A family friend, Simone Guyonvarch, lives part of the year in Sutton and part of the year on the Quiberon peninsula. Her father, like many mariners from southern Brittany, served in the Free French Navy during the Second World War. Postwar he stayed in the Navy, serving as a ship’s carpenter and literally sailing around the world on board the aircraft carrier Dixmunde (formerly the escort carrier HMS Biter). Simone kindly lent me a folder of fascinating documents covering her dad’s time in the FNFL, as well as a copy of Thierry d’Argenlieu’s wartime memoirs, Souvenirs de Guerre. Photographs in the folder showed General de Gaulle and Amiral d’Argenlieu inspecting M. Guyonvarch’s chasseur, moored on the Isle of Wight’s River Medina. We all know who Charles de Gaulle was, but who was Thierry d’Argenlieu? Last winter I wrote a 2000 word magazine piece on the Free French’s sailor priest; but History Today said no and BBC History never got back to me, hence its appearance here:
Sea-going priests with ships in their sights are hard to find, but not in France. Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu was a key player within the Free French, the political and military coalition that rallied around General de Gaulle following the fall of France in June 1940. That summer he co-founded Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres [FNFL], the Free French Navy. Mariner, priest and political animal, Father d’Argenlieu rose from lieutenant to admiral in seven years, the strength of his religious faith matched only by the depth of his loyalty to Charles de Gaulle.
Born into a Breton family with a long naval tradition, d’Argenlieu became an officer in the Marine Nationale, the French Navy. His achievements before and during the First World War earned him the Légion d’Honneur. A devout Catholic, d’Argenlieu joined the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, before transferring to the naval reserve and studying for the priesthood. Within ten years of ordination Père Louis de la Trinité was the Carmelites’ Prior Provincial in Paris.
In September 1939 Lieutenant d’Argenlieu returned to active service. Ten months later he was helping organise the defence of Cherbourg when ordered to cease fighting. D’Argenlieu was appalled by news of the armistice and vowed to fight on. As a prisoner-of-war he escaped from a German truck and secured passage to Jersey. The last ship out of St Helier brought him to England. In London he bonded immediately with de Gaulle, and the fledgling Free French gained the service of an able administrator. A somewhat cold and ascetic character, d’Argenlieu would prove a competent if unbending emissary and, surprisingly, a first-class propagandist.
De Gaulle always had a healthy respect for high-flying prelates, and from the outset he and d’Argenlieu got on well. Neither man felt the same affection towards Vice-Admiral Muselier. Both a sailor and a politician, Émile Muselier’s rackety past included several clashes with Admiral François Darlan, the Chief of the Naval Staff. It was a deep loathing of Darlan as much as de Gaulle’s famous broadcast of 11 June that brought him to London. In August 1940 Muselier promoted d’Argenlieu to capitaine de frégate. Together with a young officer called Voisin they created the Free French Navy.
Three destroyers and five submarines – including the huge Surcouf – had been seized by the Royal Navy and handed over to the Free French. An assortment of small ships fleeing France created a combined force of around thirty vessels. In due course the Admiralty added corvettes for convoy duty and power boats for coastal patrol.
Appointed the new navy’s chaplain, d’Argenlieu visited camps full of sailors fresh from the Norway campaign and keen to get home. He urged his fellow countrymen to stay and fight with the Free French, but few felt inspired by de Gaulle’s message of resistance. Accepting the legitimacy of Marshal Petain’s administration, the majority obeyed Darlan’s order to cease fighting. Not to do so was seen in Vichy, the seat of government, as an act of treason. In due course a court martial sentenced the absent d’Argenlieu to death.
Most regular officers in the Marine Nationale were Catholic, conservative, anti-republican and instinctively anti-semitic. They were soon seen by the Germans as valued collaborators in the administration of occupied France. The Vichy government was similarly trusting, especially in 1940-42 when Darlan served as Petain’s deputy. Joint operations with the Royal Navy had done little to counter a historic distrust of the British, especially after French ships were seized or interned.
