Pierre Brossolette
Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II.
Brossolette ran a Resistance intelligence hub from a Parisian bookshop on the Rue de la Pompe, before serving as a liaison officer in London, where he also was a radio anchor for the BBC, and carried out three clandestine missions in France. Arrested in Brittany as he was trying to reach the UK on a mission back from France alongside Émile Bollaert, Brossolette was taken into custody by the Sicherheitsdienst. He committed suicide by jumping out of a window at their headquarters on 84 Avenue Foch in Paris as he feared he would reveal the lengths of French Resistance networks under torture; he died of his wounds later that day at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.
On 27 May 2015, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon with national honours at the request of President François Hollande, alongside politician Jean Zay and fellow Resistance members Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz.
Biography
Education and journalism
Pierre Brossolette was born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to a family deeply involved in the fights for laic schools in early 20th century France. His father was Léon Brossolette, General Inspector for Primary Education; his mother Jeanne Vial was the daughter of Francisque Vial, Director of Secondary Education, responsible for making secondary education free in France.Brossolette ranked first at the entrance examination to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure; throughout his education held the title of "cacique" which was internally attributed to the most brilliant student, ahead of intellectuals such as philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch and two years before Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. In 1925 he graduated second to Georges Bidault after a small scandal on the dissertation themes for the final examination. His passion for history had led him to choose this "agrégation" instead of the more usual and prestigious philosophy one. During this time and while he was in his military service, he married Gilberte Bruel and had two children, Anne and Claude.
Instead of pursuing an academic career like most normaliens, he longed for action and decided to enter journalism and politics. He joined the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, the main socialist party, in 1929, adhered to the LDH and LICA league and entered freemasonry. He worked as a journalist for Notre Temps, L'Europe Nouvelle, the party newspaper Le Populaire and the state-owned Radio PTT but was fired when he violently opposed the Munich Agreement on air in 1939. In his newspaper columns, Brossolette had evolved from a resolute pacifist and europeanist, after Aristide Briand's ideals, to a denunciator of both fascism and communism.
Resistance activities
When World War II broke out, he joined the army as a lieutenant of the 5th régiment d'infanterie; before the fall of France, he reached the rank of captain receiving two citations for the French War Cross for having retreated his battalion in an orderly way. After the Armistice, when the Vichy regime forbade him to teach, Brossolette and his wife took over a bookstore specialised in Russian literature at the Rue de la Pompe near Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, where he had attended high school. The bookstore became an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance where documents, such as Renault factory plans used for its bombing, were exchanged unnoticed, thanks to the extensive library available underground.He was a popular voice on the radio before the war and his chronicles on Hitler's rise led to being blacklisted early in the 1930s by the Nazis. It did not take long before he was approached by his friend Agnès Humbert and introduced to Jean Cassou and the Groupe du musée de l'Homme, the very first resistance network. He just had time to produce the last issue of the newsletter Résistance before narrowly escaping its dismantlement.
By then assuming a pivotal role in the ZO Resistance, Brossolette coordinated contacts between groups such as Libération-Nord from Christian Pineau, the Organisation Civile et Militaire and Comité d'Action Socialiste. He finally obtained a liaison with London and General Charles de Gaulle when he was hired by conservative Gilbert Renault also known as Colonel Rémy as press and propaganda manager of Confrérie Notre-Dame, by then the most important network in Northern France.
In April 1942, Brossolette met De Gaulle in London as representative of the ZO Resistance and was hired to work on bringing political credibility to De Gaulle to back his recognition as the only Free French Forces leader by the Allies in his feud against Henri Giraud in Algiers. At the same time, he was promoted to major and awarded Compagnon de la Libération.
Brossolette created the civilian arm of the BCRAM intelligence service, which became the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action, in liaison with the RF section of the British side, Special Operations Executive. Strong ties of camaraderie were forged between Brossolette, BCRA's chief André Dewavrin and SOE's Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas. De Gaulle set up his Free French intelligence system to combine both military and political roles, including covert operations. The policy was reversed in 1943 by Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, the Interior Minister, who insisted on civilian control of political intelligence.
The three friends were sent on a mission to France and united, under the CCZN, the various ZO Resistance groups which had been thoroughly divided by political views, including the communist-led Front National ; they were thus instrumental in the merging with the ZL Resistance similarly united by Jean Moulin under the MUR. This led to the creation of the Conseil National de la Résistance by Moulin through the addition of the political parties and unions and ultimately to De Gaulle's unequivocal recognition as Free France's political representative to the Allies.
