Who Was Jean Moulin?
A heated debate over a revered Resistance leader delves into France's troubled memories of the war
By BRUCE CRUMLEY/PARIS

When the ashes of Jean Moulin were enshrined in the Paris Pantheon in 1964, the revered Resistance leader and martyr of the anti-Nazi struggle became the official personification of the covert French fight against German occupation during World War II. So sacrosanct is Moulin's memory that scholars can hardly delve into it without setting off impassioned debate. That is precisely what has happened with the publication of two new Moulin biographies: Jacques Baynac's The Secrets of the Jean Moulin Affair and The Lives and Deaths of Jean Moulin by the respected historian Pierre Pean.

Baynac's central, scandal-generating premise is that at the time of his arrest in 1943, Moulin was preparing to end his allegiance to the London-exiled Charles de Gaulle, whose single-minded, often arrogant assertion of French interests had infuriated American and British leaders. Four days before his arrest, according to Baynac, Moulin was persuaded by an American secret agent he met with to recognize the authority of Algiers-based French generals supported by the U.S. and Britain, who planned to back them as France's only legitimate representatives. It was during that monitored encounter that Nazi spies purportedly identified Moulin--arresting him on June 21 as he met the Resistance commanders near Lyons. Had fate delayed Moulin's arrest, Baynac's thesis suggests, De Gaulle would have lost control of the Resistance and been deposed as leader of the Free French Forces, radically altering France's post-war history.

The depiction of Moulin as an American lackey caused a furor, but outraged critics soon took solace in publication of a biography contradicting Baynac. Pean's book confirms the orthodox view that Moulin was sold out to the SS by Resistance fighter Rene Hardy, the member of the "Combat" faction that hated De Gaulle and resented his command. Pean paints a well-documented portrait of Moulin as an unshakable Gaullist who forged divided movements into a more organized force and kept it under De Gaulle's control.

Both authors tapped into previously unused documents and sources to produce their biographies, and as historian Francois Bedarida notes, "Both books offer interesting ideas and information that will aid our future study." But Bedarida--who voiced significant reservations about Baynac's book when asked by its publisher, Editions du Seuil, for a prepublication analysis--stresses that the work of a historian does not end with the simple uncovering of new material. "Baynac comes to some conclusions that involve both evidence and conjecture," Bedarida says. "In some cases even the evidence is flimsy, and in a few, it's historically misleading. Moulin could not have been ready to abandon De Gaulle at American behest."

The American historian Robert Paxton--whose fair though frequently unflattering analysis of Vichy France has made him one of the very few foreign experts whose views the mostly defensive French public has been able to tolerate--meanwhile observes that Baynac's biography is not the first to challenge the standard myth about Moulin's leadership. "First Moulin was accused of being a communist, and more recently a full-blown Soviet spy," Paxton muses. "Now the exemplary Gaullist is an American agent. What's next--a Nazi mole? I think these claims reflect more a sensationalist streak in the French publishing industry than they do historical research."