MEMORIES OF THE RESISTANCE

...The French Communist party is also a major butt of what is perhaps the most intriguing document on the Occupation to have appeared in recent years, the memoirs of Henri Frenay...

...A 36-year-old general-staff officer during the 1940 campaign, Frenay eluded capture in the Vosges and slipped across the line of demarcation into the "free" (Vichy) zone...

...Against what seem to be impossible emotional odds, she has written the story of a collaborationist family's painful adjustment to postwar France...

...Many younger French people, ignoring the complexity of the Petain phenomenon, have concluded that the resisters, however heroic, were an insignificant lot when compared with the overwhelming majority of complaisant or pusillanimous Frenchmen...

...Yet the very survival of the Resistance is proof of how imperfect was Gestapo and Abwehr intelligence...

...Eventually, one supposes, they are bound to sense the waning attraction of the old myths about the war...

...and Frenchmen seem less reluctant nowadays to remember that only four months before de Gaulle's Te Deum in Notre-Dame Petain himself was acclaimed by rapt crowds in the streets of Paris...

...Gaullism itself is after all essentially a strategy of convalescence, a compound of much-needed modernization and delusive grandeur...

...Such is their duty...

...By now his mother found it impossible to credit his tale that he was involved in top-secret army intelligence work...

...The roster of French public figures has long read like a sort of Who's Who of the Resistance...

...Though attached to his simple, self-sacrificing mother, he soon found himself unable to share her trust in Petain...

...Moreover, the French have a weakness for the trenchant phrase, however ill-founded or ill-advised, and many an ex-resister, and more than one impostor, has come to fancy himself a sovereign authority on the Resistance...

...There are many reasons why the Resistance is still so controversial in France...

...Of course Frenay's mother never did denounce him, but this sad anecdote shows how deeply earnest is his apparently jocular remark about his "first clandestine act...

...I'm going to the police to denounce you, to stop you from doing evil and to protect you from yourself...

...Despite an enormous amount of literature on the subject, it remains inherently obscure...

...But above and beyond maternal love there is my homeland...

...Later, in a little cafe by the Place de la Republique, she told with tears in her eyes of the death of a young comrade during the insurrection's final hours...

...Although he was imbued with a healthy respect for conservative values, Frenay's sympathies had gone to the Left well before the war...

...Such, however, is the simple truth...

...So jealously was he absorbed in the preservation of juridical and military independence that he was just plain uninterested in domestic revolution...

...That he has finally consented to tell his story is evidence not only of a renewed frankness but also of the dangers of too much secrecy in the present climate of national introspection...

...Even the Resistance itself is now viewed by many with a touch of (perhaps unjustified) cynicism...

...One is astounded to learn that de Gaulle actually upbraided Frenay in the Savoy Hotel in November 1942 with the words, "France must choose between you and me...

...Even the Resistance, the sole heroic chapter of the Occupation, was in reality such a long and terrible martyrdom that those who experienced it seem never to mention it without a hint of sorrow...

...Using the impressionistic, souvenir-album technique of Dominique Lapere's and Larry Collins's best-seller, is Paris Burning?, Jean-Jacques Bloch and Claude Robrini assembled a videotape chronicle of the spontaneous Paris insurrection of 1944...

...I believe that de Gaulle feared the advent and the possible dissidence of a Resis266 DAN HOFSTADTER tance claiming to represent France and with the great prestige of having pursued the struggle on national soil...

...They also remember their bitterness when the fruits of victory were—as they see it—snatched from them by the old politicians of the Third Republic...

...On the other hand, the collaborationist Right—despite its trivialization in Malle's Lacombe Lucien—is once again being taken for what it really was: a perfectly earnest if terribly misguided political current...

...We went out into the street and all Paris was celebrating...

...The increased interest in the Collaboration has helped foster a new and more negative image of occupied France, an image likely to rankle former resisters...

...Yet those with the firmest opinions are often animated, as one French intellectual has put it, by "a secret shame for having remained unaware of [the Resistance], deliberately ignored it, or even fought it...

...As the events of 1940 receded into the past, the Resistance grew apace and also became conscious of its own strength...

...And here we are suddenly reminded of Frenay the wayward son confronted by his mother in Lyons...

...Although the frenzied denunciations and counterdenunciations that followed the Liberation subsided with time, doubts and resentments about the Occupation still nag the French people...

