Walking through the market squares of Midi towns, amidst French shoppers wearing sandals and carrying string bags, one often sees bronze statues of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin gazing down on the leisurely crowd like a benign deity. Patrick Marnham’s lucid, dramatic, and riveting biography cuts through the legend and, moving deftly through extremely complex material, solves the mystery of who betrayed Moulin to the Germans in June 1943. “To know who he was,” Marnham subtly observes, “you must find out who killed him.”
In this engagingly short biography, which complements Ian Ousby’s excellent book The Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940– 1944 (1998), Marnham concentrates on interpreting the major events of Moulin’s life. While Moulin occasionally fades into the French underground, Marnham gives a first-rate account of the social, political, and military situation. His caustic comments, for example, on the disgracefully opportunistic politics of Simone de Beauvoir are dead on. During the occupation, he notes, with a keen eye for vivid detail, the suicide rate dropped, the birth rate (despite the loss of nearly two-million French prisoners of war) rose and, for lack of proper food, the growth of school-age children slowed.
Two historical points need clarification. Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”) decree of December 1941, which ordered that violent militia action against German forces be punished by death, was given that name (according to Field Marshal Keitel’s Memoirs) because the accused “were to be hauled across the frontier under ‘cover of darkness’”