Muted anger turned to open fury when on 3 July 1940 Admiral Somerville’s Force H attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. Although some ships fled the Algerian port for Toulon, several others were sunk or severely damaged. Nearly 1300 officers and men died. The attack raised morale in London, and sent a powerful message to Washington, but it alienated French public opinion and boosted the popularity of Petain’s regime. Anglophobia was now a powerful propagandist force in France.
The losses at Mers-el-Kébir severely tested Muselier and his fellow officers’ support for de Gaulle’s pro-British strategy. Britain’s sinking of French ships, by no means for the last time, made recruitment that much more difficult. Nevertheless, fishermen from Normandy and Brittany risked crossing the Channel to join Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres. The FNFL based itself in Cowes, with a headquarters and training depot across the Solent at Emsworth. This was still a tiny force and yet Free French propaganda created the image of a mass movement: a widely circulated photograph of sailors marching through London on Bastille Day 1940 made the entire complement seem a fraction of a far greater force.
D’Argenlieu accompanied de Gaulle on the disastrous expedition to French West Africa in September 1940. The capture of Dakar would be a major strategic gain, but ships and ground forces loyal to Vichy resisted all efforts by the Royal Navy taskforce to seize control and enter the port. A mixture of force and persuasion proved disastrous for the Free French, and d’Argenlieu sustained a nasty leg wound. The failure of the operation severely dented de Gaulle’s standing in London. A handful of Free French naval officers had found themselves on the side of their former comrades’ enemy in a fiercely conducted naval encounter – for all intents and purposes Britain was now fighting France.
De facto war was confirmed in subsequent Royal Navy and Free French operations to consolidate or secure control of other French colonies south of the Sahel and stretching deep into the interior. De Gaulle’s credibility had been partially restored, and in Marie-Pierre Koenig and Philippe Leclerc the Free French had found their fighting generals: one the hero of Bir Hakeim in June 1942, the other the liberator of Paris in August 1944. The West Africa campaign had seen d’Argenlieu directly involved in fighting between his embryonic navy and ships of the Marine Nationale. This naturally enhanced his standing with de Gaulle, and it wasn’t long before he was promoted to contre-amiral.
D’Argenlieu’s fierce loyalty to his master saw him entrusted with sensitive missions, most notably as High Commissioner of the Pacific Territories in 1941-42. More Gaullist than de Gaulle, his readiness to thwart American intentions in New Caledonia cemented the Roosevelt administration’s suspicion of the Free French. Equally infuriating for the White House was Muselier’s success in seizing St Pierre et Miquelon, France’s only territory in North America.
Although unbending as a diplomat, d’Argenlieu was always a keen networker. Back in London he charmed useful contacts like Lord Mountbatten, the one chief of staff with a kind word for de Gaulle. The two men would meet again in postwar Saigon, with d’Argenlieu deaf to Mountbatten’s message of compromise.
In August 1943 d’Argenlieu took command of the renamed Les Forces Navales en Grande-Bretagne. This kept him away from old enemies stationed in North Africa who had switched sides once the Allies were in full control: commanding the new Naval HQ in Algiers was André Lemonnier, the cruiser captain who had seen off d’Argenlieu and his Royal Navy allies in September 1940. All elements of the Marine Nationale outside Metropolitan France were now merged with the men and ships of the FNFL. Only 6000 of the 42,000 personnel were Free French, bringing with them around eighty vessels. Their flagship was the battleship Richelieu, its crew having switched sides after the Germans occupied all of France in November 1942. The Richelieu and the other state-of-the-art ships previously holed up in Dakar constituted the core of France’s renewed credentials as a maritime force. The new navy relied heavily on the British and the Americans compensating for French ships previously sunk or scuttled: London and Washington authorised a small but significant transfer of destroyers, frigates and the odd submarine.
