified. In March 1915, he entrusted the pilots in his unit, the MS 12, recently equipped with Morane-Saulnier planes, with a new mission: hunting down enemy aircraft and shooting them down. He thus laid down the first bases of fighter aircraft, although firing synchronisation remained a problem that worried him, but it was finally solved by Sergeant Alkan of the MS 12 in the spring of 1916 after months of hard work. His foresight convinced the high command to implement the first fighter squadrons along the front.

When the terrifying Battle of Verdun began in February 1916, one man was clearly qualified to turn around the situation, which was not then favourable for France – Commander de Rose. General Pétain entrusted him with a mission that he summed up in a now famous quote: "Rose, sweep the sky! I am blind." De Rose managed to have 15 squadrons equipped with the famous Nieuport XI airplane, called "Bébé", and brought together the best pilots including the famous Navarre, Guynemer, Brocard, Garros, Heurtaux, Nungesser, Dorme, etc. After fierce fighting, the French patrols finally managed to gain control of the airs in April.

On 11 May, during a demonstration flight south of Soissons at the commands of his Nieuport decorated with a rose, his personal insignia, Commander de Rose fell victim to an engine failure and was accidentally killed after having giving the art of the fighter pilot its credentials.

Marie-Catherine Villatoux - French Defence History Service, Air Force Department. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 193/April 2009

"There will be no peace on this planet as long as human rights are violated somewhere in the world". Thus spoke René Cassin, the great French jurist and one of the fathers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nobody more than he had understood that human rights and peace were inextricably linked.

Descended from an old family of Jewish extraction, René Samuel Cassin was born on 5 October 1887 in Bayonne. After his brilliant studies at Lycée Masséna in Nice, he went to Law School in Aix-en-Provence. With a Licence degree in Literature, he took the first prize of the “Concours Général” of the Law Schools, became a doctor of legal sciences, economics and politics and obtained his “agrégation” degree in private law in 1919.

René Cassin was called up in 1914 as a master corporal. He was seriously wounded by machine gun fire at Saint-Mihiel on 12 October of that year. He received the War Cross with palm and the Military Medal. He was discharged and went on to teach at the university in Aix-en-Provence, then in Marseille, Lille and Paris. In solidarity with his former comrades in arms, he took part in creating one of the very first associations of war victims, in 1917. In 1929, he became the Vice-President of the High Council for wards of the state. He dedicated part of his activities to veterans until 1940 and pushed through several laws in favour of the victims of war.

As a peace activist, René Cassin sought to "erase all borders between men, affording each of them the same inalienable rights and the dignity of being". In 1924, he was a member of the French delegation to the League of Nations. After the Munich Agreement, which he condemned, he refused to take his seat in Geneva. From the early 1930s, having been warned of the dangers of Nazism by German Jews whom he had met during a trip to Palestine, he had foreseen a new conflict in Europe.

The Nobel Peace Prize for this defender of human rights

In June 1940, he refused the idea of an armistice and fled to England, presenting himself to General de Gaulle on 29 June. De Gaulle entrusted him with the mission of negotiating the agreement of 7 August 1940 with the British, an agreement that made de Gaulle a full-fledged ally and gave Free France a status that would later receive the legal and administrative structures that would ensure the continuity of the State and the Republic.

In 1943, at General de Gaulle’s request, he took on the leadership of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which he was to lead until his death. Secretary Permanent of the Defence Council of the French Empire, President of the Legal Committee of Fighting France, and then of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (1941-1944), he was named Vice-President of the Council of State in 1944, a position he held until 1960.

As France’s delegate to the UN, René Cassin was part of a small group of specialists in charge of drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights starting in 1946, which was adopted on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. He played a major role alongside the President of the Commission, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the late President of the United States; he made sure that the Declaration was "universal" and not "international", ensuring acceptance of the idea that economic, social and cultural rights are now considered as fundamental rights.

In January 1959, he was chosen by the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe to sit as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights, which he presided from 1965 to 1968. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1968; the prize money enabled him to found the International Institute of Human Rights in 1969.

René Cassin also played an active role in France’s institutional life. In 1958, he presided over the committee in charge of drawing up the Constitution of the 5th Republic and, as President of the Council of State in 1959, he swore in the new President of the French Republic, General de Gaulle. He also played an essential role in creating the Constitutional Council, of which he was a member from 1960 to 1971.

Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, Companion of the Liberation, Resistance Medal recipient, and Commander of Academic Palms, René Cassin died in Paris on 20 February 1976. His body was transferred to the Pantheon on 5 October 1987, for the centennial of his birth.

Source : In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 188/November 2008

The author of The Diary of a Country Priest joined the cavalry in August of 1914 at the age of 26. Like that of many other writers, Georges Bernanos’ work was marked by the Great War. Through his writing, he constantly sought to explore the mystery of evil while being committed to the struggle for faith and freedom.

Born in Paris in 1888, Georges Bernanos studied law and literature. A Catholic and a Royalist, he was an activist with the "Camelots du Roi". His first fictional essays were published in the press in 1913 and 1914, before being brought together in a book titled Dialogue of Shadows. While discharged in 1911, he managed to sign up again at the end of August 1914. His passion for horses and horse-riding led him to choose the cavalry. At the end of December, he joined the 6th Dragoon regiment, where he was to serve until the Armistice.

Bernanos was changed by the war. It was the ordeal that shaped his work. In a letter, he wrote "Those who cannot see the tragic side of our times, not because of a few thousand deaths, but because it marks the limit of world history, are asses."

"The ordeal of the trenches showed him the terrible grimace of modern humanity," observed Albert Béguin, literature professor, art critic and publisher whom Bernanos asked to manage his writings after his death. It was no doubt there that the tragic dimension of his work was born, with the author going, as Jean Bastier pointed out, "from a rather conventional world to the dark, cloudy skies, dirty, livid dawns and muddy, satanic lands," that can be seen in his main novels. Talking about his novel Under the Sun of Satan, which he began soon after the Armistice and was published in 1926, Bernanos himself said that it was born of the war.

In February 1915, Bernanos was in the Marne; in April he was near Verdun. In May, his division was in Picardy where part of the men were holed up in the trenches. In September, before the major offensives in Artois and Champagne, he hoped that the infantry would break through and finally enable the cavalry to ride on to victory. But the big attack was cancelled. During the following winter, the 6th Dragoons provided more detachments to the trenches. Bernanos was seriously shell-shocked during the bombardments of 1 May 1916: "Their big shells fell regularly around us, tightening their circle minute by minute, until one of them exploded right in the trench, at the height of a man, one metre away from me. What a flash of light (...) and immediately afterward, what darkness! The sparkling thing had thrown me God knows where, along with a comrade, under an avalanche of smoking dirt. The ground around us and under us was riddled with huge pieces of exploded shells (...)".

In February and March 1917, he took pilot courses at the Dijon-Longvic aviation school, then at Chartres. But as his eyesight was not considered to be good enough, he was sent back to the 6th Dragoons at the beginning of April. He nonetheless took advantage of his time away from the front to get married on 14 May 1917.

The Germans launched major offensives in the spring of 1918. Bernanos’ unit fought, on foot, in the Aisne and the Oise. On 30 May his leg was injured and he received a commendation. "I spent two days in the liaison service between my section and my company. (...). I travelled about the entire day of Thursday on a plain and in woods that were literally riddled with bullets (....). I fought like I had always dreamt of fighting."

Hospitalised in July-August, Bernanos returned to his regiment in September: "Dust, mud (...), I took on the colour of our paths". When 11 November came, the writer shared the regrets of the cavaliers – there was not a complete victory, the disorganised enemy army was not pursued. He was also disappointed by the application of the Treaty of Versailles: "Victory didn’t like us," he wrote in The Humiliated Children.

In the 1930s he broke away from his political circle. He lived in Palma de Mallorca with his family during the Spanish Civil War, which inspired his work, The Big Cemeteries under the Moon (1938), in which he criticised Franco and his partisans. In 1938, he left for Paraguay, then Brazil. He called the Vichy regime a "ridiculous farm dictatorship" and took the side of General de Gaulle.

He came back to France in 1945 and left for Tunisia, from which he returned to die in Neuilly in 1948.

Source : Jean Bastier, "Georges Bernanos, le dragon de 1914-1918" In Les écrivains combattants de la Grande Guerre, Giovanangeli éd., 2004, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 186/September 2008

Born on 30 January 1882, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the descendent of a Dutch colonial family that immigrated to the United States in the 17th century. A graduate of the prestigious Harvard University, he undertook a career as an attorney before going into politics in the footsteps of his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901 to 1909.

A rising star in the Democratic Party, his career began in 1910 when he was elected to the New York State Senate. In 1913, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Woodrow Wilson. During World War I, he worked in favour of the development of submarines and supported the project for installing the North Sea Mine Barrage to protect Allied ships from attacks by German submarines.

