1905–1988
○ Natural causes
A Resistance organizer who moved from Vichy sympathies to opposition
“I believed in Marshal Pétain, in the double game, and even in a humane and social National Revolution.”
Henri Frenay was a French army officer who turned military discipline and patriotism into an organizing force for clandestine resistance after the defeat of 1940. He initially hoped that Pétain and the National Revolution might save France, but changed course as Vichy’s collaboration and repression became clear. With Berty Albrecht, he founded the Mouvement de Libération Nationale and expanded an underground press into Combat, one of the principal resistance movements, before overseeing the return of prisoners, deportees and refugees after the war.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1924–1926Cadet, École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr
- 1935–1938École supérieure de guerre; German studies
- 1939–1940Staff officer, 43rd Fortress Army Corps on the Maginot Line
- 1940Escaped captivity and began organizing the MLN
- 1941–1943Founder and leader of Combat; organized its underground press
- 1943–1945Commissioner and minister for prisoners, deportees and refugees
- 1948–1954President, Union of European Federalists
- 1976Published The Night Will End: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Related historical events
Resistance autonomy and the clash with de Gaulle and Moulin (1942-1943)
Frenay held that the Resistance should be an autonomous political force that would create new postwar institutions. The party system of the Third Republic, in his view, had produced the defeat of 1940, and he opposed readmitting the old parties and their networks into the Resistance. De Gaulle, acting through Jean Moulin, sought instead to separate political conflict from military resistance and to have the exiled government in London, later Algiers, assume the political function under his leadership. Frenay came to accept de Gaulle as the symbol and leader of the Resistance by the end of 1941, yet chafed at the authority of his delegates, and believed Moulin favoured pro-Soviet movements over his own. When the Mouvements unis de R\u00e9sistance (MUR) were formed in January 1943, Frenay still worked to keep his own movement, Combat, as autonomous from London as possible.
The sharpest confrontation was financial. When Moulin announced a temporary cut in the monthly allocation to the MUR in March 1943, Combat, the strongest movement, was hit hardest just as the maquis and its social service were expanding. Frenay set up a delegation in Switzerland to obtain separate funding, dealing with Allen Dulles, head of the American OSS station in Bern, and did not tell London or Moulin. De Gaulle and Moulin saw this as an American channel of support for General Giraud, de Gaulle's rival in Algiers; at the MUR directorate meeting of 28 April 1943, Moulin accused Frenay of 'a veritable stab in the back', and Frenay replied that he would not accept being 'turned into a functionary'. The decision was not Frenay's alone: the minutes show the other MUR leaders had approved it, though Moulin obtained its disavowal. Frenay later carried the dispute into print with L'\u00c9nigme Jean Moulin (1977), which accused Moulin of crypto-communism.