Guy Moquet

A fascinating article this week in Le Monde about Guy Moquet. He was a 17 year-old executed by the Germans in October 1941 along with many others as a reprisal for the killing of a senior military officer in Nantes. Moquet went down in history because of the letter he wrote to his parents on the eve of his death, in which he asks them to be stoical and says he is glad to lay down his life for a cause. President Sarkozy had the moving epistle read out on his inauguration day, and said it should be recited from now on in every school at the start of the academic year. But according to the Le Monde article, which was written by two historians, all is not quite what it seems. Moquet was from a family of die-hard Stalinists, raised from the cradle in a "culture politique bolchevique." As we know, in 1940 and early 1941 -- while Hitler and Stalin were linked by their pact -- French communists opposed the war with Germany. Indeed they "called more or less openly for sabotage of the war effort". When France was occupied, the communists cooperated with the Germans to ensure the republication of their newspapers. It was in this context that Moquet was arrested by French police in October 1940. The tracts he was handing out at the Gare de l'Est "were in total accordance with the party line and therefore did not call for resistance". A year later Hitler had invaded Russia and the Nazi-Soviet pact was over. The Feldkommandant was killed on October 1941 by three young communists, acting still then against the orders of the party hierarchy. Moquet -- still in jail -- was selected for the reprisal and shot with 26 others in Chateaubriant. Not all were Communists, but the party claimed the tragedy "pour sa seule gloire". As Jean-Marc Berliere and Syvian Bouloque say, "with the blood of the hostages, the Communist Party washed away one of the most troubled and ambiguous episodes of its history, and at the same time put up a moral obstacle against all criticism of its attitude". Moquet had never fired a shot against the Germans. Instead he had been leafletting for a party that called for a policy of pragmatic collaboration. At the time of his death he was undoubtedly fired by a laudable spirit of self-sacrifice, but the story surrounding him is a myth.