...As for the haunting reproval in the Savoy Hotel, Frenay confesses that he still does not know what to make of it, but at one point he refers to it parenthetically as "a Richelieu's reflex...

...A very different view of the Collaboration has been offered by a young woman called Marie Chaix...

...That many of them were not truly men of conscience, but merely morally vain men, does not detract from their seriousness...

...Just this refusal later becomes the book's principal theme...

...Moreover, the military doctrine of cellular organization and cloisonnement—advanced both by Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's envoy to metropolitan France, and by such major movements as the National Front and Combat—resulted in a multitude of partial, fractured, and frequently conflicting views...

...Though at first pleased with the freedom his new role gives him to gratify his baser instincts, his affection for a Jewish girl eventually leads him to try to rescue her family from impending deportation...

...But in a way those myths are merely the crutches of a convalescent nation...

...Above all, he was always a step ahead: "The French have still not understood...

...Frenay, herself an army officer's widow, comes all the way to Lyons to ask her son if he has pledged allegiance to the Marshal...

...And so often there was the feigned indifference of his ceilingfixed stare, or the sullen pouting of his chin, that exact expression of a certain Gallic mood...

...That, of course, is one of the implicit themes of Marie Chaix's book...

...When and if the nation fully heals, they will probably all be thrown away...

...As the medicine takes effect, the palliative is being laid aside...

...This theme of an uneasy rupture with family ways reappears often in the book...

...De Gaulle is never long absent from his narrative...

...But a people may commemorate both its living and its dead past, and the wave of fascination with the occupation that has swept over France in the past few years has shown that the melancholy years of 1940-44 are very much a part of France's living and therefore controversial history...

...His resistance activity, which at that time consisted exclusively in clandestine recruitment, intelligence, and propaganda, was already well under way...

...It amounts to a frontal attack on the central myth in which Gaullism founds its authority...

...The Sorrow and the Pity has been followed by three more movies dealing rather disabusedly with the occupation: Les Violons du Bal, directed by Michel Drach, Les Guichets du Louvre, based on a novel by Michel Boussinot and directed by Michel Mitrani, and Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien...

...One day he entreated de Gaulle to refrain from occupying the Rhineland...

...By midsummer he was back in his family home on the Riviera...

...For here was a man who was breaking with his family's deepest-rooted traditions to embark upon what his own mother regarded as a political crime...

...It also succinctly characterizes the tenor of his objections to de Gaulle...

...Of course not...

...The reply, "Then France must choose between you and me," is clearly not to be taken literally, but it surely revealed the General's instinctive calculations...

...The war story is of course a popular literary genre, but when French people reminisce about the war it is rarely to trot out anecdotes of regimental camaraderie...

...Yet an enormous gap separates the first Frenay-deGaulle discussions from the last, and in that gap lies all the pathos of the gradual dissolution of the Resistance as a political force...

...When Frenay voiced his fears that this body would exhume the Third Republic and provoke the hostility of the entire metropolitan Resistance, thereby creating a deadlock, de Gaulle replied: "Then I shall give orders...

...had rescued him 12 hours before his impending execution...

...The renewed candor about the Occupation— of which the best example remains Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity (1972)—has been accompanied by an upsurge of interest among those too young to have experienced it as adults...

...Not surprisingly, this was the man who called the Paris May of 1968 a "bed-wetting...

...It was the occasion for many commemorations of various kinds, some of them— like the Frenchwoman Beate Klarsfeld's kidnapping of an alleged Nazi war criminal— of a purely impromptu nature...

...poor, patriotic, Catholic, republican but perhaps barely so, and above all paternalistic...

...Now, however, he has apparently felt the need to come clean: in an interview published in L'Express, Marchais himself broached the topic...

...The General answered: Frenay, you are a child...

...Most reading Frenchmen know what Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Jacques Duclos, or even Francoise Giroud, the new Secretary of State for the Feminine Condition, were doing during the Occupation (though fewer, perhaps, are aware that Francois Mitterand, the champion of the unified Left, was decorated by Vichy during its so-called Double-Game Phase for resistance activity among the French POWs...

...The trouble is, all Malle's collabos seem to be villains and moral dwarves...

...The failure of the Communists to join the "companions of the first hour," and their claim in 1944 to have represented the entire Resistance—when the early non-Communist resisters had been all but decimated—forms the subject of one of Frenay's more vitriolic passages...

...In a poignant incident, Mme...

...All of these myths have been devalued, including the myth that de Gaulle was the author of the Resistance...