He met Winston Churchill for the first time during an inspection tour in Great Britain and on the French front.

Put in charge of demobilization after the Armistice, he left his job at the Navy in July 1920. That same year, the Democrats’ defeat in the Presidential election issued in a long period in the political wilderness during which he contracted a disease that caused him to lose the use of his legs in 1921.

He returned to the political scene in 1928, when he was elected Governor of New York State. During his term, he undertook reforms in favour of rural areas and in social policy, notably setting up the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to help the unemployed, reducing working hours for women and children and overseeing improvements to hospitals. He also exercised tolerance in terms of immigration and religion. His action was successful and was validated by his re-election in 1930.

In 1932, Roosevelt was nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidential election, basing his campaign on the New Deal, an economic recovery programme designed to put an end to the crisis that hit the country with the stock market crash of 1929. Elected with 57% of the votes, he implemented his economic recovery programme and fought against unemployment, reformed the American banking system and founded Social Security. While still fragile, the economy progressively recovered and Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936 and again in 1940.

As the situation deteriorated in Europe, he sought to break with the United States’ policy of isolationism and neutrality supported by the American Congress and public opinion. He first obtained the repeal of laws on the embargo on arms sales to the warring parties in September 1937 and then, in 1941, received authorisation from Congress for arms assistance to the Allies, without reimbursement. The Lend-Lease law, signed on 11 March 1941, enabled the Americans to supply the Allies with war materiel without intervening in the conflict directly. On 14 August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration defining the moral principles that were to inspire the establishment of a lasting peace and which was later to serve as the basis for the United Nations’ Charter (June 1945).

In the meantime, in the Pacific, relations between Japan and the Western Powers were deteriorating. The United States gave their support to China, opposed to Japan, by granting lend-lease and then, when Japan refused to withdraw from Indochina and China, the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands decided on an embargo over raw materials, while Japan’s assets in the United States were frozen. On 7 December 1941, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, the largest American naval base in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the United States into the war.

In 1942, Roosevelt gave priority to the European front while containing the Japanese advances in the Pacific. The United States thus intervened alongside the British, first in North Africa (Operation Torch in November 1942), and then in Europe with landings in Italy and France.

During the conflict, he was one of the main players in the inter-ally conferences (Anfa in January 1943 for the choice of the next front in Europe and Germany’s unconditional surrender, Dumbarton Oaks in August-October 1944 to prepare the constituent meeting for the United Nations, Yalta in February 1945 to solve the problems of post-war Europe).

Roosevelt did not recognise General de Gaulle’s legitimacy and was wary of him because he saw him as an apprentice dictator. He was opposed to letting Free France take part in the United Nations so long as elections had not been held in France. Laval’s return to power in 1942 led the United States to recall its ambassador from Vichy and to open a consulate in Brazzaville. The American President successively supported Admiral Darlan – a notorious collaborator – then General Giraud – a clear Vichy loyalist – and tried to block the action of the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (French Committee of National Liberation) in Algiers, the leadership of which de Gaulle had firmly taken, relegating Giraud to strictly military tasks.

His idea of placing liberated France under American military occupation (AMGOT) never happened, as General Eisenhower had reassured de Gaulle, on 30 December 1943, “I will recognize no French power in France other than your own in the practical sphere.” As a gesture of appeasement and to satisfy the American press and public opinion that were very favourable to the General, he welcomed him to Washington in July 1944. But he did not officially recognise the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPFR - Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française) until October of 1944 and did not invite its head to Yalta in a sign that his mistrust was not totally assuaged.

On 7 November 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected to a fourth term in the White House. He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 April 1945. In application of the American constitution, Vice-President Harry Truman succeeded him.

Nothing had prepared him to confront the war and join the Resistance. Yet at 25 Philippe Viannay became the undisputed leader of one of the main resistance movements in the north. We go back over the life of a freedom-loving man who was a pioneer in many areas.

In the galaxy of the great leaders of the French resistance, Philippe Viannay has a unique position. Although he directed Défense de la France (DF), a leading movement in the north, Philippe Viannay is less well known than many of his counterparts - Frenay, Bourdet or the Aubrac couple to name just a few. His young age - just 23 years old in 1940 - his refusal to go into politics after the war, the posthumous publication of his memoirs... all these elements go to explain this relative silence. Yet everyone who met him - in undercover night-time operations as in the Journalists Training Centre (CFJ), the Jean Moulin club or the Glénans centre - all keep a fond memory of a highly charismatic personality. Whatever his merits, we do not want to give idolising biographical details of this resistance fighter's life but rather explore the uniqueness of a prominent leader in the Army of shadows.