During this time, Pierre Brossolette resumed his radio chronicles on BBC with high-profile speeches to the "army of shadows", replacing Maurice Schumann as anchor. In a speech at the Albert Hall on 18 June 1943, he famously praised the soutiers de la gloire in a reference to the fallen anonymous soldiers and resistants. Brossolette also resumed his newspaper work through a series of articles on France's situation, including one in La Marseillaise considered by many to be the doctrinal founding of the Gaullisme de guerre movement.
Politics
In addition to journalism, Pierre Brossolette was also a politician. He was a protégé of Léon Blum and was considered an up-and-coming star of the SFIO party, running elections on his Troyes base. He assumed cabinet functions during the Popular Front government and as a political pundit on official Radio PTT he was considered the de facto foreign policy spokesman of the socialist government. Already calling for deep rejuvenation of the political class before the war, he attributed French defeat in 1940 to the corrupt political system of the Third Republic.As he politically structured the Parisian resistance, Brossolette succeeded in convincing the network leaders to create a temporary Resistance Party under De Gaulle's leadership after the war, focused on promoting ambitious social transformations while avoiding the predictable enmity and chaos of post-Liberation times. This political and social plan, including nationalisations and price controls, inspired the March 1944 Conseil national de la Résistance programme and was implemented after war.
Brossolette's criticism of the old parliamentarian system, together with the role of communist networks inside the CNR, became the main point of disagreement with his southern counterpart Jean Moulin. His desire to disband all the old parties through a complete reshuffle of ideological lines logically brought him into conflict with the party leaders. As a result, he was excluded from the newly reconstituted SFIO party by Daniel Mayer and Gaston Defferre a few days before being arrested, although the decision to remove him from the party was never enforced and was actually forgotten.
Despite this, most of his ideas were implemented in 1958 when De Gaulle established the Fifth Republic and established a presidentialist system based around his Rally of the French People party. However, De Gaulle was pushed in the short term to decide in favour of Jean Moulin's proposal as he still struggled to show the Allies that he was not a dictator. Brossolette's ideas of a Resistance party raised many opponents' fears of a "bonapartian" drift, especially among fellow socialists in London including Pierre Cot and Raymond Aron. This seemed to be confirmed to his detractors' eyes when Brossolette succeeded a bold blow against the Vichy regime by exfiltrating from France Charles Vallin, deputy leader of conservative French Social Party that had surged as the main French party with over 30% at pre-war elections, but deemed proto-fascist by the left. Hence the French Fourth Republic eventually reverted to the Third Republic's pre-war parliamentarist system.
During his last missions, Brossolette worked on creating a new party that could be the major force of the left. He was inspired by the British Labour Party, using a non-Marxist or, at least, reformist approach. For that, he spent his last days writing an ambitious critique of Marx's political philosophy as a by-product of 18th-century rationalism that would provide the theoretical framework for this party. Unfortunately, at the time of his arrest the manuscripts were thrown overboard at sea over Brittany shores.
Arrest
Brossolette returned to Paris for a third mission to reorganise the Parisian resistance which was in disarray after successive Gestapo raids, especially by CND's dismantling.By then, his role and importance was already well known to the SS Intelligence Services after Moulin's death and despite De Gaulle's clear reluctance to appoint him as substitute CNR chief. He escaped arrest many times and was summoned to return to Britain by late 1943 to introduce the newly appointed CNR chief, Émile Bollaert, to De Gaulle. The bad winter weather cancelled many Lysander exfiltration attempts or Lysanders would be shot down as in a December attempt near Laon, so in February 1944, they decided to return by boat from Brittany. However, the vessel, hit by a storm, shipwrecked at Pointe du Raz. They managed to reach the coast and to be hidden by local Resistance, but were betrayed by a local woman at a checkpoint.
Bollaert and Brossolette were not identified and were kept imprisoned in Rennes for weeks. F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, when informed of Brossolette's capture, decided to be immediately parachuted onto the continent and organise his escape. Nevertheless, they were recognised before the planned action and taken to the Intelligence Services headquarters on Avenue Foch by senior SD officer Ernst Misselwitz in person on 19 March. It was recently confirmed that he was identified by a semi-coded report to London from CNR's Claude Bouchinet-Serreules and Jacques Bingen written by the services of Daniel Cordier intercepted at the Pyrenees, tragically self-fulfilling the severe criticism of Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas about the lack of prudence inside the Parisian Délégation générale. Yeo-Thomas himself would be captured as he prepared a bold escape from Rennes Prison wearing German uniforms with the help of Brigitte Friang. Both Yeo-Thomas and Friang were captured before planned action as many Parisian networks were dismantled following the so-called "Rue de la Pompe affair" and Pierre Manuel's avows.