Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance
Patrick Marnham
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 037550608X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Enthralling and intelligent, a masterly exploration of
the sinister labyrinth that was wartime France . . .
It is a remarkable book, utterly fascinating.”
—Allan Massie
Not long after 2:00 p.m. on June 21, 1943, eight men met in secret at a doctor’s house in Lyon. They represented the warring factions of the French Resistance and had been summoned by General de Gaulle’s new envoy, a man most of them knew simply as “Max.”
Minutes after the last man entered the house, the Gestapo broke in, led by Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon.” The fate awaiting Barbie’s prisoners was torture, deportation, and death. “Max” was tortured sadistically but never broke: he took his many secrets to his grave. In that moment, the legend of Jean Moulin was born.
Who betrayed Jean Moulin? And who was this enigmatic hero, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? After the war, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon—France’s highest honor—where his memory is revered alongside that of Voltaire and Victor Hugo. But Moulin’s story is full of unanswered questions: the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend conveniently manufactured by de Gaulle.
Resistance and Betrayal tells for the first time in English the epic story of France’s greatest war hero, a Schindler-like character of ambiguous motivation. A winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, praised by Graham Greene and Julian Barnes, Patrick Marnham is a brilliant storyteller with a keen appreciation for the complex maze of moral compromises navigated in times of war. Told with the drama and suspense of the best espionage fiction, Resistance and Betrayal brings to life the dark and duplicitous world of the French Resistance and offers a startling conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Second World War.
Praise for Patrick Marnham
Fantastic Invasion
“An exhilarating Swiftian excursion into human folly —
a brilliant book.” —Doris Lessing
“A writer afoot with a ruthless vision and armed with a literary style which burns away the surface of what it describes . . .
His main strength lies in his genius as a storyteller.”
—Jonathan Raban
The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret
“I doubt if there will be a better, or better-written, portrait of Simenon for a long time.” —Julian Barnes
“I can confidently say there will never be a better book on this subject. It makes absolutely compulsive reading.”
—A. N. Wilson
“Excellent, penetrating, fully researched and very well written . . . Adds to our understanding not only of Simenon’s art but of
the art of the novel itself.” —Muriel Spark
American Nightfighter Aces of World War 2
Closing the Ring (The Second World War, Volume 5)
British Motor Gun Boat 1939-45 (New Vanguard, Volume 166)
Haute-Loire, where the local commissars of the communist resistance organized a show trial. Just as in the Moscow show trials the four accused were made to write down their life stories, photographed, in the style of police photographs, and then denounced before general assemblies of the maquisards by party prosecutors. The formal accusation was that they had “poisoned the water supply.” The assemblies, transformed into popular juries, were then invited to vote for the death of their fellow
protests in Castelnaudary, whose egg producers did not possess free rail passes. More seriously, the prefect had to intervene in the Béziers wine market to prevent the deputy mayor of the town and two leading merchants from buying up wine in order to sell large quantities at an inflated price to the army. One evening Moulin had a humiliating reminder of how soldiers regarded young men in his privileged position. While out walking with a group of fellow students, all smartly dressed, they were set
descendants of that revolution, and the unity of the war memorials, graven in stone, where monarchist and republican names were jumbled together in alphabetical order, mort pour la France (dead for France), was shattered in a new ideological struggle. The first blow was struck by the left in February 1923 when “an anarchist,” acting more or less alone, assassinated one of the leading figures in the monarchist movement, Action française. In reply the monarchists attacked and burned down the
Savoy, a man called Mounier who had formerly been secretary-general at Montpellier. This was a personal appointment based on friendship, but the move to Chambéry in February 1922 nonetheless marked an important change in Moulin’s life. Chambéry, the capital of the Savoy, was historically a garrison town, with its massive château providing a strongpoint that enabled whoever held it to control the Alpine passes to Italy. There was little that was familiar in this town or this region to a young man
known to have worked for six different resistance or intelligence groups. These included Victor Farrell, MI6’s correspondent in Geneva; Colonel Groussard, the cagoulard resister who had arrested Pierre Laval in 1940 and who was now running the Gilbert network from Berne; the British Pat O’Leary escape line, founded by the Belgian doctor Albert Guerisse; Serge, one of the Vichy Deuxième Bureau’s resistance units, as well as a French police resistance network called Ajax, and the Swiss secret