Philippe Viannay was born in 1917 in a conservative family: his father was close to Colonel de la Roque's PSF movement and his mother had a nobles of the robe background. He also felt that his family belonged to "an honourable bourgeoisie" that despised money while having a small amount of it. After a year of hypokhâgne at Louis-le-Grand secondary school, he began studying philosophy while considering the priesthood - a vocation he abandoned in 1938 to resume his studies at the Sorbonne.

After fighting bravely in 1940, he returned to Paris, determined as the saying goes "to do something". Indeed, in October 1940 he considered publishing an underground newspaper, an idea given him by the boss of a friend, Marcel Lebon. Backed by a former classmate, Robert Salmon, and a student he met in the Sorbonne, Hélène Mordkovitch, whom he married in 1942, he launched an underground newspaper, Défence de la France with the first issue being published on 14 July, 1941.

Can you escape from your roots? The answer to this question is neither black or white when considering Philippe Viannay's life. Coming from a conservative Catholic family background, in many ways his opinions reflected those of his upbringing. In fact, up to 1942, DF adopted a Petainist line, wrongly crediting Petain with resistant tendencies. Similarly, the apprentice philosopher built his fight on an ethical basis. He did not try to fight against the occupier militarily but mainly focused his efforts in calling for a moral uprising.

Simultaneously, Philippe Viannay moved away from his milieu. Far from blindly following Petain, he considered the fight against Germany as a burning priority. And thanks to Hélène Viannay, DF became a patchwork where rather right-wing bourgeoisie elements mingled with more left-wing Russian migrants.

Through his charisma, sense of organisation and open mind, Viannay then influenced the line taken by the movement. As he came to realise the obvious, the paper gradually abandoned Petain and supported de Gaulle after an initial Giraud period. Above all, DF gradually embraced the idea of an armed struggle, setting up corps-francs then maquis groups in Burgundy-Franche-Comté and Seine-et-Oise in particular. But he failed to win over fighting France. While getting funds that enabled him, among other things, to finance a false ID papers workshop, the movement was not a part of the National Council of the Resistance. Viannay was probably a much better organizer than he was a politician! In fact, he preferred in 1944 to fight in Seine-et-Oise - where he was severely wounded - than go to Paris to prepare the now open publication of Défense de la France / France Soir .

Albert Bernier, Philippe Viannay (centre) and Françoise de Rivière, the Seine-et-Oise maquis in August 1944.

©Fondation de la Résistance, AERI, coll. Défense de la France DR

Although a member of the Consultative Assembly, at the Liberation Viannay abandoned both his political career and France-Soir . However, anxious to train journalists who he had found lacked professionalism before the war, he set up the CFJ, invested in the newspaper France-Observateur, and created the Glénans nautical centre. In this he remained faithful to his ideas. While remaining interested in public affairs through the Union of the Socialist Left and the Jean Moulin club, he preferred to get involved in civil society - the common link between his clandestine commitment and his investments in calmer times in a restored Republic. He died in 1986, aged 69.

Olivier Wieviorka, author of Une certaine idée de la Résistance, Seuil, 1995, reprinted. 2010. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 240/November 2013

In 1940, Gilbert Renault, alias Rémy, set up the biggest intelligence network in free France: the Confrérie Notre-Dame that was to carry out numerous actions in France. His biographer, historian Guy Perrier, talks about his actions, in particular in 1943.

Stunned by the collapse of 1940, Gilbert Renault, a devout Catholic close to the ideas of l'Action Française, a movement however that he was never to join, refused to admit France's defeat. Leaving his wife and four children behind, he left the town of Vannes and sailed for England where he joined general Charles de Gaulle, with whom he forged links of admiration and affection that were never to be broken despite their future differences. De Gaulle assigned him to the 2nd bureau, which was to become the  Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations (BCRA) led by colonel Passy, whose real name was André Dewavrin, who asked him to set up a network along the Atlantic seaboard, where the Kriegstnarine was harassing British ships.