...The Resistance always remains offcamera, no more than a moving target for young Lucien's automatic weapons...

...De Gaulle is reported to have laughingly told his provisional cabinet that during his tour of battle-torn Normandy a tearful woman had tossed him a posy with the cry, "Long live the Marshal...

...He moved back to his Lyons birthplace but continued to conceal his activities from his family...

...Since May 1968 Stalinism has been at an almost total discount among younger French socialists of all persuasions, and the significance of Thorez's 1939 treason is not lost on them...

...Georges Marchais, top man in the French Communist party, is a case in point...

...Thus it may seem absurd or shocking of me to insist that he never even understood it...

...Readers of France's biggest daily, France-Soir—itself a product of the Resistance— recently discovered a new column on an inside page...

...Hardly a week goes by without some new light being thrown on the great trauma...

...One sleepless night he composed a manifesto against defeatism: already, in his heart of hearts, he 264 DAN HOFSTADTER had opted for resistance...

...The Django Reinhard guitar numbers, the bottles of Suze, the outspread issues of Robert Brasillach's collaborationist newspaper, Je Suis Partout, these and other details all convey an absorbing period feeling—for those who wish to be absorbed by that miserable period...

...It was an anger backed by the muscle of Frenay's cohorts and by his willful readiness to seek help elsewhere (from the Americans, for instance), but it was always tempered by his admiration for the savior from Colombey...

...Her account of her father's treason seems rather forced, a potpourri of apology and resentment, but her treatment of the ordeals of her family, and the emotional avarice of her grandfather—a spry, Balzacian provincial who toys with his own funeral arrangements but cannot face his doomed son— creates a sense of the Collaboration much more tangible and genuinely tragic than Malle's...

...The conservative notion of duty and the revolutionary ideal of brotherhood were both essential ingredients in his acceptance of the adversary role...

...Captain Henri Frenay was a child of the French Right...

...Very few of the early resisters lived to tell how the various movements came into being...

...Do you think that Roosevelt, Churchill, or Stalin indulge in noble sentiments...

...In her book Les Lauriers du Lac de Constance, which appeared in the summer of 1974, she intertwines her father's prison journals and her own bittersweet memories of a protected girlhood in Suresnes...

...His feelings seem to have kept miraculously unspoiled since the wartime years, as if preserved by some secret balm...

...I love you dearly, as you know—my children are my whole life...

...In recent years the reexamination (and, one is tempted to say, the reliving) of the Resistance and the Collaboration has become a pervasive phenomenon, one that bears witness to an increased capacity for self-criticism by the chosen people of the god of wit...

...Frenay's misgivings about die-hard Gaullism first arose while he worked alongside the B.C.R.A...

...Any reader of the General's Memoirs," writes Frenay, would naturally conclude that it was he who inspired, organized, and directed the Resistance...

...Bloch and Robrini were able to interview many others beside Madeleine Riffaut: all in all, they used only about l5 minutes of old newsreel footage...

...When the Resistance splintered after the Liberation into numerous ideologically opposed factions, so much political bias crept into personal testimonials of resistance that it became impossible fully to credit most of them...

...Lacombe Lucien tells the story of a dull young rustic who leaves his village in southwest France to join the Gestapo in a larger town...

...But note the grounds on which Frenay defends his refusal to take the required oath to Petain: it is impossible, he says, for "a citizen and a Christian to pledge allegiance to a man...

...In a sense, the Right is now so dead that its seriousness can be comfortably granted...

...My child, [she said] you've been lying to me...

...The question, "What did you do in the war, Daddy...

...By the summer of 1942 it had become imperative for Frenay to see the General in London...

...Confessing that he concealed from her his fateful decision, Frenay adds with a charm and candor all his own: "It was my first clandestine act...

...Of this London was not unaware...

...Force of habit, I expect," quipped the General...

...I felt in him no warmth," writes Frenay, "but everything I said had been listened to, and had registered...

...One suspects that it was precisely Frenay's conception of himself as a faithful son of his country—"a citizen and a Christian"—which led him to pursue his guerrilla war on national soil...

...Many ex-resisters have written about various partisan groups—the most famous accounts are probably those of Pierre Guillain de Benouville and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade—but Frenay is the first chief of a comprehensive front to provide a detailed story of its birth and development...

...From Frenay the potential rival to Frenay the "child...

