The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost.(Review)

Patrick Marnham The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost. John Murray, 290 pages, 20 [pounds sterling]

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'" and secretly executed in Germany. Marnham twice says, without explaining why, that Roosevelt disliked and distrusted de Gaulle. After meeting de Gaulle at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt felt he was a megalomaniac who wanted to establish a dictatorship in postwar France. "The day he arrived," Roosevelt said, "he thought he was Joan of are and the following day he insisted he was Georges Clemenceau."

Moulin was born in Beziers in southern France--the son of a radical and freemason, a teacher and influential local politician with ancestral roots in a Provencal village--in 1899. That extraordinary year also produced Hemingway, Nabokov, Borges, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Noel Coward, Elizabeth Bowen, Hitchcock, and Bogart. All of them were solidly anchored in the nineteenth century, came to maturity during World War I, flowered during the artistic resurgence of the 1920s, lived through the economic depression and what Auden called "the low dishonest decade" of the 1930s, and (except for Crane) experienced the horrors of World War II.

In 1918 Moulin joined the engineers, was trained as a sapper, but did not sec action. After earning a law degree at Montpellier, he joined the high-powered provincial administrators, the Corps prefectoral, and became the youngest sub-prefect and then the youngest prefect in France. His meteoric success was due "to his ferocious ambition, to his astounding ability as an administrator ... to his personal connections and the influence of his father--what the French call le piston." After a marriage, arranged by his father, that lasted for only two years, the charming and charismatic Moulin--also a bit of a playboy--had a series of sage mistresses, often juggling three of them at the same time. He amusingly described his seduction technique (right out of a Billy Wilder movie) as "a few languorous tangos, several glasses of champagne.... At two o'clock in the morning there were no taxis, but plenty of hotel rooms.... `But I have no pyjamas' `Don't worry, I'll lend you mine.'... Cue the violins."

Transferred from Chambery in Savoy to Quimper in Brittany, Moulin fell under the influence of the homosexual artist and Catholic convert Max Jacob, who encouraged his work as an artist. Moulin signed his paintings with the pseudonym "Romanin," the name of the castle near his Provencal village. He would later use the name for the art gallery he tan in Nice--a convenient wartime cover. In a passage that effectively synthesizes Moulin's character in 1934, Marnham notes that he was a secretive man with a talent for duplicity and "the social habits of a libertine, a weekend painter with an acknowledged gift for caricature, attentive from a distance to his elderly parents and still without any particular political commitment."