Thus began a new life for this impulsive, eccentric and chivalrous adventurer, who had worked for a long time in film as a producer after taking up numerous other occupations. After numerous trips between England, occupied France and Spain, Remy soon had informants in every port. On 6 January, 1942, after visiting the Notre-Dame des Victoires church in Paris, he baptised his movement the Confrérie Notre-Dame (CND) whose success was to gain him "unprecedented prestige with the Intelligence Service" according to Sébastien Albertelli, author of Services Secrets de la France Libre.

The network became the largest network in free France, it processed and forwarded mail from several networks: the Civil and Military Organization (CMO), Libération-Nord, Fana (Communist). After a stay in France at the end of 1942, Rémy went back to London on January 11, 1943 and would not come back to France until the Liberation. It was at this time that he brought the Communist leader Fernand Grenier to meet General de Gaulle, an event with far-reaching consequences. For Remy, whose monarchist beliefs were totally contrary to those of the Communist Party, the fate of his country must transcend ideological divides!

While the Confrérie Notre-Dame continued its intelligence work, a serious event occurred that disrupted the activity of the network. On 6 October 1943, a CND agent, Parsifal, fell into the hands of the German Security Service, the Abwehr. He was interrogated by a Belgian collaborator, Christian Masuy, who submitted him to the bathtub torture. The agent could not bear it and revealed the names of important members of the network. This was a major blow to the Confrérie Notre-Dame.

Remy came up with a contingency plan to put his organisation back on track and wanted to return to France. But London believed that colonel Rémy was more useful in London to help prepare for the allied landings, as part of the Sussex plan which intended to use French soldiers on inter-ally missions. In England, Remy had the joy of spending Christmas 1943 with his wife at their small home in Elwood and hearing the message of support that he had recorded the day before being broadcast by the BBC and aimed at the resistance fighters imprisoned in France.

Named a Companion of the Liberation on 13 March 1942, Rémy was to become the proponent of a very unlikely cause after the Liberation: that of attempting to reconcile Gaullists, resistants of all persuasions and anti-German petainists! He became a militant of the Gaullist RPF (Rally of the French People) in the aftermath of the war. He defended the idea, refuted by most historians, that general de Gaulle and Pétain were complementary, the first representing 'the sword of France' and the second 'the shield'. An assertion expressed in several of his books devoted to his action in the resistance, but that de Gaulle himself refuted without however this harming their friendship and the esteem de Gaulle had for him.

On 28 July, 1984, Rémy, the No 1 secret agent for free France passed away, a few days short of his 80th birthday. François Mitterrand, President of the Republic, hailed him as "one of the most glorious heroes of the Resistance, who will forever remain the honour of France". Two years after his death his last book was published, simply entitled: La Résistance.

Guy Perrier, historian, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 235/april 2013

Despite being a renowned historian, the resistance activities of Marc Bloch, arrested in March 1944 by the Gestapo and shot with 29 others on 16 June in Saint-Didier de Formans, are not well known. Historian Laurent Douzou tells of the undercover action of this committed intellectual, from 1943 up to his death.

"We should focus more than we do on how academics die when they do not die of illness or old age" wrote the philosopher Georges Canguilhem about Marc Bloch, whose extraordinary reputation as a historian has sometimes obscured the active role he played during the Occupation.

A Professor at the Sorbonne and co-founder of the Annals of Economic and Social History, Bloch was a scientific luminary when war broke out. As he entered into the prime of life, he already had one work to his credit. He had also come under fire during the great war that he came out of with the Military Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre.

Aged 53 in 1939, this father of six asked to fight. Responsible for fuel supplies for the 1st army, he fulfilled his mission but noted with amazement that the building he believed to be solid was in fact very weak. In an analysis written in the summer of 1940 and published in 1946 under the title The Strange Defeat, he dissects the levels of responsibility for this disaster without trying to exonerate himself: "I belong to a generation that has a bad conscience. It is true that we came back very tired from the last war. Also, after these four years of fighting idleness, we were looking forward to going back to our jobs and taking up the tools of our various trades, tools now attacked by rust: we wanted to go all out and make up for the lost work. Those are our excuses. I no longer believe that they are sufficient to free us of blame".

Moved by the status of the Jews in October 1940, Marc Bloch was expelled from his position as Professor seconded to the University of Strasbourg, which had fallen back to Clermont-Ferrand. Under Article 8, which provided exemptions for individuals who had rendered exceptional services to France, he was reinstated in January 1941 and assigned to Montpellier in July. He refused to use the visa he had obtained for the United States because he would not leave his friends and family. He served in Montpellier until he was dismissed on 15 March 1943.

