Pétain’s proposal to seek an armistice with the Reich. On 17 June 1940 de Gaulle and a handful of other senior French officers flew to London. The following day the General issued his great rallying cry on the BBC from his London exile, the
appel du 18 Juin
. This called on the French people to reject the proposed armistice, to fight on, and to form the Free French Forces which – very soon – would oppose those of collaborationist Vichy. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Few heard this bidding in the darkness of France’s Occupied Zone, and fewer still responded.
In the French Alps, the range that ran from Nice to Geneva, the
appel
fell on rather more fertile ground. North of the Jewish sanctuary of Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes lay the Alpine province of Dauphiné; further north beyond Dauphiné, the Alps that reared up to Mont Blanc overlooking the southern shores of Lake Geneva. This was the Haute-Savoie, where in 1943 Guido Lospinoso’s Jewish charges would find sanctuary in Megève and St Gervais. From July 1940 these eastern borders of France had been designated part of the Zone Libre. Here homage was nominally paid to Vichy, but Pétain’s way of collaboration was by no means to everyone’s taste, and political persecution had proved scarcely less virulent under Vichy than under the Nazis in the Occupied Zone. Moreover, in the same way asSwitzerland lived under the constant threat of Nazi invasion, so too did France’s Zone Libre – something that throughout France was more conducive to resistance than passivity. In the Alps the people were also of an independent spirit, not always as regardful as they surely should have been of directives from Vichy or Paris or Berlin.
After the initial shock of the events of 1940 had subsided, the Alpine people began to stir. If not all had heard or registered de Gaulle’s original appeal of 18 June 1940, many now began to listen to his regular broadcasts from London on the BBC; in August 1940 it had done the General a power of good to be sentenced by Vichy to death for high treason. In Savoie, the Dauphiné and the Alpes-Maritimes the people also began to realise how admirably their surroundings lent themselves to the purpose of the
réfractaires
: those who refused to submit to the Vichy regime. They might be combed out in street-to-street, house-to-house searches in France’s towns and cities; they were far more difficult to track down in her mountains. These offered levels of cover that made it very difficult for the Wehrmacht to find, let alone to attack any erring
réfractaires
. They were bandit country.
*
One day in the summer of 1941 – it was the glory days of Operation Barbarossa when the Wehrmacht swept the Red Army before it – a small group of men gathered in the Café de la Rotunde near Grenoble station. Its immediate environs were grubby, but beyond lay the inspiration of the great mountains of the Rhône-Alpes towering over the Alpine city: the Chartreuse to the north, the Belledonne to the east, and to the south-west the Vercors. This was a limestone plateau sixty miles long and thirty broad, the size – say – of the county of Surrey: less populous, though, less stuffy, more rugged, more wooded, and at the time still supposedly the home of wild bears.
Among the men in the café were a forty-one-year-old engineer called Pierre Dalloz, and forty-seven-year-old Eugène Chavant. Dalloz was a distinguished Alpinist and pioneer ofwinter mountaineering who had climbed extensively in the Vercors. Chavant was a cobbler’s son, born in Colombe just north of Grenoble. Both saw the plateau as a sanctuary, for it was accessible only by a few steep and narrow roads, easily blocked and readily defended. The pair’s idea was to turn this to advantage. They would set up camps to provide refuge for those persecuted by Vichy.
Like most of the resistance in occupied Europe, they
appel du 18 Juin
. This called on the French people to reject the proposed armistice, to fight on, and to form the Free French Forces which – very soon – would oppose those of collaborationist Vichy. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Few heard this bidding in the darkness of France’s Occupied Zone, and fewer still responded.
In the French Alps, the range that ran from Nice to Geneva, the
appel
fell on rather more fertile ground. North of the Jewish sanctuary of Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes lay the Alpine province of Dauphiné; further north beyond Dauphiné, the Alps that reared up to Mont Blanc overlooking the southern shores of Lake Geneva. This was the Haute-Savoie, where in 1943 Guido Lospinoso’s Jewish charges would find sanctuary in Megève and St Gervais. From July 1940 these eastern borders of France had been designated part of the Zone Libre. Here homage was nominally paid to Vichy, but Pétain’s way of collaboration was by no means to everyone’s taste, and political persecution had proved scarcely less virulent under Vichy than under the Nazis in the Occupied Zone. Moreover, in the same way asSwitzerland lived under the constant threat of Nazi invasion, so too did France’s Zone Libre – something that throughout France was more conducive to resistance than passivity. In the Alps the people were also of an independent spirit, not always as regardful as they surely should have been of directives from Vichy or Paris or Berlin.
After the initial shock of the events of 1940 had subsided, the Alpine people began to stir. If not all had heard or registered de Gaulle’s original appeal of 18 June 1940, many now began to listen to his regular broadcasts from London on the BBC; in August 1940 it had done the General a power of good to be sentenced by Vichy to death for high treason. In Savoie, the Dauphiné and the Alpes-Maritimes the people also began to realise how admirably their surroundings lent themselves to the purpose of the
réfractaires
: those who refused to submit to the Vichy regime. They might be combed out in street-to-street, house-to-house searches in France’s towns and cities; they were far more difficult to track down in her mountains. These offered levels of cover that made it very difficult for the Wehrmacht to find, let alone to attack any erring
réfractaires
. They were bandit country.
*
One day in the summer of 1941 – it was the glory days of Operation Barbarossa when the Wehrmacht swept the Red Army before it – a small group of men gathered in the Café de la Rotunde near Grenoble station. Its immediate environs were grubby, but beyond lay the inspiration of the great mountains of the Rhône-Alpes towering over the Alpine city: the Chartreuse to the north, the Belledonne to the east, and to the south-west the Vercors. This was a limestone plateau sixty miles long and thirty broad, the size – say – of the county of Surrey: less populous, though, less stuffy, more rugged, more wooded, and at the time still supposedly the home of wild bears.
Among the men in the café were a forty-one-year-old engineer called Pierre Dalloz, and forty-seven-year-old Eugène Chavant. Dalloz was a distinguished Alpinist and pioneer ofwinter mountaineering who had climbed extensively in the Vercors. Chavant was a cobbler’s son, born in Colombe just north of Grenoble. Both saw the plateau as a sanctuary, for it was accessible only by a few steep and narrow roads, easily blocked and readily defended. The pair’s idea was to turn this to advantage. They would set up camps to provide refuge for those persecuted by Vichy.
Like most of the resistance in occupied Europe, they
Similar Books