Fusing the rival navies was made that much easier by Darlan’s assassination in Algiers at the end of 1942. The Marine Nationale’s commander in chief had been an arch collaborationist. Yet, ironically, before he died Darlan fulfilled his pledge that the Toulon fleet would be scuttled to prevent the Germans seizing it – in July 1940 Churchill had dismissed that promise, hence the attack at Mers-el-Kébir.
Darlan had done a deal with the Americans, as had General Henri Giraud, the Allies’ choice of military commander in Algiers. It became increasingly clear that Giraud had no power base in North Africa let alone within France, so once more de Gaulle was back in the ascendancy. Muselier was tarnished by his close association with Giraud, to the obvious advantage of d’Argenlieu.
Unsurprisingly, when de Gaulle crossed to France on 14 July 1944 d’Argenlieu joined him on the destroyer La Combattante: seven months later the former HMS Haldon would sink after hitting a mine off Hull. Free French ships had an unenviable record of avoidable mishaps, but d’Argenlieu spent little time inquiring into why this should be – he was focused on higher matters, both spiritual and secular. Naturally he walked beside de Gaulle on his famous walk to Notre Dame on 25 August 1944.
After the Liberation the heroes of 1940-41 feared they would be forgotten, but not in the Bulletin de la Marine Française. The magazine dedicated frequent photo shoots to d’Argenlieu, giving Lemonnier minimal coverage. The June 1944 issue applauded d’Argenlieu’s success creating rest and recreation centres in London and Cowes, while August’s Bulletin highlighted an emotional return to Cherbourg. Fittingly, the farewell issue saluted the ships and sailors of the FNFL as they were in mid-1943 prior to merging with their former Vichy foes.
The summer of 1945 saw the soon to be Admiral d’Argenlieu appointed as Governor General in Indo-China. His inflexibility over the following eighteen months would see the Viet Minh commence a nine-year war to end French rule. Leclerc led an expeditionary force in a ruthless counterinsurgency operation, and yet increasingly he saw the need to negotiate. He failed to convince d’Argenlieu that this was an unwinnable campaign, the two men having loathed each other since their first meeting in London five years before.
The advent of the Fourth Republic saw de Gaulle out of power, and d’Argenlieu was soon back with the Carmelites. He served the order faithfully until his death in 1965, but remained Chancellor of the Ordre de la Libération, the honour created by de Gaulle in November 1940 to reward the staunchest of his supporters. Most elevated among the order’s thousand or so companions were those who had founded the Free French at the very moment of national humiliation. These were the loyalist of the loyal, with whom d’Argenlieu worked relentlessly to forge a powerful and enduring myth of national resistance. When de Gaulle returned to office in May 1958 d’Argenlieu quietly celebrated the creation of the Fifth Republic. Unlike other veteran Gaullists he stayed silent over the decision to quit Algeria. Thierry d’Argenlieu was by now a largely forgotten figure, other than in the presidential office where his portrait took pride of place.
Naval officers like d’Argenlieu who rallied to de Gaulle were Catholic, conservative, and often monarchist; but their dislike of the Third Republic never extended to virulent anti-semitism and a readiness to place ideology above patriotism. Appalled by the notion of surrender, let alone collaboration, they fought alongside the British even when their emotions as loyal Frenchmen were sorely tested. De Gaulle’s broad alliance embraced radicals and socialists – even at times Communists – but those he trusted most were men from the same mould as himself. This is what so infuriated Petain and all those intent on an anti-republican counter-revolution in France: why in God’s name was a senior Carmelite at the head of a navy dependent on the goodwill of their oldest enemy?
D’Argenlieu had the last laugh, his closeness to de Gaulle ensuring power and influence even after the uneasy fusion of Free French and Vichy naval forces. Other Free French veterans had more painful experiences. Yet all of them could reflect on the desperate days of 1940 and know that with the passage of time their refusal to surrender would be duly vindicated and universally honoured.
2 pings