On this date, his peaceful medievalist life of toil took a radical turn. By going headlong into the resistance, Marc Bloch became "Narbonne" by making contact with Franc-Tireur. Georges Altman, leader of this movement, told of this encounter: "I can still remember that charming instant when Maurice [Pessis], one of our young friends in the underground, his 20-year old face red with joy, introduced me to his "new recruit", a fifty year old gentleman with military decorations, a finely sculpted face under a head of greying hair, a sharp look behind his spectacles, his briefcase in one hand, a cane in the other, rather ceremonial at first, my visitor soon smiled at me reaching out his hand and said kindly: Yes, I'm Maurice's "young colt"...

This precious testimony suggested what this plunge into the underground movement might have represented for the academic Marc Bloch where starting afresh he had to prove his worth just like any other beginner. Everything he then had to do was a break with his former life Georges Altman noted: "And we soon came to see the Sorbonne Professor share this gruelling "street dog" life that was the underground Resistance in our cities with amazing composure." "Maurice's colt" was quickly entrusted with tasks to match his talents. He worked on the Political Journals for the General Studies Committee and the Free Review, published by Franc-Tireur. These publications bear his mark, in particular this methodical table of the articles from the first year of the Political Journals in issue 5 in January 1944!

In July 1943, Marc Bloch became one of the three members of the regional directorate of united resistance movements, a position that was both exposed and strenuous. Aware of the danger, effective and determined, "Narbonne" asserted himself as a legitimate and respected leader in the small but demanding world of the underground. His arrest by a well-informed Gestapo, on the morning of Wednesday, March 8, 1944, on Boucle Bridge in Lyon shocked his comrades. Tortured on the premises of the military health school, interned in Montluc prison, Marc Bloch was shot on 16 June 1944 with 29 other resistance fighters in Saint-Didier-de-Formans.

Laurent Douzou, historian, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 234/march 2013

A leading figure in the French Resistance, an ethnologist and writer, Germaine Tillion drew lessons from her experience of World War II that served her throughout her entire life. At all times she managed to combine testimony, reflection and action.

Germaine Tillion was born on 30 May 1907 in Allègre in Haute-Loire. In 1919, the family moved to the Paris region. During the twenties, she began to study ethnology and obtained a scholarship to study the Berber population in the Algerian Aures region in 1933. Between 1934 and 1940, she stayed with the Chaouias for four long periods and continued to write her thesis.

Back in France, on 9 June 1940, after the Armistice, she decided that "something had to be done". In the company of Paul Hauet, a retired colonel, she began her resistance activities under the cover of an association to help prisoners of war, the National Union of Colonial Combatants. This cell came into contact with similar groups, such as the one at the Musée de l'Homme, bringing together other ethnologists with Boris Vildé at the head. It was in 1946, when Germaine Tillion took care of getting administrative approval for the network, that she gave it the name "Network of the Musée de l'Homme", in tribute to the majority of its founders. The Group had numerous activities: collecting information to be passed on to London, taking care of escaped soldiers or organising prison breaks, sheltering English paratroopers, making false ID papers, spreading calls to combat, eradicating traitors and Gestapo agents.

Even though she was a dedicated patriot, Germaine Tillion never forgot one guiding principle to which she adhered at all times: dedication to truth and justice. In a note to the underground press, she observed that a lot of information concerning the situation at the time was circulating in French society but was contradictory because it came from different sources. She directed her fellow resistants to not skew the truth, to not hide anything, to strive to understand and to judge impartially. "In terms of ideas, at the outset we only know one cause that is dear to us, that of our homeland, it is for love of it that we have come together, to try to preserve its faith and hope." But in no way, in absolutely no way do we want to sacrifice the truth to it, because our homeland is dear to us only on one condition, that we do not sacrifice the truth to it".

An initial denunciation led to the arrest of several members of the Musée de l'Homme cell; in April 1941, a second betrayal led to the arrest of its remaining members. They were tried a year later, in February 1942. Ten people, including several close friends, were sentenced to death. Germaine Tillion, who escaped these arrests, struggled to get them reprieved but in vain: the seven men in the group were shot and the three women deported. She herself was arrested in the street in August 1942 by the German police after being betrayed by a French priest posing as a resistant. Detained for more than a year in the French La Santé and Fresnes prisons, she was deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in October 1943. She was freed in April 1945.

After returning to France, she devoted most of her time to the history of the Resistance and Deportation and published several works on these themes. However, she did not neglect her civic commitments and took part in the campaign against the camps that is still in operation in the communist countries in Europe and Asia.

