Jacques d'Andurain - Memory

At the beginning of 2001, Bernard Pivot, during a meeting with Jorge Semprun at the ‘Bouillon de Culture’, underlined the scarcity of living witnesses to the Second World War, especially the disappearance of those victims deported or dead in concentration camps and members of Resistance organisations.

No one was left, he said, who, having joined the Resistance movement from the first in 1940, was there, still fighting, at the end of the war.

Information about several Resistance members, including myself, is missing from this account.

I was an active participant from 18th June 1940 in Sablet (in the Vaucluse), a soldier (on the ground) in the reconnaissance squadron of the Armée des Alpes. I was present, holding my Remington rifle, in August 1944 in the Place du Vigan, in Albi, where I was sickened to see other Resistance members shaving the heads of girls who had slept with the ‘Boche’.

The oversight is mine. I have never written about it.

Some months beforehand, I had telephoned Lucie Albrac to express my indignation about the accusations in Barbie’s will, uncovered by Maître Vergès, in which she was named as having denounced Jean Moulin, and about Caluire’s historic meeting in June 1943. She asked me what was my attitude to Vergès. I put forward my supposition and Lucie, with her usual vehemence, shouted at me, ‘Write about it. Write, write!’

Write? I had been thinking about this for a long time but considered writing about my mother rather than about myself. The evening when I saw her for the last time, in Tangiers, before she was assassinated on board her yacht, the Djeilan, my mother asked me,

‘What will you do after my death?’
‘I shall write your story ... but ... it will be the truth.’

That was in 1948.

I should like to reply to what has been said about me in various books about the Resistance. The impression has been given that I was, as it were, rather like a pretentious ball-boy claiming, ‘I handed the ball to Yannick Noah the day he won the Roland Garros tournament.’

Before speaking of the Resistance, a word of introduction by Henri Jeanson, written for the ‘Canard Enchaîné’ which appeared on 30th April 1947 :

‘Un pur trouve toujours un plus pur qui l’épure‘
(An irreproachable person will always be bettered by someone more irreproachable than himself).

Oblivion is never complete oblivion, even for me today. But - what is told today and was told yesterday is full of inaccuracies. I am far from claiming to be an historian. My aim in writing here is to show the fragility of evidence written and published by witnesses themselves.

This is my own evidence.

‘A personality with a dazzling future.’

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‘ Nobility! ... That mystical property of the seminal fluid. ‘ (Paul Valéry)

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‘Heir to the forty kings who made France ...’
(L’Action Française)

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