get a good cheap lunch here, washed down with the rough white wine of the nearby Grésivaudan valley.
At first sight, the five conspirators, all of whom held strong left-wing views, had nothing in common with the two intellectuals who had cut down a walnut tree at Sassenage four months earlier. They had even less in common with the young Army officers who, for months past, had been smuggling lorryloads of arms and ammunition past the front door of the café. But all three groups were in reality bound to a single purpose that would, in due course, bring them together in a common enterprise which would transcend their political differences: the distant but now growing possibility that some time – some time soon perhaps – their country might be free again.
Among those seated at the table that afternoon was a figure of medium height, round shoulders and powerful build whose face was underpinned by a sharply etched chin and enlivened by eyes which missed little that went on around him. Aimé Pupin, the patron of La Rotonde, was normally to be found behind its dark wooden counter, chatting to his customers and overseeing the service at the tables. Passionate about rugby – he had been a formidable hooker in his youth – Pupin had received, like so many of his class in pre-war France, only the bare minimum of education. But he had a force of personality, matched by firm opinions and a propensity for action, which made him a natural if at times obstinate and impetuous leader. He also had a marked sense of idealism for the brotherhood of man and the Socialist cause, and this was ardently shared by the four men sitting around him, all of whom were not only fellow members of the Socialist Party but also Masons.
Beside Pupin sat Eugène Chavant, forty-seven years old, stocky, pipe-smoking, taciturn, the haphazardly trimmed moustache on his upper lip complementing an unruly shock of hair greying at the temples. Chavant’s quiet demeanour hid an iron will and unshakeable convictions. As a young man he had followed his father into the shoe-making trade. During the First World War he had been quickly promoted to sergeant and platoon commander in the 11th Dragoons and received the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with four citations for bravery. When the First World War finished, he returned to Grenoble, became a leading member of the French Socialist Party and was elected on the first ballot with the entire Socialist list in the 1936 elections. For this he was summarily sacked from his post as foreman in a local shoe factory, forcing him to go into the café business in order to pursue his political convictions. He had later been elected Mayor of the Grenoble suburb of Saint-Martin-d’Hères and was now, like Pupin, the patron of a restaurant in a working-class district of the city.
Others round the table included a railway worker at the station, a garage owner and Léon Martin, who practised as a doctor and pharmacist in the city. At sixty-eight, Martin was the oldest of the five, a past Socialist Mayor of Grenoble city and a strong opponent of the Vichy government. He told his co-conspirators that he believed the time had come to set up a Resistance cell in the Grenoble area. The others enthusiastically agreed, and the meeting broke up – but not before the conspirators marked their passage into the shadows by distributing aliases. Chavant’s clandestine name would henceforth be Clément and that of Pupin, Mathieu. Slowly, over the following months, the little group drew more and more supporters to their meetings in the back room of Dr Martin’s pharmacy at 125 Cours Berriat, which lies under the rim of the Vercors at the western edge of the city.
Although the daily lives of those who lived on the Vercors itself were less affected by the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy government than those in Grenoble, the plateau was by no means immune from its consequences.
On 28 September 1940, the prestigious Polish school in Paris, the Lycée Polonais Cyprian-Norwid, which had decamped from the capital shortly after the Germans arrived, formally re-established itself in Villard-de-Lans on the northern half of the plateau. A month later, on 28 October, it opened its doors to students – chiefly the children of Polish refugees from the north – in the Hôtel du Parc et du Château, a famous pre-war skiing establishment in the town.
On 23 May 1941, a trainload of French refugees, driven out of their homes in Alsace-Lorraine by incoming German families, arrived in the station at Romans, below the western edge of the Vercors. They were kept on the station for three days while the Vichy authorities found houses in the region, many of them in the Villard-de-Lans area. To add to these new arrivals, Jewish families soon started to arrive as well, fleeing the early round-ups in the northern zone, later replicated by the Vichy government in the south as well. Even by the standards of a town used to the annual influx of winter-sports visitors, life in Villard was becoming unusually cosmopolitan.
Some time during the late summer or early autumn of 1941, a quite separate group of conspirators, also Socialists and Masons, started meeting in secret in Villard-de Lans. The moving spirit of this group, who were initially unaware of their Grenoble co-conspirators, was another doctor/pharmacist called Eugène Samuel. A Rumanian by origin, Dr Samuel, who had come to Villard to join his wife after the fall of France in 1940, held his meetings in the back room of his pharmacy under the cover of a Hunting Committee. The Villard group was as varied as its Grenoble equivalent, consisting, apart from Samuel himself, of a hotelier, the local tax inspector, the director of the Villard branch of the Banque Populaire and the three brothers, Émile, Paul and Victor Huillier, who ran the local transport company. Not long after their formation, the Villard group began searching for other organized Resistants in the area. Through the good offices of one of their number they were put in touch with Léon Martin in Grenoble.
On Easter Monday (6 April) 1942, ‘the day the history of [the Resistance] in the Vercors started’, according to Léon Martin, the two groups met together in Villard and agreed to form a single organization to promote the Socialist cause and foment resistance in the area. The journey had begun that would take this handful of idealistic plotters from furtive meetings in the back rooms of local pharmacies to a fully fledged, 4,000-strong partisan army ready to take on the full might of the German Wehrmacht.
Marcel Malbos, one of the teachers at the Polish school in Villard, summed up the mood of these early resisters: ‘When the life of a whole people is mortally threatened, when the tyrant sets out to destroy a whole civilization along with both its culture and its people, when the shipwreck is upon you – then, just when all seems lost, suddenly a conjunction of events occurs, as is so often found in history, which offers the possibility of hope. [In our case] it was the creation on our mountain plateau of a patch of dry land above the flood – above the tumult – where a few men came together to create a kind of rebirth. And soon this tiny plot above the waves would become a rock, a refuge, a home and a fortress …’
4
All day and all night, General Laffargue stayed in his grand office with its heavy Empire desk in the Hôtel de la Division on one side of the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The date was 10 November 1942, two days after the Allied landings in French North Africa, and the General was expecting a telephone call from his superior which would set in train the plan already drawn up by Vichy military headquarters for mobilization of the Armistice Army against a German invasion in the south. All through the long day and night, into 11 November (the anniversary of the German surrender in 1918), the General waited. But the call never came.
The truth was that the government of Vichy had been thrown into complete confusion, not to say panic, by the Allied invasion of North Africa. The Vichy leaders knew what would come next, but should they oppose, or acquiesce? Anticipation and indecision came to an end at dawn on 11 November 1942, when Hitler’s personal emissary arrived in Vichy and delivered a letter from the Führer to Marshal Pétain informing him that Axis troops were taking control of Vichy France. In fact, the Germans had already launched Operation Attila. Some hours previously Italian units had stormed across the French/Italian frontier with orders to occupy Grenoble. Meanwhile German columns under Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, the newly appointed German Army commander for southern France,
