King of the Shadows

All through the chill, rainy afternoon, the simple urn containing the ashes of Jean Moulin was on view at the Memo rial to the Victims of the German Labor Camps near Notre Dame Cathedral. Inside the cement crypt glimmered 200,000 crystal rods-one for each Frenchman who died in the Nazi camps.

That night the urn was placed on an old armored car, and, illuminated by flaming torches and moving to the funereal roll of drums, the cortege passed between silent crowds bundled against the cold. All lights on the mile-long route to the Pantheon were extinguished. One cafe attempted business as usual with gas lamps, but police entered and blew them out. The colonnaded Pantheon was also dark, but brilliant tricolor searchlights cast a V up into the sky. As a military band played civil servant. When the Nazis arrived in Chartres on June 17, 1940, Jean Moulin met them in his full regalia as prefect of the district. His independent spirit soon landed him in prison. After one torture session, during which he refused to sign a document serving Nazi propaganda, he feared that he would not be able to hold out next time, and tried to kill himself by slashing his throat with a piece of glass. But he recovered. By October 1941, Moulin had escaped France and arrived secretly in Britain, where he joined the Free French movement. De Gaulle, as he recalled later, decided that Moulin was "a man of faith and reason, doubtful of nothing, defiant of everything." Within a few months, Moulin parachuted into the French Alps bearing the microfilm of an order naming him De Gaulle's top representative in France.

As the legendary "Max," Moulin became head of the Resistance movement. He was small, dark and inconspicuous, usually wore a navy blue trenchcoat and a grey scarf to hide the scars that remained on his neck from his suicide attempt. Moving about the country with speed and stealth, Moulin managed to weld together mutually mistrustful Frenchmen of the left, right and center. He created a clandestine press, arranged the sabotage and harassment of Nazi detachments, and drew up plans for massive help for the eventual Allied landings. While the Nazis searched frantically for him, Moulin, nicknamed "the King of Shadows," held a Paris meeting of the 16 most important leaders of the underground, who elected him president. But in June 1943, Moulin was captured near Lyon by the Gestapo, and a few weeks later he was dead of torture-without having revealed anything he knew about the Resistance to the Nazis.

Sense of History. Before last week's reburial at the Pantheon, Moulin's remains had rested for two decades at Pere-Lachaise cemetery, and there were some skeptics who wondered at Charles De Gaulle's long delay in recognizing Moulin's great wartime contribution. Some saw the ceremony as designed to inaugurate De Gaulle's presidential campaign. But there come moments in France when political passion and factional rivalry are briefly overshadowed by a sense of history and literature. One such occurred when Andre Malraux, De Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs and leading literary prophet, delivered a eulogy for Moulin that virtually all political factions hailed as a masterpiece.

With an emotionalism that sounds slightly too rich in any language but French, Malraux noted that when Moulin was seized by the Gestapo, "the destiny of the Resistance depended upon the courage of this man. And here today in France triumphant we have the victory of this silence so terribly paid for." Dramatically addressing the dead Moulin, Malraux cried: "You, leader of the martyred Resistance fighters who died in cellars, look with your empty eye sockets at all the women in black who now keep watch over our companions!" Malraux closed with an appeal to the 16 million Frenchmen who have been born since Moulin's murder: "Think of him, youth of France, as you would hold out your hands to his poor deformed face on that last day, to his lips that did not speak. On that day, his face was the face of France."

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