In 1954, she was sent by the French government as an observer to Algeria, where the insurgency was getting under way. At first, she proposed strengthening the education given to the indigenous population (boys and girls, children and adults) to enable them to emerge from the poverty that economic development had failed to stem. As the conflict intensified, in 1957, Germaine Tillion devoted all her efforts to mitigating the effects of the violence: she campaigned against torture, executions and met with FLN leaders to convince them to stop indiscriminate attacks.

Elected studies director at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1958, she spent the following decades studying North African societies. She also published a new reviewed edition of Ravensbrück, her book about Deportation. She died on 19 April 2008 aged 100. Her autobiographical work, Fragments of Life, was published the following year.

Tzvetan Todorov - President of the Germaine Tillion association. In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 241/december 2013

Resistant in 1940, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the only woman recognized as the head of a large French resistance network, the Alliance network. Michèle Cointet, her biographer, tells of her extraordinary journey.

Marie-Madeleine Bridou escaped from the conformism of the bourgeois background she was born into in 1909. She lived with her two children in Paris, far from her husband Edward Méric, an Indigenous Affairs officer in Morocco. She divided her time between "Radio-Cité" and Commander Loustaunau-Lacau's General Secretariat of anti-communist and anti-German publications. Loustaunau-Lacau was the founder of the Corvignolles network and La Spirale and the person who initiated her into undercover activities. The love of a mythical homeland gained from a childhood in Shanghai where her father was the General Maritime Messaging Agent and... "honourable correspondent" and a lack of illusions about Marshal Petain inspired her in June 1940 to believe that since the men had put down their weapons, it was up to the women to take them up.

However she let herself be convinced to follow Loustaunau-Lacau in Vichy drawn by a general delegation to the powerful French Legion of combatants. A network centered on Marseilles and Vichy was set up which proved fertile ground from which to recruit officials from ministries and patriotic officers. The break with Vichy was not long in coming when Admiral Darlan expelled Loustaunau-Lacau from the Legion in February 1941. Developments in the war offered them an opportunity to engage actively against Hitler. Indeed, submarine warfare threatened the survival of the British. Getting information on submarine departures from Lorient was vital. Only the French could provide this. In April 1941, contact was established in Lisbon where Loustaunau-Lacau got money and a first transmitting station, the most effective weapon to get round the several weeks delay with conventional mail and finally enabling an immediate response. Alliance owned up to 17 of these stations. Since Marie-Madeleine's cover was not blown, unlike Loustaunau-Lacau in Paris, she organised the Alliance network in the north and west proclaiming loyalty to England and equality among partners. The Germans called it "Noah's Ark" because of the animal nicknames adopted by its members.

Arrested in Algiers in May 1941, Loustaunau-Lacau was found guilty then handed over to the Germans. Marie-Madeleine concluded from this event that it was best to refuse to make political commitments and this led some members who wanted to have closer ties with General de Gaulle, such as General Alamichel, to put some distance between themselves and Marie-Madeleine. Driven by her companions, she took over from Loustaunau-Lacau using a neutral signature: POZ 55. Since the results were exceptional, the British eventually acknowledged her, finally unveiled, as the head of the military intelligence network, the only one to benefit from this status in Europe. A great organizer, authoritative, rigorous, a natural leader and bold, she had enough mental flexibility to follow the advice of the British to decentralise the network into sub-networks such as Sea Star or Georges Lamarque's remarkable Druids.

Alliance recruited heavily among civil servants and was unique in  another way: 24% of members were women, making it the resistant organisation with the strongest female presence. Alliance played its greatest role in the Battle of the Atlantic providing information on train operations (German transports to the east), the first information about the V1 and V2 testing at Peenemunde through Amniarix (Jeannie Rousseau), records of launch pad operations in north-western France and a detailed map of the Atlantic defences. Marie-Madeleine organised General Giraud's submarine departure from Lavandou on 4 November, 1942 to Algiers to facilitate the Allied landing there.

She was held up in England following the arrest of her assistant Faye in September 1943 but got to return to France in July 1944 and, after escaping from a German barracks, carried out intelligence missions ahead of Patton's army.

Sensitive to the material and moral suffering of the members of her hard-hit network, 431 were killed i.e. one third of the total, she spent over twenty years caring for the survivors and their families. She published memories in the form of a memorial entitled Noah's Ark and defends the memory of the Resistance as Chairwoman of the Resistance Action Committee. With her husband, Free French fighter Hubert Fourcade, she helped return General de Gaulle to power in 1958. She was neither a political party icon nor anti-fascist activist and remained faithful to her idea of the Resistance: an efficient patriotic struggle against Nazi Germany.

