People of the Revolution and the USSR

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1808–1893 ○ Natural causes

Marshal captured at Sedan who led the Versailles army against the Paris Commune and became the president of “Moral Order”

As commander of the Versailles army, he led the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Elected president in 1873, he headed a “Moral Order” government; after Republicans won a parliamentary majority in 1877, he resigned in 1879.

A soldier from a family of Irish descent, he won his marshal’s baton and dukedom in the conquest of Algeria, the storming of the Malakoff in the Crimea and at Magenta in 1859. In 1870 he led the Army of Châlons to relieve Metz and was wounded and captured with the emperor at Sedan. Released by Germany, he commanded Thiers’s Versailles army, entered Paris in May 1871 and directed the repression and mass executions of Bloody Week. Succeeding Thiers as president in 1873, he led a “Moral Order” government awaiting a restoration, lost the 1877 confrontation with parliament and resigned in 1879.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1867–1965 ○ Natural causes

From Foch's brilliant staff officer to a general of defeat and accommodation

On 12 June 1940, Weygand advised the French government to capitulate.

Maxime Weygand was a French general who served as Ferdinand Foch's key staff officer in the First World War, coordinating Allied operations and reading the armistice terms to the German delegation in 1918. Between the wars he carried French military influence in Poland and the Levant, then became commander-in-chief of the French armies in May 1940 and, after the German breakthrough, judged that continued fighting in metropolitan France was no longer feasible and advised an armistice. He joined the Vichy government and later directed French North Africa, choosing limited accommodation with Germany while enforcing antisemitic measures harshly. Detained after the war on treason charges and cleared in 1948, he later defended Marshal Pétain's memory.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1878–1940 ✕ Killed when aircraft was shot down

The Paris prefect of police, hard on the left and indulgent to the leagues, whose dismissal lit the fuse of 6 February

'Then I shall be in the street', on the telephone with Daladier as he was removed, 3 February 1934. The right-wing press read it as notice that he would take to the streets; Chiappe said he had meant only that he would be out of a job

A Corsican from Ajaccio who rose through the police administration and served as prefect of police of Paris from 1927 to 1934. He had a standing reputation for severity toward left-wing demonstrations and indulgence toward the street actions of the far-right leagues, and was popular with the right-wing press and the veterans' associations. When Prime Minister Édouard Daladier removed him on 3 February 1934, the right read it as the republic striking down its own policeman, and three days later the Place de la Concorde erupted. He remained a central figure of Paris right-wing politics after his dismissal, and died in 1940 when the aircraft carrying him to take up the Vichy post of high commissioner in the Levant was shot down over the Mediterranean.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1889–1952 ○ Natural causes

The general who defied Vichy and led the Liberation Army

In January 1945, defying a retreat order, he commanded that the symbolic city of Strasbourg be defended, anticipating de Gaulle's own instruction by twenty-four hours 'with perfect convergence.'

Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was a French professional soldier shaped by the First World War and the Moroccan war, and a commander who preserved his division’s cohesion amid France’s defeat in 1940. He remained in Vichy’s army, but in November 1942 he refused orders not to resist the German occupation of southern France, and joined the Free French after imprisonment and escape. Commanding Army B and then the French First Army, he led the liberation of Toulon and Marseille after the Provence landings, advanced to the Rhine and Danube, and represented France at the German surrender in Berlin in 1945. He later commanded the French colonial war in Indochina, where illness ended his life in 1952; he was posthumously made Marshal of France.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1889–1964 ○ Natural causes

Carmelite friar and Free French admiral whose Republic of Cochinchina as High Commissioner opened the road to war

On 1 June 1946, while Ho Chi Minh was negotiating in France, he unilaterally proclaimed Cochinchina’s provisional government, intensifying the conflict with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

A naval officer from Brest who became a Carmelite friar after the First World War, he returned to the navy in the Second and led de Gaulle’s Free French naval forces. Arriving as High Commissioner for Indochina on 31 October 1945 to restore colonial administration, he set up an autonomous Republic of Cochinchina in 1946 while the Viet Minh leaders were negotiating in France, breaking the Ho–Sainteny agreement of 6 March and effectively starting the war. He directed a hard line including the Haiphong shelling and was recalled in 1947.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1898–1983 ○ Natural causes

Last commander of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, who chose to fortify Điện Biên Phủ and met defeat there in 1954

Navarre ordered French troops into Điện Biên Phủ in November 1953 and directed its defense. He did not order a withdrawal during the siege, which began in March 1954; the fortress fell in May, erasing France’s expected negotiating advantage.

A French army general of both world wars, he succeeded Salan as commander of French forces in Indochina in May 1953, and soon reported to his government that the war could not be won and that stalemate was the best hope. Under the “Navarre plan” of holding the cities and main roads to force the Viet Minh to negotiate, he dropped paratroopers into Điện Biên Phủ in November 1953 to block the Viet Minh route into Laos and fortified the valley. The fall of the fortress in May 1954 sealed France’s defeat.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1899–1984 ○ Natural causes

French commander in the First Indochina War and leader of the OAS.

Salan commanded French forces in Indochina in 1952–53 and later served as the French government's delegate in Algeria. Opposed to Algerian independence, he joined the generals' April 1961 coup; after its failure, he went underground and founded and led the clandestine Organisation armée secrète (OAS), which sought to keep Algeria French and carried out attacks and violence in Algeria and France. Arrested in 1962, he was sentenced to life detention and pardoned and amnestied in 1968.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1902–1991 ○ Natural causes

French general who commanded the Điện Biên Phủ fortress in 1954 and was captured when it fell

He commanded French forces at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 and was captured after their defeat. After his release, he commanded a division and later ran a recycling firm.

A cavalry officer from an old French noble family, he served through the Second World War and into the Indochina War, taking command at Điện Biên Phủ in December 1953. After the Viet Minh attack began on 13 March 1954, artillery wrecked the airstrips and the monsoon cut supply until only three strongpoints remained. On 7 May General Cogny in Hanoi ordered him to cease fire and destroy his equipment without raising a white flag, and de Castries was taken prisoner as the fortress fell, to be released after the Geneva Accords.

France state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1909–1993 ✕ Assassinated

Vichy police chief who negotiated with the occupier

On 2 July 1942, he agreed to place the French police at the occupier’s disposal for the arrest of Jews.

René Bousquet was a senior French civil servant who pursued Vichy police collaboration while presenting it as a defense of French administrative sovereignty. He negotiated with German security officials for room to operate a French police force, while supplying that force to the persecution and deportation of Jews. His decisions helped make the July 1942 Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup possible, after which he escaped the main force of the post-Liberation purge and returned to influential business and political circles.