Jean Pierre Moulin

In early 1943, personal rivalries and political differences threatened to split the Resistance, and as early as August 1942 trade-union militants at a Toulouse meeting had put forward the idea of a body that would join labour unions and political organisations to the Resistance movements. Moulin was at first unenthusiastic, fearing that such a body would limit his own remit, and he reproached Morandat for sending a report to that effect to London. When several resistance leaders took up the project, however, he decided to propose it to de Gaulle. The scheme also had the advantage of shoring up de Gaulle's authority before the Allies and the French, and of foiling both the American attempt to promote General Henri Giraud and the attempt at a Communist takeover of the internal Resistance.

The National Council of the Resistance held its first clandestine meeting on 27 May 1943 in a first-floor flat at 48 rue du Four in Paris, with Moulin presiding. Its founding participants were representatives of eight major Resistance movements, of the two large pre-war trade unions rebuilt underground, the CGT and the CFTC, and of the six principal political parties of the Third Republic. Moulin became its first president. Since June 1942 he had maintained a Committee of Experts to work out a synthesis of post-war political projects, and that work fed into the Council's Programme, adopted on 15 March 1944 after months of negotiation. The Programme comprised an immediate action plan and measures to be applied from the Liberation, among them the restoration of universal suffrage, press freedom, the right to unionise and social security. Having obtained adoption of a single Programme and recognition of de Gaulle as leader by the disparate components, including the Communist resistance, Moulin turned the Resistance into a political actor with a claim on post-war France, even as the unification he built kept colliding with the movements' insistence on their own independence.