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Books Related to The Death of Jean Moulin Patrick Marnham - ISBN: 0719559197
Don't be put off by the awful title - Rated
I knew very little about Jean Moulin, one of the heroes of the French resistance, and bought this out of print book in spite of its somewhat meaningless title. Now I know a lot more about him, because this is a well-researched, tightly-written account of a man whose mysterious last years as would-be organiser of the resistance and courageous death were, in a sense, the making of the man.
It's certainly heard to understand quite what Moulin was up to acting as an intermediary between De Gaulle in London and the disparate groups of resisters in France - of whom the Communists were by far the most well organised and effective. He does seem at every stage to have overplayed his importance and - due to his untimely death - tragically achieved very little.
All in all, the story is much more intriguing than the title makes it sound - both because of the strange circumstances of Moulin's arrest in Lyons and its depiction of the highly perilous business of resistance and the seeming tendency of some parts of it (ie the Communists) to put internecine conflict above the common goal of getting rid of the Nazis.
I suspect - I don't know, maybe this is unfair - that the author may have been encouraged to sex the book up by playing up the theme of what might be called "the enigma that was Jean Moulin". They might have been worried about whether an English biography about a man who is after all fairly obscure outside France would sell... A shame, because it's a great story.
A very poor book - Rated
This book is an enormous disappointment. It is poorly written and is dominated by its authors ludicrous obsession with communism. The agony of France under occupation is reduced to a tale of the evils of the PCF. It's not my job to speak up for the French Communists, but the fact remains that - despite the dark stain of the Hitler-Stalin pact - it was the CP that was the first to kill a German in occupied France and it was the CP that most effectively mobilised people in the early days of the resistance. In the circumstances it is little wonder that Moulin worked closely with Communists yet this author seems to to think that makes him a fellow-traveller or worse, a Soviet spy. This ridiculous argument is maintained even after Marnham recounts how Moulin brow beat the CP into accepting the leadership of De Gaulle. To make matters worse it presents the earlier popular front era through the (rather distorted) glasses of hindsight and equates collective security and an alliance with the Soviet Union as "pacifism". In short a very poor book.
A fabulous challenge to existing historical "facts" - Rated
Marnham does a terrific job of challenging the existing "myth" of Moulin. Moulin was a "creation" of de Gaulle's and Marnham uses excellent historical references to pinpoint as much as is known about Moulin to humanize him and demystify the existing French preoccupation with his place in the Resistance movement. A must read for any serious reader of WWII in Europe.
