Two Remarkable Frenchmen
by Richard Pooley
A game I play when entering a southern French town for the first time is to guess when I will first sight Avenue/Boulevard/Rue/Place Jean-Jaurès. The French socialist leader’s assassination on 31 July 1914 (by the appropriately named Raoul Villain, a nationalist) ended any hope that France would avoid declaring war on Germany and the carnage that Jean Jaurès knew would ensue. There are 2,370 streets in France named after him. Most are in the south, where he was born and where I have a house.
Much of my knowledge of French history has come from spotting a street named after someone I had not heard of and looking them up in my history books or online. Yet to my shame, there is one great Frenchman who, until this week, I had not known about, even though he has 1,472 streets named after him, or rather after the nom de guerre he used in World War Two to shield his aristocratic family from the attention of the Nazis. I thought my lapse could be blamed on the fact that most of these streets are in the north, where he was born and where I seldom go.
But No! I looked at the map of Brive-la-Gaillarde, our nearest town, and there it is: Avenue du Général Leclerc Maréchal de France, a narrow, one-way street I have been down (and up once, by mistake) many times, including two weeks ago. It passes Place Winston Churchill, for God’s sake.
Philippe François Marie de Hauteclocque was born in the Somme department in 1902. He legally changed his name to Jacques-Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque in November 1945 to incorporate his wartime pseudonym, Leclerc, the single name by which nearly all French people know him.
It’s thanks to De Gaulle: Liberté, the second film in the five-hour-long La Bataille de Gaulle I reviewed in the last issue - Odysseus 1, De Gaulle 3 , that I now know something about Leclerc. I saw it a few days ago. Go and see it; it’s as good as the first, De Gaulle: Résistance.
In fact, two men other than De Gaulle are central to this second film – Leclerc and Jean Moulin.
Leclerc was a brilliant general, another true leader, whose men followed him from Equatorial Africa, to the Libyan and Tunisian deserts, from the Normandy beaches to Paris (the first of the Allies to arrive; the Germans surrendered to Leclerc), on to Strasbourg (where, following an oath they made with Leclerc in Africa, they flew the French Tricolour from the cathedral), to finally crossing the Rhine and ending up close to Hitler’s holiday retreat in Berchtesgaden. Throughout he remained loyal to De Gaulle rather than the latter’s rival General Henri Giraud, who US President Roosevelt championed. As the film makes clear, Leclerc’s daring and successful military engagements in the North African campaign earned him, and by association, De Gaulle, the respect and political support for the Free French of generals Montgomery and Eisenhower.
In the film, Leclerc tells his men, inadequately-armed and still recovering from their trek across the Sahara, why they must not retreat from the Libyan oasis of Ksar Rhilane but instead defend it from an attack by a German panzer division of some sixty tanks. He reminds them of the civilians in France who, without any weapons at all, were risking their and their families’ lives to get information crucial to the Allied war effort out to the British and Americans.
I can find no evidence Leclerc gave such a speech but it reinforced the key message of the film: De Gaulle would not have prevailed without the Free French forces showing that they were effective military allies, and without the various groups in the Resistance within France uniting and accepting, however unwillingly, De Gaulle as their leader.
And Jean Moulin? I thought I knew quite a lot about the famous leader of the Resistance, betrayed in Lyon by a compatriot (who this person was has been the subject of books, tv documentaries and films ever since), tortured by Gestapo boss “The Butcher of Lyon”, Klaus Barbie, and dying somewhere unknown in early July 1943. What I should have known but didn’t was how his pre-war years as a brilliant, left-wing politician (chef adjoint to Pierre Cot, a Radical-Socialist minister in the 1930s, and France’s youngest préfet in the Aveyron department) gave him the diplomatic and political skills to spend 18 months in and out of wartime France getting the many anti-German, anti-Vichy political parties to unite. Only he could have done it. Without Moulin the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) would never have formed in May 1943. Without the existence of the CNR, De Gaulle could not have outwitted Henry Giraud and persuaded Churchill and Roosevelt that he and he alone was the leader of the provisional government of France.
Ultimately, De Gaulle, Leclerc and, posthumously, Moulin were together responsible for the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories not to include France. This was Roosevelt’s idea: not only would Germany, Italy and Japan be governed by the Allies but so would France. And Belgium would extend over much of northern France and become New Wallonia! The US Federal Reserve printed millions of Franc-denominated bank notes. At Roosevelt’s insistence La République de la France was removed from the first dummy notes. Only the French Tricolour was allowed. But Roosevelt’s idea, motivated partly to stop De Gaulle becoming the new president of France, died long before he himself did in April 1945. It was clear to nearly everyone else, including Eisenhower and, of course, De Gaulle, that the French would not accept rule by any other power, however friendly.
Is there any doubt that had Moulin lived he would have been France’s post-war leader once De Gaulle had resigned as head of the government (as he did in January 1946)? One of the great ‘What if’s’ of history.
And what if Leclerc had not been killed in a plane crash in North Africa in November 1947, six days after his 45th birthday? He had been held in such high regard by all the Allied leaders that it was he who represented France when the Japanese surrendered on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. And it was he who, after being given the job of recovering French Indochina – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – by force, soon realised that a war against the Vietnamese nationalists was ultimately unwinnable. He negotiated with Ho Chi Minh and a preliminary settlement was reached. He argued that “anti-communism will be a useless tool unless the problem of nationalism is resolved. Negotiate at all costs!” But he failed to persuade the colonial politicians locally and in France that this should be accepted. He was removed from his post in July 1946 and died four months later. Would the US Americans have been dragged into their disastrous Vietnam war if Leclerc had been listened to twenty years earlier?
Charles de Gaulle has 3,903 French streets named after him. At the bottom of our steeply-inclined French garden there is a small wall over which I frequently climb to land in Avenue Jean Moulin, one of 2,215 streets named after Moulin. But nowhere in the village is Philippe Leclerc so honoured.
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