Resistance

By John Skow

SOLDIERS OF THE NIGHT

by David Schoenbrun

Dutton; 512 pages; $15.95

French society never showed its character more clearly than in the Resistance movements of World War II. Gallantry and resolute opposition to the German invaders were part of the display; in curable factionalism was another part. At the time of the liberation of Paris in 1944, for instance, separate and competitive Resistance groups, including blocs loyal to De Gaulle and to the Communists, were operating within the city. The squabbling and anarchical governments that misruled France before and after the war were blood cousins to the contentious and political Resistance apparatus, with one difference: the Resistance was a success.

That was little short of miraculous. As this lively history recounts, the Resistance began as many hundreds of separate, desperate decisions by men and women whose circumstances varied widely. Mutual opposition to the Germans was never sufficient reason for leaders from the extreme left and extreme right to set aside traditional class hatred. The arrogant assumption of authority from the distance of London by the little-known Charles de Gaulle was a complicating factor that served to divide as often as it unified.

David Schoenbrun, a former CBS bureau chief in Paris, met De Gaulle and other Resistance figures during the war, when he was a young U.S. military intelligence officer. He has interviewed the surviving intelligence leaders, among the most notable of whom is Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who, as Hedgehog, ran the menagerie of animal-named agents known to the Gestapo as Noah's Ark. Schoenbrun threads expertly through the bewildering tangle of alliances and hostilities that is the history of the Resistance. He is particularly skilled at portraiture, notably the grand, absurd, indomitable figure of De Gaulle, at one point trying to rewrite General Eisenhower's D-day speech; at another point refusing to fly in an American bomber until it was repainted with French colors; and finally insisting that a French car, not a U.S. Jeep, be found to carry him into liberated Paris. Clearly the author admires the French and their great hero with all of his nationalistic absurdities. But Schoenbrun's piece de Resistance never allows affection to stand in the way of appraisal. "De Gaulle," he writes, "understood that the imperial world was dead. But he fell just short of understanding that France, alone, was no longer a world power. He did not fully see how the world had changed." Paradoxically, it was the Resistance that accelerated the change. --By John Skow

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