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.

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

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.

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