De Gaulle’s Debt

Patrice Higonnet

• Jean Moulin: Le politique, le rebelle, le résistant by Jean-Pierre Azéma
  Perrin, 507 pp, €24.00, April 2003, ISBN 2 262 01329 2

By 1995, there were 37 monuments and 113 plaques dedicated to Jean Moulin in France; 978 boulevards, avenues, streets, squares, bridges and stadiums were named after him, as well as more than 365 schools, including one university. There are even more today; only de Gaulle is more honoured. And yet at the time of his death at the hands of Nazi torturers in the first days of July 1943, Moulin was unknown even among the elite circles of the day. In all likelihood, Pétain and even Laval had little idea who he was. To no other man, however – apart from Churchill – did de Gaulle owe so much, as that excessively immodest man fully understood, just as no one, apart from de Gaulle himself, did more to frustrate Franklin Roosevelt’s determination not just to liberate France in June 1944, but to occupy and administer it until some government presumably favourable to the US emerged from its ruins. By what he had done – and because of his untimely death, what was left undone – Moulin made a lasting mark on French history, greater than he himself could ever have anticipated.