...A skilled metalworker at the outbreak of the war, he did not attempt to evade deportation to Germany, he argued, because he himself had known no resisters and because "if a referendum had been organized in 1940, or even in 1941, Petain would have won by 90 percent' '—a rather "as-mediocre-as-thou" way of putting it...

...Free French) in London...

...fumes Frenay, who had done as much as anyone to rally the Resistance to Gaullism), the younger man felt the disappointment of a patriot who expects a touch of sympathy for his and his comrades' efforts...

...Eventually, in Algiers, Frenay received the portfolio of Prisoners, Deportees, and Refugees (" the ministry of suffering," he calls it), and felt the representation of the Resistance slip largely out of his hands and into those of the Communists, whose desertion of the French cause after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact he had never fully forgiven...

...It was, in his own words, "the profanation of my secret garden," the cumulative misrepresentation of events that he had personally experienced, which finally loosened his tongue...

...Henri Frenay was a founder and virtual leader of Combat, the major non-Communist resistance movement in the Vichy zone...

...He relates how his mother anxiously knocked on his door and asked why he was still awake...

...For the testimonials of the major collaborators, given during the great postwar purge trials, reveal them to have been not scoundrels but traitors of probity...

...Many of them remember all too well the years after the Liberation when genuine partisans were often indiscriminately lumped with the bandits, opportunists, and "September resisters" who jumped on the bandwagon of victory well after the liberation of Paris in August 1944...

...Many of the historical myths of both the Gaullists and the Left, then, are being discarded...

...For Marchais has been much reproached for his undistinguished behavior during the war (at which time, however, he was not yet a Communist), and this could become a sore spot now that the Socialists are cutting heavily into the Communist vote...

...And I suppose you think that I'm going to shut up about it...

...Lucien's own moral imbecility is positively exotic: he is the kind of insolent brute who endangers himself as much as his enemies...

...Despite the French army's classic apolitical role, by 1938 the young army intellectual was already lecturing hundreds of reserve officers in Toulouse and the Haute-Garonne area on the evils of Nazism: [For Nazism] the heretics are the democrats, the rationalists, the humanists, the liberals...

...Yet the outpouring of dreadful memories in France-Soir was no isolated event...

...They believe that the far-reaching renewal of French institutions that they prepared during the war was stunted, through no fault of their own, by the peculiar exigencies of the Cold War and the struggle between de Gaulle and the Communists...

...It was, on the other hand, the moody General who came to embody the goal of national sovereignty, often to the virtual exclusion of any other...

...To this Frenay appends, "I was not convinced...

...Called "My Liberation," it dealt with liberation in the most literal sense...

...The trauma of the Occupation has come to be regarded as the central event in modern French history (somewhat like the Civil War in the United States...

...Hardly ever do we find him using the word "sovereignty" unless to qualify some gesture of de Gaulle's...

...We couldn't believe it," she said...

...Frenay's book is only one of the more salient and controversial treatments of the Occupation to have appeared in France in the last few years...

...Resistance groups "working" the same territory were often ignorant of each other's very existence, and after the war, whether through vainglory or for political reasons, they often begrudged each other the laurels that each felt to be exclusively its own...

...Just as postwar France became overnight a nation of former partisans, so the older generation now finds itself accused by its children of having been merely a pack of moral hibernators...

...For in June 1945 it was the very same Frenay—by then Minister of Prisoners— whom the General was to chide in the Matignon, saying, "Frenay, you are a child...

...Though we can be certain that this ongoing reexamination very much concerns political people and intellectuals, it is harder to judge just how much it affects the French in general...

...Here," says Frenay, "was the heart of the problem: the relationship between de Gaulle and the Resistance," and he goes on to describe how he bluntly told de Gaulle that the Resistance would reserve the right to disobey his orders if it saw fit...

...For documentation there remain, of course, the enemy's archives, particularly those discovered in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin after the war...

...Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre (Black Thursday) is probably the first French movie to deal explicitly with the ill-famed "Black Thursday" of July 16, 1942, in which 13,000 Jews were rounded up by the Paris police and collaborationist stormtroopers and marched off to the Velodrome d'Hiver, where they were detained in inhuman conditions before being deported to the Nazi death camps...

...Though no one, I think, questions Marchais's honesty on this point, many find it odd that a man of apparently dubious patriotism now heads a party that once called itself "the party of the 75,000 firing-squad victims...

...But she refused to let me go on...

...They bitterly defend the interests of their nations...

