Guy Môquet

Before Môquet's own arrest in 1940, the French state had already built a machinery of repression against Communists. In the wake of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, Communist newspapers were seized and suspended from 25 August 1939, and on 26 September 1939 the Daladier government dissolved Communist organizations by decree-law. That decree-law struck his father Prosper Môquet, a Communist deputy for the 17th arrondissement of Paris, who was arrested on 10 October 1939; stripped of his parliamentary mandate in February 1940, he was deported to a French internment camp in Algeria. The dismantling of the immediate family became a direct motive for the son's militancy.

Guy Môquet first took refuge in the Manche with his mother and younger brother Serge, then returned alone to Paris and worked underground in the Communist Youth. In November 1939 he wrote to Édouard Herriot, president of the Chamber of Deputies, asking for his father's release, and after the occupation and the installation of Vichy he distributed leaflets and handwritten notices in the 17th arrondissement demanding that release. On 13 October 1940 he was arrested at the Gare de l'Est metro station by French police officers of the Anti-Communist Special Brigade.

The character of the repression appears most clearly in the fact that he was a minor. On 23 January 1941 the 15th correctional chamber of Paris acquitted him as having acted without discernment and ordered that he be provisionally entrusted to his parents, yet on the same day it had him taken to the Paris police prefecture's holding depot. The law of 3 September 1940 and the Peyrouton circular of 16 November 1940 allowed administrative internment by prefectural decision alone, without judicial review, and that measure was applied to him from the very day of his acquittal. He wrote a letter of protest to the prosecutor denouncing what he considered illegal acts, and never received a reply.

The route that followed tracked the dispositions of the French state apparatus. He passed through the prefecture depot, then the Santé prison, then on 27 February 1941 the Clairvaux central prison; on 14 May 1941 he was transferred with a hundred other Communist internees from Clairvaux to the Choisel camp at Châteaubriant. Communist activists arrested between September 1939 and October 1940 were already held there, and 219 militants were transferred to Choisel in May alone. He was placed in barrack 10, the one for the young, and grew close to Roger Sémat and Rino Scolari. Even after the transfer to Châteaubriant, it was not the French authorities but the German occupation forces who decided his execution, and it was the German side that added him to the list of hostages on which he did not appear among Pucheau's names.