Michèle Cointet, University Professor Emeritus, In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 239/october 2013

For more information:

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade-Un chef de la Résistance, éd. Perrin, 2006.

“Mort pour la France”

Louis Pergaud was born on 22 January 1882 in Belmont, in the Doubs department. Son of a lay schoolteacher, he spent his childhood in small villages, exploring the countryside and trout fishing with his buddies. A brilliant student, he was admitted to the École Normale in 1898 and was appointed schoolteacher at Durnes in October 1901. The death of his two parents in February and March of 1900 was a great shock to the young man, which he got over by reading the poems of Léon Deubel, inspiring his literary passion.

In 1902, he did his military service, which left him with bad memories; his marriage to Marthe Caffot in 1903 was a failure and his daughter died in 1904. At the same time, his militant Republicanism caused him some problems with the population, leading to his transfer to Landresse at a time when the relations between the Church and Republican schools were extremely tense. Louis Pergaud was dissatisfied with life and withdrew into hunting and walking, awaking the scents of his childhood, and discussions with friends, including the extravagant café owner, Duboz. He soon fell in love with one of his daughters, Delphine. Léon Deubel, who had helped him get his first collection of poems published in 1904, asked him to come and join him in Paris.

Pergaud decided to change his life. He moved to the capital in 1907 and had Delphine join him and he married her after his divorce. Léon Deubel supported him in his desire to write. To make a living, he went back to his profession of schoolteacher and during his holidays he gathered material for his works. Louis Pergaud immediately became a figure in the literary world: he received the Prix Goncourt in 1910 for his first book, De Goupil à Margot, which met with great success.

In 1912, he published The War of the Buttons, the novel of my twelfth year. On the backdrop of the rivalries between two villages, the author uses sometimes fierce humour to develop subjects that were dear to him: country life, parochialism, the quarrels between the church and the secular state, etc. For Pergaud, 1913 was a happy period with the success of his novel Miraut the Hunting Dog, but it was also painful due to Léon Deubel’s suicide.

A naturalist writer, Pergaud used rich, dense writing to create a hymn to life that is still wild, with an innovative side in seeking out empathy with animals. He revisited his rural world, preparing several texts that he sent to Mercure de France in the spring of 1914 under the title Les rustiques. The book had not yet been published when Louis Pergaud was mobilised. War broke out on 2 September. With recruitment roll number 2216 in Belfort, he was assigned as a sergeant to the 166th Infantry Regiment at Verdun. “A pacifist and antimilitarist, I did not want the Kaiser’s boot more than any other boot rammed onto my country.”  (1)

He reached the front in October, in the Woëvre sector of the Meuse, a damp region whose hills saw fierce fighting. His correspondence deplored "bedroom patriots", describing the courage of the "poilus" – the French soldiers – the mud in the trenches and ever-present death. The childhood fights between the Lebrac gang and the Aztec gang of Les Gués, the heroes of The War of the Buttons, took on the mortal dimension of an adult conflict.

Second lieutenant Louis Pergaud (centre).

In the spring of 1915, the French launched an offensive in the Hauts de Meuse. During the night of 7 April, Second Lieutenant Pergaud’s company set out from Fresnes-en-Woëvre, attacking hill 233 in the direction of Marchéville. Near the enemy trenches, under the pouring rain, the soldiers met with intense gunfire. Louis Pergaud’s section was decimated, the survivors hid and then withdrew in the early morning. No one ever saw the writer again. Some of the men said he was wounded. German stretcher-bearers may have retrieved him and transported him to a trench while waiting to be able to evacuate him. But to take the Les Éparges Ridge, hill 233 had to be taken: the next day, the French artillery pounded the area, destroying the entire landscape, forever burying the men in this land, without distinction.

On 4 August 1921, a judgement by the court of the Seine, Louis Pergaud, who had disappeared, was declared “Mort pour la France” (Dead for France) on 8 April 1915 at Fresnes-en-Woëvre. He was one of the 1,160 soldiers who died or disappeared from the 166th Infantry Regiment during the year 1915. There is no tomb, but his books carry on the memory of this writer and his broken destiny.

Commemorative plaque, 3 rue Marguerin, Paris 14e. Source: © Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

(1) Letter to Lucien Descaves, March 1915.