...Though not skittish about making enemies, Frenay quit the French political scene in disgust upon the formation of the 1945 Constituent Assembly and has always been loath to engage in retrospective backbiting...

...It was called Paris, Leve, Debout and was broadcast in August for the uprising's 30th anniversary...

...This time he has not the courage to tell her a lie: "I tried to steer our conversation into the realm of principles," he writes, such as the impossibility for a citizen and a Christian to pledge allegiance to a man...

...In the spring of 1945 Frenay found himself once again at odds with the General, this time over the latter's project for France to participate in the dismemberment of the Reich...

...When de Gaulle, with a faint tic of the eyelid, would sulkily end an interview without answering Frenay's questions, or shake his head at him with the words, "Let's stick together, let's stick together...

...Frenay's many interviews with de Gaulle form the dramatic core of his memoirs, a composite portrait of that foremost practitioner of the "French authoritarian style...

...In another issue a man related how the F.F.I...

...Recently, scholars such as Robert Paxton, Stanley Hoffman, and Richard Griffiths have focused on Marshal Petain's extraordinary popularity...

...In 1940 his cast of mind was still essentially military, a product of the Saint-Cyr drillground and Ecole de Guerre study-groups...

...As for the Communists, their stories too are losing credibility...

...You're going to hurt our country, and you're going to make a good job of it too, just as you make a good job of everything you do...

...This is Frenay's chief argument...

...This inability was, perhaps, an essential part of his paternalism, of the fact that he saw himself not as a rebel but as a father of his country...

...q 268 DAN HOFSTADTER...

...But what makes the 262 DAN HOFSTADTER movie something of a landmark is that it presents the Collaboration in the role of protagonist...

...They often speak of the "reverse mythification" (i.e., a belittling) of the French Resistance...

...By then Frenay was a convinced "European," a man without rancor against the Germans and alarmed by the possibility of a new edition of Versailles...

...The Resistance was, of course, an adventure, and it attracted not only adventurous men but also adventurers...

...Frenay hints that de Gaulle's inability to conceive of any popular movement arising on national soil was closely related to his own willingness to leave that MEMORIES OF THE RESISTANCE 267 soil...

...French TV-viewers were to see this woman, whose hands still bear the stigmata of her tortures, standing by the Solferino bridge and recounting how, at the age of 19, she had shot down a German officer on the very same spot...

...Gentlemen, they are us...

...Frenay first met de Gaulle (excluding some brief prewar contact) in September 1942, and he was quick to note the older man's personal style: his grave demeanor, his eschewal of all decorations save his own Cross of Lorraine, his odd manner of address that assumed he had always known a new interlocutor, his dangling cigarette, his teetotaling, and his long unresponsive yet signifying silences that fell across his conversation like a zone of shadow...

...an important faction in the ultra-fascist opposition to Petain...

...Another reason why the Resistance stays permanently controversial is the number of exresisters who have risen to prominence in politics, letters, labor, and many other fields...

...Not surprisingly, Frenay continued for a while to work for the army's Deuxieme Bureau (intelligence) in Vichy, but his gradual disillusionment with Petain led him to resign his commission in February 1941...

...She is the 32-year-old daughter of a leader in Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Francais (P.P.F...

...Partly because of his own desire to represent the Resistance to Free France, and partly because of his rivals' reluctance to see him back on metropolitan soil, Frenay was to spend much of his time from late 1942 on in MEMORIES OF THE RESISTANCE 265 England...

...During this period of exile it was his thankless task to beseech the Free French and the British for arms, money, and better communication lines...

...Well you're wrong...

...The word "liberal" hardly recurs again in the entire book, but in fact it describes Frenay's politics better than many of the now quaint labels that he and his friends devised for themselves...

...The paper had asked its readers to send in stories of their personal experience of release from bondage in 1944, and they replied with heartrending accounts...

...Yet, though a Resistance record hardly elicits veneration from the skeptical French, the public demands more and more to know just what important politicians were doing during the war...

...What else can explain, if not the fear of a potential rival—a Richelieu's reflex— his constant desire to place his own men, whose destiny depended on his good graces alone, over the Resistance...

...What is extraordinary, given the lapse of 30 years, is the freshness of his invective, not only against his Communist rivals but also against such figures as Emmanuel d'Astier, Francois Mitterand, Jean Moulin, and, most of all, de Gaulle himself...

...His pettish resentment of the English for allegedly pulling the teeth of the French Empire, and for offending a dignity that he identified with his own, was immediately apparent: "This, I shall not tolerate," he announced to Frenay one day (speaking of the ouster of France from the Levant), as if he were in a position to be "tolerant," and as if the majeste lesee were all his own...

...he would ask Frenay, or affirm, with that sovereign use of the third person whereby he institutionalized himself: "France must rally to de Gaulle if she wishes to remain France...

...A conscientious collaborator might have held more dramatic interest: a selfrighteous fascist, for example, or an antiSemite "on principle"—one of the Robert Brasillachs, Jean Luchaires, or Pierre Pucheus of the Collaboration...

...Even today one sometimes hears the allegation that the partisans were for the most part no more than gangsters or opportunists...

...Two French TV producers recently put together a passionate televised defense for the often slighted masses of French people who did actively oppose the Nazi occupier...

...Malle has trivialized a movement whose leaders, even when facing the firing squad, remained stoically convinced of their own righteousness...

...It was, in fact, this military cast of mind with which he was most often to be reproached in the Resistance— especially by the labor-oriented group, Liberation—for Frenay always remained a believer in the value of strict encadrement, of elites...

...We sat down on a bench and wept...

...Actually, one suspects that this film's appeal comes largely from the current vogue for nostalgia...

...In any case, Marchais's apologia was a bit lame...

...Early in his London phase he scribbled a personal note above a memorandum to de Gaulle saying that he intended to play "the bull in the china shop of Free France," and indeed it was not long before the warm-blooded young staff officer's impatience at the captious and undemonstrative General had turned to exasperation and even anger...

...On August 7 and 10, for example, an elderly Parisian widow told how she and her four-year-old son had been liberated from a prison hospital by the French Forces of the Interior...

...Between these two sentences lay a long succession of exchanges and altercations...

...In effect, the second half of the book sets forth a long attack on de Gaulle, and in it the author comes close to those who have seen Gaullism's major anomaly as the insistence that Frenchmen "view things through the eyes of one who refused to view them through anyone else's...

...He was reared in a Lyonnaise military family...

...His lengthy book La Nuit Finira (Paris: Laffont, 1973) is an eyewitness chronicle of a resistance movement told by its own leader...

...Haven't you understood yet that policy, especially foreign policy, is not made with noble sentiments...

...Though bitterly critical of de Gaulle's claim to have sown the seeds of the Resistance with his famous June 18 Appeal, of which Frenay and his friends, not to mention the Communists, remained unaware until long after June 1940, Frenay does not conceal his frank admiration for the great man...

...has always somewhat unnerved him, because during the war Georges Marchais worked in Germany manufacturing war materiel...

...On a deeper level, Frenay was already perceiving what he and so many others were later to pinpoint as the most dangerous flaw in orthodox Gaullism: the tendency for the outward forms of sovereignty to mask an actual deliverance into servitude, and for the assertion of national independence to disguise the persistence of social unfreedom...

...In turn, members of the older generation, which tends to be loyal to "the legend of the Resistance," suggest that what really distresses their children is the sheer difficulty of following in the wake of giants...

...My duty is to defend the interests of France, which, as far as Germany is concerned, begin with our presence on the east bank of the Rhine...

...Having lost his aplomb, he was momentarily not "de Gaulle" but just "me...

...In the course of his background research, Bloch ran into an ex-resister called Madeleine Riffaut who eventually became the "star" of his broadcast...

...But he was dead...

...Parisians from many walks of life told how they had risen against the oppressor...

...To me, he said this...

...If this canard has been all but silenced by the gradual enfeeblement of the French Right, and by the Left's fondness for seeing the Resistance as a sort of paradigmatic "national liberation front," it has been replaced by a new thesis that the Resistance was basically unimportant...

...In effect, it was de Gaulle's response to what he saw as Frenay's raw baiting contumacy in attacking his pet project, the creation of the National Council of the Resistance (C.N.R...

...Eventually he joined de Gaulle's provisional government in Algiers, all the while in constant touch with the domestic leadership of the movement he had founded, now known as Combat...

...For at the heart of the Frenay-de Gaulle drama lay the conflict between the junior officer appealing for an almost paternal support for his youthful ideals, and the older general, the prophet of the armored column, with his overriding concern for French sovereignty...

...The MEMORIES OF THE RESISTANCE 263 most important thing," said Bloch, himself an ex-resister, "was that they should not be betrayed...